After 30 years, Adelaide hard-core veterans The Mark Of Cain are still kicking arse and taking names.
Bassist Kim Scott explains why precision is still paramount on their current Australian tour. “We always rehearse a lot before we go out on the road, because we are known for our tight sound and tight performances, so we have never been a band that can go out and be sloppy, its all got to be accurate.”
When Kim looks out into the crowd at a show he sees some of the same faces that have been head-banging back at him for the last three decades. “There are certainly a lot of die-hard people that have followed us from 30 years ago. We have noticed that a lot of our hardcore old-time fans are getting larger in girth. We used to joke that if it was a 1,000 capacity venue then we would now only be able to fit 800 of our fans in now!”
=Adding to the crowd is a new, younger breed of TMOC fans. “We are seeing a few younger kids, people who have been introduced by their parents or friends or maybe they liked Helmet then they get to us through our drummer John Stanier [formerly of Helmet]. But it’s certainly a mixed crowd now.”
Standing in for Stanier on this tour is 23 year-old Eli Green. “I don't know if Eli was a fan of ours, I've never actually asked him that question in case he’s embarrassed by the answer! I was a little dubious, like 'a 23-year-old kid, is he really going to get it?' He's a drum teacher and he plays in a couple of different bands. He's clearly an accomplished musician, and he was just able to play everything flawlessly. We work him pretty hard; he had blisters on his hands after Saturday's show.”
Both Kim and his brother, singer/ guitarist John, are engineers by trade and have had long, successful careers in the defence industry. “John's now working for the Attorney General's department in Adelaide and I resigned from my job as a senior executive at a large defence company three months ago.”
Click here for photos from The Mark Of Cain's Sydney show.
Seemingly two very different worlds, the band’s music and the day jobs of its core members are not entirely unconnected. “What does drive our music from our work environment is that in engineering everything is mathematical, and everything needs to be accurate and precise. Therefore when we approached the music we were disciplined in the way we did it and we were quite precise in how we wrote songs.
“The time signatures were quite complex, which kept us interested. John Stanier famously said when he left Helmet and joined us that 'Helmet were mathematical rock, you guys are calculus rock'. We really enjoy doing songs that aren't just in 4/4 time. Having such complex, time signatures really fucks with our audience because they can't dance to it, but I guess it's not supposed to be dance music anyway.”
John is the principle songwriter for the band, and takes inspiration from some very dark places. “John has always had a fascination with extremes of the human condition. Like serial killers, and how humans can do such terrible things to each other. The song 'Battlesick' is all about people coming back from Vietnam [War] and less than 24 hours after they were in the jungle, they are suddenly in an urban setting. If people weren’t fucked up by that, it probably would have been weirder; if they just came back and were normal.”
Henry Rollins has long been a friend of the band and produced TMOC’s 1995 album, ‘Ill At Ease’. Rollins features as a guest vocalist on the recently released single, ‘Grey- 11’. “We were always fans of Rollins, so we sent him a copy of our first album, ‘Battlesick’, and by the time he had got to the third track he had called up and said: ‘I want to release these guys and I want to play with them’.
“Since then whenever he is in Adelaide we always have a catch-up. We happened to be in the studio recording 'Songs Of The Third And Fifth' during the time that Henry was touring, doing spoken word. Someone made a joke and said 'do you want to be a guest vocalist on the album?' and he went 'