“I’m so sorry about last night”: Watch Ghost frontman Tobias Forge apologise onstage for last-minute concert cancellation

Ghost singer Tobias Forge has apologised for cancelling the first of three planned concerts in Mexico.

On Tuesday (September 23), shortly before doors were due to open for Ghost’s first night at Palacio de los Departes in Mexico City, the Swedish hard rock/heavy metal band announced that the show would not be happening due to Forge (who performs as masked frontman Papa V Perpetua) suffering from food poisoning.

They also announced that the other two Palacio de los Departes performances, scheduled for Wednesday (September 24) and Thursday (September 25), would be going ahead as scheduled.

On Wednesday, Ghost played their set, and Forge took time mid-show to apologise for the past night’s cancellation. Footage of the apology was then uploaded to Ghost’s social media accounts.

“I feel better tonight,” Forge says in the published video. “I’m so sorry about last night.”

He adds: “At the end of the day, I am just a gringo [Latin American term for ‘outsider’], coming here with my army, asking for too much. So no wonder I got hit by the curse of Montezuma [a colloquial term for traveller’s diarrhoea]!”

Ghost’s Mexico City dates, promoted earlier this week with the help of a spooky mariachi band, are the final stops on their worldwide Skeletour, promoting this year’s album Skeletá. The tour is notable for being completely phone-free, a format Ghost first experimented with for two concerts in Inglewood in October 2023, which were filmed and eventually released as part of their Rite Here Rite Now film.

The phone ban is enforced using Yondr pouches: magnetically sealed bags that are kept on the attendee’s person. The attendee’s mobile phone is sealed inside by security on the way into the auditorium, and the only way for it to be unsealed is by security personnel on the way out of the show. Ghost mastermind Tobias Forge) who portrays masked lead singer Papa V Perpetua onstage) has called the practice a “life-changer”.

“Just walking off stage first night [of the tour] was just, like, this has completely changed the entire outlook of how this feels,” he said at a live Q&A in Birmingham, UK. “So, yeah, now we’re doing that. And I think that there are a lot of bands that are looking at this and just, like, ‘OK, so how do we do that too?’”

In 2024, Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson told Metal Hammer that he’s a big fan of Ghost’s phone-free concerts. When Maiden announced their Run For Your Lives 50th-anniversary tour last year, manager Rod Smallwood urged fans to keep phones in their pockets as much as possible. The band will play a show at La Défense Arena in Paris in June where phones are banned, using the same Yondr pouches in place at Ghost gigs.

Ghost are the subject of an extensive, 132-page special from the team behind Metal Hammer. You can get your copy via the Louder webstore, in an array of bundles that come with an exclusive t-shirt and/or a 3D-textured sweatshirt.