SODOM TRIVIA
Trivia
Agent Orange, in 1989, took Sodom into the German album chart for the first time. The official chart archive has it entering at 47 on the chart of 24 July, peaking at 36 on 7 August and staying for sixteen weeks. Of the four bands later called the Teutonic Big Four, Sodom were the first to reach the official German album chart: Tankard followed in September 1990 with The Meaning of Life, Kreator in September 1995 with Cause for Conflict, and Destruction in May 2000 with All Hell Breaks Loose. Tom Angelripper says the band could not have cared less at the time, since the charts were no place for them, but he grants that the placing showed things were going well and helped them land a good deal for the albums that followed.
According to laut.de's biography, Japan took notice of Sodom around Better Off Dead in 1990, and the band made several trips there afterwards. A Tokyo concert from that period waited more than thirty years for release. The expanded reissue of Tapping the Vein that Noise/BMG put out in November 2024 includes, in its deluxe bookpack edition of three LPs and two CDs, a previously unreleased "Live in Tokyo 1992", alongside unreleased 1992 shows from Düsseldorf and Cologne. The Tokyo set runs to twelve songs, opening with "Sodomy & Lust", mixing Tapping the Vein material with "Agent Orange" and others, and closing with "The Kids Wanna Rock".
Tank run deep in Sodom. Tom Angelripper names Tank's Algy Ward among the singing bass players he always looked up to, and says Tank's war-heavy lyrics helped steer his own writing towards war. "Don't Walk Away", which closes Agent Orange, is a cover too: the band's own site marks it "(Cover)" in the running order of the Ausgebombt EP, and its writers are Algy Ward, Peter Brabbs and Mark Brabbs. The covers that close the anniversary video Live at Zeche Carl include Tank's "Shellshock" as well.
Tapping the Vein, in 1992, was the first album guitarist Andy Brings ever made. The band's own site notes that he was 20 and still at school when he joined in 1991. According to Tom Angelripper, Brings played unlike any of their previous guitarists, and his arrival pushed the band to go heavier. Angelripper was a punk fan himself, with The Exploited and Discharge among his favourites, while Brings leaned towards the Ramones and glam; at their first rehearsals they played some covers, and Angelripper was amazed at how much noise one guitar could make. The songs came together quickly, many of them in a single session. Fans have taken to calling it Sodom's death metal album, although, as the band points out, nobody in Sodom was listening to death metal at the time.
Sodom's highest placing on the official German album chart came not from a new album but from the reissue of a record more than thirty years old. Tapping the Vein entered at 98 in 1992 and peaked at 56 over nine weeks; the expanded edition that Noise/BMG released on 15 November 2024 took it to number 3 on the chart of 22 November, the band's best position ever. Get What You Deserve, which peaked at 45 in 1994, followed suit after its reissue of 27 February 2026, reaching number 5 on 6 March. Tom Angelripper explains that BMG now owns the back catalogue: it started when BMG got in touch about reissuing Agent Orange, and the label began with M-16.
The title track of the 1993 EP Aber bitte mit Sahne! is a cover of a German-language song composed by Udo Jürgens, with lyrics by Eckart Hachfeld and Wolfgang Spahr. According to laut.de's biography, this was when Tom Angelripper discovered his fondness for German songs, which he celebrated first by recording this EP and later pursued with his side project Onkel Tom. The band's own site lists the EP's other tracks as "Sodomized", "Abuse" and "Skinned Alive '93", played by Angelripper with guitarist Andy Brings and drummer Atomic Steif, and produced by Wolfgang Stach.
Decision Day was named on the German Record Critics' Award's Bestenliste for the fourth quarter of 2016, in the Hard and Heavy category. The Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik publishes these lists every three months, choosing the best and most interesting new releases of the preceding quarter; Decision Day first made the Hard and Heavy jury's longlist for the same period before reaching the final list, where it is entered as Steamhammer 0886922706004 (SPV).
