The Satanic Scandi metal band who’ve become a box office sensation
In the London Borough of Camden, where I live, there are presently two adverts promoting concert films. At Euston station, passengers awaiting passage on delayed trains are all but compelled to cast their eyes at a giant electronic banner bearing information about the apparently ubiquitous Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (which, following a grandly successful theatrical release, can now be seen on Disney+) stretching from platforms five to 13. With rather less ostentation, meanwhile, up at the local Odeon, a poster for Rite Here Rite Now, a 160-minute concert picture from the Swedish goth-pop-rock band Ghost, is barely noticeable in its lonely position at the foot of the stairs.
With box office grosses of $267 million, the former needs no introduction. In an age when even festival headliners are not quite mainstream names – take Glastonbury headliner SZA, for example, or k-pop Stray Kids, who are topping the bill at Hyde Park this summer – the dominance of Taylor Swift is total. When it comes to cross-generational cut-through, the pop music summer belongs to her.
The success of Ghost, meanwhile, may seem more surprising. With their black-and-white corpse-paint, elaborate masks and knowingly kitsch Euro-pop melodies, the Linkoping group are the kind of act to whom attention is paid only by the committed. When it comes to celebrity, its members – mastermind Tobias Forge (a singer with the stage name Papa Emeritus IV) and a cache of anonymous players known as A Group of Nameless Ghouls – are unlikely to be invited to turn on the Christmas lights even in their own homes. Not that this abundance of mainstream obscurity should detain us, mind. Rite Here Rite Now was filmed at the Kia Forum, in the LA suburb of Inglewood, at which Ghost’s audience over two nights numbered 35,000 people.
Speaking from his home in Brooklyn, Alex Ross Perry, the movie’s director, endorses the view that the band are a box-office bonanza who are somehow hidden from view. “You see the energy and the atmosphere from the fans,” he tells me, “but you don’t imagine they’d be filling 10,000, 15,000 and 20,000 seat venues. You think that the bands playing those kinds of arenas would be those you’ve heard of, even if you don’t know their music. Maybe that kind of thing doesn’t exist any more, though, which is why, when seeing the film last week, my wife said to me, ‘Remind me again how this band became so popular?’”
After barely 10 days on release, the numbers for Rite Here Rite Now are quietly astounding. Originally scheduled for a two-night theatrical run, its place on silver screens the world over was extended by more than a week following box office receipts of more than $5 million ($600,000 of which were harvested in the United Kingdom). For the company handling distribution, Trafalgar Releasing, this success ranks second only to Billy Joel: The 100th – Live At Madison Square Garden, a network television concert film from a man who is an indisputable household name.
Formed in 2006, the traceless rise of Ghost can be attributed to a combination of pop-metal finesse, witty marketing and good ol’ fashioned rock and roll shock and awe. Periodically, the band have been known to announce the recruitment of a new singer (a brother or even an ancestor of his predecessor) without bothering to disguise the fact that it’s merely the old singer with a different name.
That the audience are in on this ruse – this is the all-knowing 21st Century, after all – has done little to quell the appetite for plotlines concerning this bizarre family tree. When Rite Here Rite Now rolled into cinemas last week, the internet was busy with fans asking early-bird viewers to restrain themselves from posting online plot-spoilers. This dialogue, explains Alex Ross Perry, is “what people say about their favourite TV show or the new Marvel movie. To have this for a concert film for a cult band that exists without any robust mainstream appeal… is amazing.”
With a sound that has more in common with, say, Blue Oyster Cult than it does noisy Scandinavian predecessors Burzum, Ghost also embrace a kind of knowingly silly Satanism that has somehow managed to prove controversial all the same. This too has been good for business. In Nashville, the group were unable to find choral singers willing to contribute to 2013’s Infestissumam LP, while radio stations in conservative cities have balked at playing even their catchiest songs.
A restaurateur in Chicago (who, one imagines, was in on the joke) was required to issue an apology after placing “The Ghost” burger on the menu. Comprising goat shoulder, a red wine reduction and a communion wafer, the dish was described by a local food blogger as “a mockery of something that is holy”.
When it comes to selling all this sizzle, Ghost are like Kiss with Swedish accents. The word-of-mouth appeal of image, music and theatrics – in LA, the stage is designed to look like a church, while a troupe of dancers dressed as skeletons cavort about the place – has, according to Alex Ross Perry, seen Rite Here Rite Now make “truly significant money domestically and worldwide without [formal] marketing. It was just marketed directly to people who are likely to already be excited about it.
“It’s not like the trailer was running before every horror movie for six months so fans who had never heard the band could get a glimpse of the visuals and say, ‘Oh, I’m interested’. It’s sort of a… fan and community-driven success that [Tobias Forge] has made for himself, which fills arenas and which now fills movie theatres.
