Ghost’s “Papa Emeritus” Makes First Unmasked Public Appearance as Tobias Forge

UPDATE, 3:32pm EDT: There is now a rough translation of Forge’s entire episode of the radio show available here.

Original Post:

The man behind the “Papa Emeritus” costume and the bandleader of Ghost made his first public appearance yesterday under his real name, Tobias Forge, on the Swedish radio program Sommar i P1.

Forge’s identity has been known for years and was confirmed and acknowledged this past spring when former members of Ghost filed a lawsuit against him, but this is the first time in the history of Ghost that he’s made a public appearance as himself.

Sommar i P1 is a daily radio program that has been running every summer in Sweden since 1959. Each episode features a well-known Swede, alone on the air, left to their own devices to talk about whatever they’d like for 90 minutes.

The official website for Sommar i P1 has a brief English synopsis of the episode:

“Tobias Forge tells the story about Ghost’s travel to the American Grammy awards, when they proudly proclaimed that ‘a nightmare had turned into a dream.’ They had just won the Grammy for the best hard rock song of the year.

“They also had the pleasure of keeping all their identities a secret while playing in big arenas all over the world, all while speculation aboutwho they really were was running wild. Until now. Tobias Forge is the man behind the mask in Ghost, and in this show he steps forward telling the story of how Ghost became one of the biggest rock bands in the world, and his journey with music. In his heartfelt story, he also talks about the love of his great brother – and how important he has been for Tobias Forge.”

You can listen to the episode here… but you’ll need to understand Swedish to do so.

In case you missed it: read all about the man who claims to have invented the Papa Emeritus character later adopted by Forge.

Thanks: Marcus L.