What set Sodom going was Venom's debut album, Welcome to Hell. Tom Angelripper says he and his friends were among the first to get hold of it as an import from England, and that guitarist Frank "Aggressor" Testegen heard it and wanted to make music like that, to which Angelripper said yes. Only Testegen could actually play; Angelripper could not play anything and started out behind the drums. Once he had met Chris Witchhunter the band needed a bass player instead, so he bought a bass, reckoning that four strings would be easier for a beginner. He had always liked singers who played bass, he says, naming Lemmy of Motörhead, John Gallagher of Raven, Algy Ward of Tank and Cronos of Venom, and the thin strings of a guitar never suited him.
The first song Sodom wrote was "Witching Metal", which Tom Angelripper calls the band's anthem and its musical direction. Black metal and thrash metal were not yet names anyone used, he says, so they told people they did not play heavy metal but Witching Metal. The first demo was made in spring 1982 in a small, musty rehearsal room on Stauderstraße in Essen's Altenessen district, amid an industrial wasteland, and "Witching Metal" was the song they were cutting. By Angelripper's account the five-song demo was recorded with nothing more than two microphones, and he designed the cassette's cover and the Sodom logo himself. He played the tape to the grandparents, aunts and uncles who visited every week: his parents and grandfather were aghast, and only his grandmother said to let the boy get on with it, since he would grow out of it. Forty-one years later, on the 2023 EP 1982, the band re-recorded "Witching Metal" and other early songs and wrote a new title track looking back on those first steps.
Most of Sodom's members have gone by stage names. Tom Angelripper's real name is Thomas Such, and drummer Chris Witchhunter was Christian Dudek. The early guitarists made a run of three names ending in "-or": Aggressor was Frank Testegen, his successor Grave Violator was Josef "Peppi" Dominik, and Destructor, who came next, was Michael Wulf. The habit carried on later: Frank Blackfire is Frank Gosdzik, drummer Atomic Steif is Guido Richter, guitarist Bernemann is Bernd Kost and drummer Makka is Markus Freiwald.
Sodom's deal with SPV grew out of a show in Frankfurt that Tom Angelripper counts as the band's first real gig. It doubled as a Venom autograph session, and Tankard and Destruction played as well. As Angelripper tells it, the band were all thoroughly drunk, but Manfred Schütz of SPV, watching from the crowd, concluded that this was the worst band in the world and that he simply had to sign them. Schütz was looking for bands with something special about them rather than good ones, Angelripper says, and Sodom were especially bad, so he gave them a chance. The result was the first EP, In the Sign of Evil. According to laut.de's biography, Tankard were the only band to go home that night without a contract.
In the Sign of Evil did not come out on Steamhammer but on a label called Devil's Game. According to the band's authorized biography, Manfred Schütz, who founded SPV in 1984 and released its metal records under the Steamhammer name, thought it too risky when Sodom insisted on printing their lyrics with the record, so another subsidiary, Devil's Game, was set up for this one release. The cover was painted by Joachim Pieczulski, and the band were never entirely happy with it, because the logo was not placed in the centre. Tom Angelripper now finds it a pretty cool cover, but it still annoys him that the back of the inner sleeve, where a band photo was meant to go, was left almost blank.
In the Sign of Evil was recorded in West Berlin by Horst Müller, who had overseen the first records by Running Wild and Celtic Frost. The official producer was Wolfgang Eichholz, guitarist of S.A.D.O., but Tom Angelripper remembers him turning up now and then, checking what they were doing, telling them to carry on and leaving again. It was the band's first time in Berlin, they had no idea how a recording session worked, and Angelripper admits the city at night interested them more than the studio by day. Their lodging was the Pension des Westens, full of truck drivers and shady characters. In the end an SPV employee who came to check on them stopped the sessions, so only an EP was finished rather than an album, and a bass solo by Angelripper that is listed in the booklet never made it onto the record. Grave Violator, done with his guitar parts, was sent home on Helloween's bus to save money after Helloween had played Berlin; into far harder music, he considered them posers, and he recalls a very frosty ride.
Most of In the Sign of Evil leans towards the occult, but "Burst Command Til War" already shows the war theme that would become central to Sodom. According to the band's authorized biography, Tom Angelripper brought the idea back from his military service: posted to the Luftwaffe at Delmenhorst near Bremen, he was assigned to bunkers housing Cold War missile strike systems, and the "burst command" was the launch command unit kept there. He always connected the launch of a missile with war, he says, adding that this was the time of the Cold War. In a 2022 interview he again traced the song to his two years of service during the Cold War, when he worked with American soldiers handling nuclear missiles and launchers, and explained that burst command was an order used in the military.