“I find that fascinating because you only tend to see the Eras Tour that’s playing in movie theatres,” he says. “It makes perfect sense to everybody that it would make [a fortune because] it has ads on TV and stuff. This film doesn’t, it’s much more off at the side. But it’s still this other thing that can cross over in this weird way.”
It is, I think, worth looking the established parameters of what is known as “event cinema”. With limited-run concert films exempt from the membership schemes of outlets such as Curzon or Vue, everyone in attendance at these one or two-night happenings is required to pay as much as £20 for the privilege of seeing the action. Almost without exception, submissions from even the most popular artists tend to flutter by without comment. Last year, for example, at the Camden Odeon, I was just one of five people who turned out to watch Metallica’s two performances at the 100,000 seat AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys.
There are, of course, exceptions. After being lauded by American movie critics such as Pauline Kael, of the New Yorker, in 1984 Talking Heads’ near-peerless concert film Stop Making Sense earned a whopping $6.4 million from its run in independent and college picture-houses. (Directed by future Oscar winner Jonathan Demme, this most iconic of music movies enjoyed a second successful theatrical run just last year.) The source of the funding for the film’s budget of more than a million bucks, however, speaks to the riskiness of these invariably high-cost ventures. Right from the off, the group’s record company was unwilling to countenance the prospect of red ink on their ledgers.
“One thing that nobody ever mentions, particularly our singer, David Byrne, is the fact that the band paid for the movie,” Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz told Rolling Stone in 2014. “Yes, we got a loan from Warner Bros, but it was [set] against our royalties, so the band, the four of us, really coughed up the money. We didn’t have a whole lot of savings at the time, so we were basically putting our life savings into this movie, which we did and I’m glad we did, because not only did we get it back, but we have a great movie.”
Asked about the budget of Rite Here Rite Now, Alex Ross Perry pleads the fifth. “I don’t think I can answer that,” he says, on account of “not being a producer” on the film. “But my instinct,” he adds, “is yes”, it’s already turning a profit.
Perry has worked with Ghost in the past on music videos, an interactive pop-up exhibition, and the mockumentary Metal Myths: Ghost Part 2. For his work on the group’s Kia Forum concert film, being paid a flat fee means that he doesn’t have to worry about box office receipts. It also means there’s no opportunity for further financial reward.
As a fixture of the independent movie scene – his directing credits include the feature films Golden Exits and Nostalgia – the irony of “the one project I’ve been involved in that’s been a runaway success immediately [being] the one time where there was no opportunity for such a thing [as profit share]” is not squandered on him. “I wouldn’t have asked for it, though,” he adds, rather sweetly.
He has done a good job, though. On the one hand, with its artful and surreal spoken word sections, Rite Here Rite Now recalls the 1988 art-house concert film Big Time, from Tom Waits. On the other, with its spaceship lighting rig and its noisy audience, the live action is reminiscent of Iron Maiden’s Live After Death, the Holy Grail of long-form Wallop Rock. At his home near Prospect Park, Adam Ross Perry confirms that a DVD of Maiden’s performance at the Long Beach Arena, on the World Slavery Tour of 1984-5, is but “a few feet away from where [he’s] sitting”. On the stump promoting Rite Here Right Now, Tobias Forge also spoke of his love for Live After Death.
Filmed in arenas 22 miles apart, the respective concert films from Maiden and Ghost are separated by almost 40 years. But as the two group’s stellar world tours descended on Southern California, both drew huge audiences to their flame despite an absence of support from radio or television. The conventionally overlooked Sleep Token, from the UK, meanwhile, have themselves just returned from a tour of US arenas and amphitheatres, while the most recent US campaign by Berliners Rammstein – whose Rammstein in Amerika movie, from 2011, is a must-watch – saw them advertising forthcoming appearances in stadiums with the words “we’re going to build a wall (of fire) and you’re going to pay for it”. When it comes to rock bands hiding in plain sight, perhaps there’s nothing new under the sun after all.
As matters relate to concert films, the difference, I suppose, is that Rite Here Rite Now is currently knockin’ ‘em dead on the kind of big screens on which the likes of Live After Death never played. Last Thursday, in fact, on the film’s opening night, Alex Ross Perry took himself and his New York crew to the Regal cinema on Broadway, to see his hit movie sharing a roster with pictures such as Bad Boys: Ride Or Die and Inside Out 2. For an independent director, this hop with the Hollywood jet set proved quite the night out.
“To see the audience yelling and screaming, it was, like, ‘Yeah, we were trusted with this crazy responsibility of bringing this thing to the screen,” he says. “And although it’s this niche thing for a cult audience, there’s a lot of people in that audience. It’s insane. I guess it’s a good thing we did our job as well as we could.”
Rite Here Rite Now is in cinemas now
