Ghost No Longer Legally Obligated To Use ‘BC’ In Name
In 2013, Ghost were forced to changed their name to ‘Ghost BC’ in the US due to “legal reasons”, which they made a point of saying were a bunch of horseshit, even though adding stupid suffixes to your band name has become somewhat of a tradition.
But apparently, the band no longer has to use their altered moniker. One of the Namless Ghouls recently explained things to Loudwire:
“The thing was there was never a lawsuit… It was basically, I have to just explain myself after I hang one institution out to dry here and that was not our real label, but the bigger umbrella version of our label. Unfortunately in the legal world in general, and it’s not an anti-American thing, but especially in America where people are so conscious about not being sued, obviously all corporations are extremely conscious about not getting sued. So the big major label, specifically, had a policy that said that every artist they sign must own their own name. Obviously we don’t have exclusive rights to our band name because it’s a word so commonly used. There are so many brands that have the word “ghost” that I think it’s almost un-ownable, in a way, unless it’s more specific. So it was basically a demand from the label that we added something.
“What we found least irritating was that if it was something short for something else. We added the B.C. ‘Because of Copyright’ or, obviously, ‘Before Christ.’ We wanted people to still focus on Ghost. Unfortunately that leaked over into the promotional side too just because they tagged everything ‘Ghost B.C.’ everyone started calling it that. While we told every promoter and every journalist that we spoke to, ‘Don’t write Ghost B.C. because that’s not our name.’ It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to go down to McDonalds LLC or McDonalds, Inc. and buy a burger.’ So this time around, when we had a little bit of a flip within the company, we took the opportunity to raise the question and make it happen so that we don’t have to write it out on the record. There’s something extremely unromantic that’s called metadata and within the metadata in all the regions that we need to, it’s still B.C. It’s there in the fine print, but for you and I and everybody else, we don’t have to say that. So it’s Ghost now, which I’m extremely happy about.”
Ugh, legal jargon — the enemy of all things cool.
I’m glad Ghost are back to just Ghost. I’m a big fan of the recent trend of bands taking simple, obviously-used-before names and making them their own (Midnight and Vampire are two more than come to mind). The ‘BC’ felt like some real modern nonsense, which it apparently was, so I’m glad to see it go.
Ghost, no ‘BC,’ will release their new album Meliora on August 21st.
