There was no signal. No flicker of LED glow. No fingers tapping cameras, no screens rising like a dull digital tide. And for the first time in years — maybe decades — an arena of 21,000 souls found itself looking not through a phone lens, but directly into the black-and-purple mouth of Ghost’s ecclesiastical inferno. The Skeletour had begun, and Manchester bore first witness.
It wasn’t just a concert. It wasn’t even a ritual, though that’s what they call them. It was an ascension — the first full outing for Papa V Perpetua, the enigmatic, flamboyant fraternal twin of Frater Imperator, and the new guiding light of Ghost’s sixth era. Shrouded in myth, teased in film, whispered in interludes and cryptic playlists, Perpetua made his live debut like a thunderclap in velvet. The AO Arena stage became a church without walls, and its choir sang in screams, raised fists, and roars of worship.
No one knew exactly what to expect. But no one expected this.
The phones had been surrendered. It wasn’t just a gimmick — it felt like cleansing. From the first moment, you understood why: this was a show made to be felt, not filtered. Every fireball, every flick of a Ghoul’s plectrum, every step of Papa V’s gliding, camp procession across the stage — it all felt sacred. Temporary. Unrepeatable. As though it would dissolve if captured.
And when the lights dropped, and the first skeletal note of Peacefield rang out beneath billowing smoke, it wasn’t just the start of a gig. It was the cracking open of a tomb.
For the devout, the lore surrounding Ghost is as vital as the music itself. And in this new chapter — following 2024’s cinematic opus Rite Here Rite Now, the cryptic interregnum, the V-Day emails, the billboards puffing black smoke in Las Vegas — anticipation was volcanic. Satanized, the lead single from the soon-to-be-released Skeletá, had dropped in March like a knife through silk. The Ghoul’s new aesthetic, slick, smooth, all hinted at something deeper, more decadent.
And then there was him.
Papa V Perpetua does not float like Papa III, nor brood like Papa IV. He struts. He sashays. He mocks, he kneels, he laughs. He is Cardinal Copia’s fraternal twin — but stranger. More knowing. At once archbishop and drag queen, echoing the camp of 1970s Italian horror, laced with whispers of the burlesque. From the second he emerged, the crowd roared as if to confirm: this is our anti-Pope now.
And Perpetua owned the space. A master of ceremony, a deviant ringmaster, he worked the crowd like an old lover. He blew kisses mid-psalm. He mock-blessed a fan in the front row with a flick of the wrist. And beneath it all, a knowing, serpentine energy: this man, this creature, was born for this. Between tracks, he addressed the congregation with theatrical flair, confessing he was “new around here” and didn’t “like it gentle.”
He changed outfits nine times across the night, each more extravagant than the last. At one point — during a soul-shaking rendition of Majesty — he donned a sheer purple robe and was suspended at the back of the stage, arms spread in eerie stillness, surveying the sea of followers like a haunted messiah. It was the only time he wore the robe — and it made the moment feel even more unholy.
But a great frontman is nothing without a liturgy — and what a setlist he summoned.
Ghost didn’t just play the hits. They exhumed them.
Lachryma, a haunting piece fans had never heard live, emerged from the mist like a long-lost gospel, swirling through blood-red spotlights. Spirit thundered into From the Pinnacle to the Pit in a one-two punch that rattled the ribcage. But it was Majesty that truly cracked the evening open — a song untouched in live settings for years, now revived with orchestral heft.
And then came The Future Is A Foreign Land. Rarely has a song so recent felt so eternal — a final gift from Papa Nihil, passed like a chalice to the new reign, while Perpetua stood centre stage, arms outstretched like the Grucifix itself. You didn’t need a phone to capture the image — it burned itself into the mind.
The staging, as always, bordered on religious ecstasy. But this tour, it felt like something else entirely. Ghost had always understood spectacle, but here, they wielded it like a weapon. New screen tech layered with real-time distortion, the biggest lighting rig I’ve ever seen, and shifting stained glass patterns turned the AO Arena into a cathedral ripped from some dystopian psalm. Pyrotechnics were a constant companion — flaring in sudden bursts, blooming in ritualistic waves, always serving the grandeur rather than overwhelming it.
Cirice returned with renewed malevolence, the breakdown dragging into almost cinematic tension before releasing in a shimmering fog of choral harmony. Darkness at the Heart of My Love sent the crowd into something close to quiet devotion. And when Satanized arrived, it did so not like a single, but like a declaration: Ghost in 2025 are darker, dirtier, more seductive than ever.
The Ghouls — in their most radical visual transformation since the band’s inception — had traded their iconic masks for skeletal bodysuits and sleek, angular facial coverings more reminiscent of a villain from Squid Game than anything before. They looked like revenants, moving with twitching grace, channeling menace and finesse in equal measure.
The band? Tighter than ever. The Ghouls tore through riffs with manic precision — particularly during Rats and Mummy Dust, where keytar solos met death-disco breakdowns and unholy confetti blasts.
But for all the grandeur, the moment that brought the arena to its knees — metaphorically and, for some fans near the front, literally — was He Is.
Performed with near-religious silence, it was the evening’s heart. A candlelight hymn of praise to something both ancient and human. You could feel the weight of the song across every face in the crowd. Tears, raised hands, whispered lyrics — in this moment, Ghost didn’t just command a stage. They led a congregation.
From there, the show spiralled upward into sheer chaos. Kiss the Go-Goat oozed sleaze. Monstrance Clock rang out with the weight of ritual, with thousands chanting the climactic “Come together, together as one” as if performing a summoning. It was, as ever, less a song than a benediction.
And just when you thought it had ended — that the ritual was complete — the encore hit with almost blasphemous joy.
The first organ swell of Mary on a Cross was met with screams that bordered on ecstatic. It is, somehow, the most tender and most depraved Ghost song — and here, it was reborn. Papa V’s delivery turned every lyric into velvet-coated sin, drawing the crowd into a shared, swaying delirium.
Dance Macabre followed, now a victory lap of the damned — fans twirling, hugging, crying, dancing with the kind of reckless joy you only find at the edge of something enormous.
And then, of course, the hammer dropped.
Square Hammer, the closer to end all closers. A song that never loses its shine. But this time, it hit harder. With fireworks cracking the rafters, the screens bleeding violet smoke, and Papa V — now clad in a gleaming blue blazer that shimmered like lacquered oil — framed in a silhouette of flame, it felt like the end of something much bigger than a gig.
It felt like the end of the beginning.
When the lights finally rose, and the crowd shuffled back into the cool northern night, blinking, sweating, stunned — there was silence. Not because there was nothing to say, but because no words could yet meet the moment.
Ghost had returned. But more than that, they had transformed. The Skeletour isn’t a tour. It’s a ceremony. A resurrection. A challenge to every band who thinks spectacle is enough, or that legacy can exist without myth. What Tobias Forge has built here isn’t just a live show. It’s an empire of belief.
Papa V Perpetua has stepped out of the shadows, and the world — the real world, the one beyond the phones and reels and feeds — is his stage now.
And Manchester? Manchester was the spark that lit the flame.
THE FRONT ROW 
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