Jan Müller explains in his column how he and other artists deal with their left-handedness.
“Hello, my name is Jan Müller, I only write with a felt-tip pen because I can’t do it with a fountain pen.” My friend Rasmus Engler (the “Toco Blues”, 2007) wrote these lines for our joint project Dirty Dishes. The verse is not written as far from reality as one might initially assume. I really can’t write with a fountain pen. To explain this, I have to go back a little: I am left-handed. Shamefully, at some point during my elementary school years, my class teacher persuaded me to “try writing with my right hand.”
I don’t know why a teacher at the end of the 1970s dared to make such an outdated and nonsensical move. I also don’t know why my parents didn’t intervene early. The experiment, which lasted a few weeks, was not successful. I soon started writing with my left hand again, just as my right hemisphere dictates. Nevertheless, this human experiment caused lasting calligraphic confusion in me. I no longer knew what was correct, and from then on my writing was catastrophic from the teachers’ point of view.
My parents took it with humor: “The child is going to be a doctor!” When the fountain pen was on the curriculum, it was immediately clear that this instrument was unsuitable for me. I was the only one in the class who was allowed to write with a ballpoint pen. Nevertheless, my classwork was often so illegible that I had to copy it again in the teacher’s room.
As a left-handed person, I play a right-handed instrument
Somehow I like being left-handed and not being part of mainstream society, at least in a tiny way. In another time, this small deviation would have brought with it greater disadvantages. The devil holds the trident in his left hand. In the past, left-handed people in Germany suffered badly. Sometimes considered to be possessed by evil. Even today, they still have a difficult time wherever religions have a high level of influence. In almost all major religions, the left hand is considered unclean.
When my friend Arne Zank and I bought our first electric guitar together when we were teenagers, I didn’t even think about the issue of left-handedness. In the “Musikkeller” in Hamburg St. Georg we asked the seller how to hold the thing. The salesman looked at us blankly, but then readily gave us information. Our next instrument together, a wonderful DDR bass (Musima de Luxe 25 B), was also intended for right-handers. I probably found it difficult to learn because of my left-handedness. In our first band together, “My Parents,” I became, perhaps for this reason, neither a guitarist nor a bassist, but a singer. By the way, that wasn’t a good idea.
After I got back to the bass at some point, I actually tried to relearn from right to left after years, but that seemed completely absurd to me. So, as a left-handed person, I play a right-handed instrument. By the way, this is probably the only musical technique that I have in common with Sting. Noel Gallagher and Mark Knopfer do the same thing. In addition to left-handed basses, there are other tools specifically made for left-handed people that I don’t know what to do with. Scissors, can openers, sharpeners etc.
We left-handed people are happy when we meet each other
Nevertheless, we left-handed people are happy when we meet each other. Left-handedness is a harmless and beautiful otherness. And of course I’m very interested to see which musicians are left-handed. There really are quite a few: Beethoven, Mozart, Kurt Cobain, Tony Iommi, Sting, Courtney Barnett, Guido vom Flockenberg, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. The early pioneers of pop music had to be creative if they didn’t want to spend huge amounts of money: Jimi Hendrix, for example, simply turned his Fender Stratocaster over and wound the strings in the reverse order. The great blues musician Elizabeth Cotten even refrained from remounting the strings. This technique is now known as Cotten picking.
Are there actually right-wing rock musicians who play left-handed guitars? Probably not. It would contradict their faint-hearted worldview. What really amazed me was that the right-handed Greg Sage, singer and guitarist of the Wipers, who I highly admire, plays a left-handed guitar as a right-handed person. Queerness at it’s best! Oh, and last but not least: I like to write by hand these days. Nevertheless: fountain pens are really completely outdated. They are superfluous. Especially left-handed fountain pens. Long live the ballpoint pen!
On Jan Müller’s “ Reflexionr” podcast: www.steadyhq.com/de/reflektor
Jan Müller from Tocotronic meets interesting musicians for his “ Reflexionr” podcast. He reports on these encounters in Musikexpress and on Musikexpress.de. This column first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 10/2023.