Back in 2012, some higher up at Ghost's record label were afraid of a potential lawsuit, so they made Ghost change their name to Ghost B.C. in the States. Ghost themselves were not happy about it, but it happened.
It never stuck, and now that the new album cycle is beginning, you may notice that the band is just going by Ghost now. How could that be? Loudwire reached out to one of the nameless ghouls, who explained:
“The thing was there was never a lawsuit,” the Ghoul explains. “It was basically, I have to just explain myself after I hang one institution out to dry here and that was not our real label, but the bigger umbrella version of our label. Unfortunately in the legal world in general, and it’s not an anti-American thing, but especially in America where people are so conscious about not being sued, obviously all corporations are extremely conscious about not getting sued. So the big major label, specifically, had a policy that said that every artist they sign must own their own name. Obviously we don’t have exclusive rights to our band name because it’s a word so commonly used. There are so many brands that have the word “ghost” that I think it’s almost un-ownable, in a way, unless it’s more specific. So it was basically a demand from the label that we added something.”
“What we found least irritating was that if it was something short for something else,” the Ghoul continues. “We added the B.C. ‘Because of Copyright’ or, obviously, ‘Before Christ.’ We wanted people to still focus on Ghost. Unfortunately that leaked over into the promotional side too just because they tagged everything ‘Ghost B.C.’ everyone started calling it that. While we told every promoter and every journalist that we spoke to, ‘Don’t write Ghost B.C. because that’s not our name.’ It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to go down to McDonalds LLC or McDonalds, Inc. and buy a burger.’ So this time around, when we had a little bit of a flip within the company, we took the opportunity to raise the question and make it happen so that we don’t have to write it out on the record. There’s something extremely unromantic that’s called metadata and within the metadata in all the regions that we need to, it’s still B.C. It’s there in the fine print, but for you and I and everybody else, we don’t have to say that. So it’s Ghost now, which I’m extremely happy about.”
Legal mumbo jumbo sounds so exciting. So all you meta-data nerds get to still see Ghost B.C. live, while the rest of us can go about calling Ghost Ghost.
