Queens Of The Stone Age played an underground concert at Erlebnisbergwerk Glückauf in Sondershausen, Germany, on November 20, 2007. Around 700 metres, or 2,300 feet, below the surface, 300 competition winners joined the band for a semi-acoustic performance inside a salt mine.
A place at the show depended on winning a ticket. German magazine Visions offered two pairs through its own competition and directed readers to another giveaway on the band’s German website. Organized buses brought winners from Cologne, Berlin, Munich and Hamburg. The destination already had a concert hall, which had opened in 2001, but transporting a rock show into it required considerably more planning than pulling a truck up to a loading door.
Sound engineer Patrick “Hutch” Hutchinson described that work in a 2024 interview with Heil Sound. Management had been finding unusual places for the band to perform, and Sondershausen presented a particularly demanding load-in. Its ten-person lift limited what could travel underground at once. Hutchinson recalled that moving the equipment down took a day, while bringing in the audience took half a day. Fans made the descent wearing matching jackets and protective helmets.
The equipment also needed time to adjust to its surroundings. A March 2008 report in Mix described how Complete Audio Berlin, which supplied the sound system, left the components underground for 36 hours to acclimatize before use. Once everything was in place, the crew had to contend with strong reverberation from the chamber’s walls. The location affected both the preparations and the job of making the performance audible.
Queens were touring Era Vulgaris, and they adapted their repertoire for the occasion. In comments reproduced by Louder, Josh Homme explained that the band rehearsed songs they rarely performed and continued changing arrangements until the previous evening. The 14-song set placed “Make It Wit Chu” alongside older material including “In the Fade” and “Mosquito Song,” with covers of “White Wedding” and “Goin’ Out West” adding to the selection. The semi-acoustic approach left room for the performance to grow louder, too. Hutchinson recalled that “it quickly turned a lot heavier with everyone getting excited.”
Cameras captured the concert for a planned film release. The band’s official YouTube channel published a short salt-mine teaser on December 4, 2007, and contemporary coverage described a longer film being prepared. That distinction matters to the show’s subsequent history: the performance happened, and a preview reached fans, but the proposed full-length release did not follow that initial promotion. In its August 2026 retrospective, Louder reported that the complete concert footage remained unreleased.