The interest in war at the heart of Sodom's lyrics goes back to Tom Angelripper's childhood. In a 2022 interview he remembered talking about the escalating Vietnam War with his parents in the 1970s and watching anti-war demonstrations in German streets on television. The Deer Hunter, which he got to know in 1979, later spurred him to write lyrics, and so did the stories his grandfather told about fighting in the First World War. The band began with satanic subjects, but by the time of Obsessed by Cruelty, he says, his interest in Aleister Crowley and satanism had given him nothing, so he turned his lyrics towards war, encouraged by Tank and their many war songs. What he wants to describe is not politics, he explains, but a single soldier fighting another soldier in the jungle, and the lyrics he writes are against war.
Sodom and Kreator were entangled from the start. Tom Angelripper recalls that when Sodom needed a guitarist after Grave Violator, they had a session with Mille Petrozza, then in Tormentor, the band that became Kreator; Sodom were the better known of the two at the time. Petrozza decided their music was not his thing, Angelripper says, but put them in touch with guitarist Michael Wulf instead. In the band's authorized biography, however, Grave Violator says it was he who recommended Wulf, a friend who lived on his block, so the accounts differ. The encouragement also ran the other way. Petrozza remembers a night after the In the Sign of Evil sessions when Sodom were drinking and celebrating at Grave Violator's place and Angelripper told him it was time his band made an album too. Petrozza replied that they were not good enough yet, but after that night their manager, Andreas "Stoney" Stein, sent a demo to Noise Records founder Karl-Ulrich Walterbach.
Sodom's first album, Obsessed by Cruelty, was recorded twice. According to the band's authorized biography, the first attempt was made at Horst Müller's studio in Berlin, where the EP had been cut, with beer flowing every night, and a label representative who came by declared that a sound that bad could not be released. For the second attempt SPV founder Manfred Schütz waylaid the band on their way to the studio and told them to pull themselves together, the sessions moved to Hilpoltstein in rural Franconia, and SPV imposed a strict ban on alcohol, in the same studio where Destruction had just recorded Eternal Devastation. The trio paid no attention. Tom Angelripper says the landlady of their small guesthouse kept a crate of beer in their room for them, so they built a dummy Marshall cabinet to hide it from the producer; when Schütz came to check on them and opened the door, around 300 cans came tumbling towards him. Uwe "Assator" Christoffers of Darkness was also brought along as a backup guitarist.
Obsessed by Cruelty also made its mark in the shops. According to the band's authorized biography, it reached number five in Metal Hammer's sales chart in the July 1986 issue, with only giants such as Judas Priest and AC/DC above it. The local scene looked on with some amusement. Kreator's Ventor remembers the band driving past the Mephisto club in their little red Simca with "Sodom" painted in big white letters across the bonnet, Chris Witchhunter leaning out of the open window and shouting that they had sold 3,000 copies, and Tom Angelripper at the wheel with his army buzz cut.
The turning point, as Tom Angelripper sees it, came when guitarist Frank Blackfire joined in 1987. Blackfire played nothing like the band's previous guitarists, and the songs became far more structured. Songwriting and recording had still been chaotic on Obsessed by Cruelty; now their producer, Harris Johns, drilled them to play tight, forever reminding them that this kind of music lives on precision, and the band put themselves entirely in his hands. With the Expurse of Sodomy EP and the album that followed, Persecution Mania, Angelripper says, Sodom found themselves as a band. The band's own site credits Persecution Mania as produced by Sodom and engineered by Johns.
The soldier in a gas mask who keeps appearing on Sodom's sleeves is called Knarrenheinz. He first turned up on the cover of Persecution Mania in 1987, painted by Johannes Beck. Tom Angelripper never met Beck personally: he was a friend of SPV managing director Manfred Schütz and offered his artwork for the record, and the band agreed it suited the change of musical and lyrical direction they were making on that album. That, says Angelripper, was the birth of the band's mascot. He only became a regular after Agent Orange, though; a mascot limits what you can do with a cover, Angelripper admits, but it does no harm. Nor can he remember who came up with the name Knarrenheinz, though he thinks it may have been guitarist Frank Blackfire.
