Tobias Forge

I always hate starting tours, especially when it coincides with an album coming out.

From my point of view, a lot of the things that we've done over our entire career have always been a big failure because it was never the way that I planned it. But then there's always upsides with it that turn out to be better or greater than the original plan.

Even the biggest bands - and I hate to break the magic - but even the band that sold out 90,000 tickets in your football stadium, they might come back two years later and do an arena. It still feels huge, but there's a difference - there's a big difference. And there's a big difference playing a 30,000-seat stadium and a 90,000.

I've liked Kiss from when I was three years old. I've seen them, the real deal, with all the original members when they came back in '96 and all that, and that's fine.

Public trials are very unsupervised and extremely swift and speak to the most primordial parts of us.

Even when I was a kid, I always sort of identified myself with Keith Richards and Slash more than the singers of the bands.

As a young teen, Satan and the idea of some sort of world that you could be in touch with that could empower you was very much the symbol for freedom.

The original idea of being anonymous - it was a great, naive idea on paper in 2008, not knowing to what degree we'd be touring or to what extent this was going to be a professional operation. That regimen is very hard to live by. What I hadn't foreseen was the fans and their willingness to embrace that and play along.

The reason for a lot of bands not making it is because they don't really understand that your job is sort of divided into two different things. It's one thing creating it... It's like being an architect but also a construction worker.

I was told before that one of the hardest jumps to do, painlessly, is the one from playing clubs into playing arenas. I am completely aware of that now.

I'm a band dictator.

I think that it's crucial. I think that playing live, if you want to be an artist - that's what artists do.