Jan Müller explains his complicated relationship with sound checks.
In 1981, the Goldbekhaus socio-cultural district center opened in Hamburg. The white building with the beautiful lettering on the facade is located directly on the Goldbek Canal, which flows idyllically through Hamburg-Winterhude. Nevertheless: The word “Goldbek” has nothing to do with gold, but is derived from “Gol” for dirt or mud. So it was logical that, as a native of Winterhudian, I attended my first punk concert in the Goldbekhaus.
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My schoolmate and best friend Arne Zank saw a poster: “GZW (Ex-Slime) – Live in the Goldbekhaus”. That must have been around 1984. It was immediately clear to us that we would go there. Excited, we arrived at the Goldbekhaus much too early on the evening of the concert. At 6 p.m. we entered the concert hall, where a few, although not many, people had already gathered. Back then we had no idea how going to a concert worked.
It seemed strange to us how casually this concert began
My rock music concert experiences were limited to a Torfrock concert in Hamburg’s Stadtpark and a performance by the questionable rock music clown Jango Edwards at the same location. Back then, my parents took care of everything. So now Arne and I were standing in the hall and I was amazed that the former singer of Germany’s most famous punk band was strolling through the hall to the stage like a normal person. I already knew that there shouldn’t be stars in punk; but my 13-year-old self was nonetheless immediately thrown into a state of extreme excitement.
So Dirk Jora came on stage and the band started playing. It seemed strange to us how casually this concert began and how even the few people present paid so little attention to it. There was no applause after the songs, and some songs weren’t even played to the end. During the breaks between songs, the musicians talked to each other. And after half an hour the band left the stage again, and I began to suspect that this wasn’t the concert yet. Arne and I then just stayed in the hall. Nobody asked us for a ticket.
Little by little more and more people arrived. The lights went out, the band took the stage again, the spotlights shined and only then did Arne and I actually experience our first punk concert. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that what we had experienced before was the sound check. I had no idea at the time that I would spend many more torturous hours dealing with events of this kind in my future life. Nowadays, I confess, I go on stage as late as possible in the afternoon before the concert evening. Our employees and technicians have already set everything up, the basic sound is stored digitally anyway and then the sound is simply adapted to the requirements of the respective venue. Digital is just better.
Sometimes I ask myself: “Sound check? Is that really necessary?”
However, when we started Tocotronic in 1993, I first learned how tedious and long a sound check can be. We initially went on our tours without our own technicians. The technicians on site often had different ideas than we did, and we had little sound expertise. Over time we understood some basics. For example, I learned that monitor speakers are not screens (as I once thought), but rather the speakers for stage sound. I was often dissatisfied with the sound. That only changed when we decided to travel with appropriate FOH and monitor mixers and backliners. I am very grateful to them for how much they have improved everything for us. Thanks to them, for example, we no longer have to endure hours of drum sound checks. Nevertheless, sentences like “And now the snare, please!” have burned themselves painfully deep into my consciousness.
Even though sound checks these days no longer resemble the endless events of earlier times, they are still not my favorite item on the agenda during a tour. And sometimes I ask myself: “Sound check? Is that really necessary?” The answer is: “No!” In 1995 we toured with the American band Guided by Voices. “We won’t do the fucking sound check” was one of their standard phrases. They still sounded fantastic every evening. Who is actually playing in the Goldbekhaus this month? Maybe I’ll go. At least for sound check.
This column first appeared in Musikexpress issue 12/2025.