Knarrenheinz has kept reappearing in new guises. At first glance he is missing from the cover of M-16 in 2001, but Tom Angelripper says that is Knarrenheinz without his helmet. In War and Pieces, in 2010, finally gave him a song of his own, "Knarrenheinz". Joe Petagno, who painted the cover of Decision Day in 2016, made him a symbol of the countless soldiers who have fought on through the centuries and had his head bursting open from within. And on Genesis XIX in 2020, at Angelripper's request, Knarrenheinz became the destroyer of Sodom and Gomorrah, placed at the centre of the painting as the embodiment of divine vengeance on the cities of sin.
Until Sodom could pay his way, Tom Angelripper worked in a coal mine. In a 2013 interview he said he had trained as a Schlosser, a metalworker, and spent ten years underground as a miner, until 1989, when the band was doing well enough for the label to offer him a small cheque every month. Coming home from tour and having to go back down the pit, he remembers asking himself what he was doing there. His father pointed out that he had money in the bank every month and could earn even more if he went to the Steiger school to become a mine supervisor, but money never mattered to him: making a living from music and being able to stay in bed in the morning was his idea of luxury. In 2012 he described it as a dream come true that had let him give up his job in a coal mine.
Get What You Deserve, in 1994, was recorded completely live, without a single overdub. Listening to it again on headphones in 2022, Tom Angelripper said it still hit hard and called the recording one he remembers fondly. The band's own site credits Wolfgang Stach as producer, and laut.de's biography notes that, like the Aber bitte mit Sahne! EP before it, it was made without Harris Johns, the band's regular producer until then. The same biography reports that the label refused to release the cover the band had come up with for the album. The record closes with a cover of "Angel Dust" by Venom, the band that started it all for Sodom.
Away from Sodom, Tom Angelripper has a solo project, Onkel Tom, known for rock versions of drinking songs and party favourites. According to laut.de's biography, when Sodom's deal with Steamhammer ran out in 1996 and the label released only the best-of Ten Black Years, Angelripper used the gap to record Ein Schöner Tag with Onkel Tom. The 2018 album Bier Ernst split 21 tracks across two CDs called "Bier" and "Ernst", the second, as Angelripper put it, carrying songs full of anger at people's indifference. Onkel Tom's drummer at the time, Cornelius "Corny" Rambadt, is also a sound engineer, and he produced Sodom's 2016 album Decision Day.
The cover of 'Til Death Do Us Unite, in 1997, is a photograph rather than a painting. In 2012 Tom Angelripper explained that it combined life, death and embryonic life in one image, that the fans did not understand what the band meant by it, and that this was why Sodom went back to soldiers and war on the albums that followed. In 2022, though, he called it a superb cover, a photo that symbolises life and death without needing an elaborate painting, and noted that it was censored because it showed bare breasts. That was not the first time: according to laut.de's biography, the 1988 live album Mortal Way of Live, recorded in Düsseldorf on the band's first proper tour, supporting Whiplash with new guitarist Frank Blackfire, could only be sold with a black cover sheet over its lewd artwork.
For M-16, in 2001, Sodom went as far as Vietnam. Tom Angelripper says the first plan was to play a concert there, relying on SPV's Manfred Schütz, who knew people in the country. The band spent several days in Saigon, where a contact took them to a home for veterans badly wounded in the Vietnam War, and they talked with the residents; they met people whose skin had been burned by napalm and went out for beer to drink with them. Permission to perform never came, so there was no show, and no live album from a club called Apocalypse Now where they had hoped to record one. For the promotional photos they bought camouflage gear at a big market in Thailand and shot the session in the border region between Thailand and Cambodia, and for the album's presentation they flew journalists in to Bangkok, which Angelripper admits cost them a fortune.
M-16, which Loudwire calls the only concept album Sodom ever made, was not planned as one. When Tom Angelripper started writing, the first five or six lyrics he finished were all about the Vietnam War, some of them drawn from films such as Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, and with plenty of books on the subject at hand he wrote the rest about the war as well. What he wanted to describe, he says, was not the facts of the war but the inner war the soldiers had to fight. The closing cover of The Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird" comes from the same source: the song is on the Full Metal Jacket soundtrack, and Sodom gave it a metal treatment. "Napalm in the Morning", "M-16" and "I Am the War" are still in the live set, but "Minejumper", Angelripper says, has never been played live.
M-16 was Sodom's last album with Harris Johns and, as Tom Angelripper puts it, the last record the band ever made together as a band in a studio. They spent three or four weeks at Johns's studio in Lütte, Brandenburg, built into an ancient country inn that Johns had renovated himself; the band were together from morning to night and slept there too, and Angelripper remembers it as idyllic. He is not usually a friend of reissues, he says, but he was glad to work on the 20th-anniversary edition because it was done with such care for detail, and not least because M-16 had originally come out only on CD.
The covers of Decision Day in 2016 and Genesis XIX in 2020 are the work of Joe Petagno, the painter behind many of Motörhead's sleeves. Tom Angelripper had admired Petagno's Motörhead covers since his youth; in 2016 he found his contact details on a website and asked whether he would paint Sodom's next cover. He was proud when Petagno said yes, called the result "an absolute dream come true" for a Motörhead fan like himself, and was surprised how well the artist knew Sodom: Petagno brought up Knarrenheinz as soon as they began talking. Petagno does not use a computer for his paintings. For Genesis XIX he worked out the details in pencil sketches before airbrushing the final picture, after which nothing could be changed, and Angelripper says he trusted him completely. Petagno puts the work at some 80 to 100 hours, after discussions that began more than a year earlier.
The title Genesis XIX refers to chapter 19 of the Book of Genesis, the story of how Sodom, the city that shares the band's name, was destroyed with Gomorrah by burning sulphur. Tom Angelripper says the Bible offers little historical background but that he always finds it exciting to study and learn more. "Genesis 19" had already appeared as a song on the 2019 EP Out of the Frontline Trench. On the cover, at Angelripper's request, Knarrenheinz takes the destroyer's part, standing in for God. Angelripper insists the cover makes no political statement: Knarrenheinz, he explains, stands as a warning to a world full of social injustice, selfishness and belligerence, pressing its rulers to come to their senses at last.
The Final Sign of Evil, in 2007, settled business left unfinished more than twenty years earlier. According to the band's authorized biography, the label had cut the In the Sign of Evil sessions short, so only the EP was completed. In 2007 Sodom finally carried out their plan to record and release the seven abandoned tracks, reuniting the EP's recording line-up of Tom Angelripper, Chris Witchhunter and Grave Violator for the purpose. Angelripper traces it to the first Sodom "class meeting", where talk of the old days turned into an idea he and Witchhunter shared: to re-record the first mini-album as a full-length with the unreleased songs. The band's own site credits the production to Thorsten "Toto" Hain and Sodom.
Sodom, Kreator, Destruction and Tankard are often called the Teutonic Big Four. In December 2012 the four came together on The Big Teutonic 4, a CD given away with issue 82 of the German magazine Legacy, each covering a metal classic: Sodom played Motörhead's "Iron Fist", Kreator Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast", Destruction Motörhead's "The Hammer" and Tankard Iron Maiden's "The Prisoner". At the first Beastival, held in Geiselwind from 30 May to 1 June 2013, the four shared one stage on one evening in pouring rain, and Tom Angelripper said the night would go down in history and hoped it would be repeated. For 20 July 2024 the four were billed together again at the Klash of the Ruhrpott, a festival Kreator announced for the Amphitheater in Gelsenkirchen, Sodom's home town.
Sodom celebrated their tenth anniversary with a show at Zeche Carl in Essen. According to laut.de's biography, a crowd of musicians from Rage, Blind Guardian and Kreator joined them on stage that night for a string of cover versions, and almost all of them can be seen on the video of the show. In the running order of the Live at Zeche Carl video on the band's own site, Sodom's own songs are followed by seven covers, among them Motörhead's "Iron Fist" and "Ace of Spades", Tank's "Shellshock", the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop", Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" and AC/DC's "Highway to Hell".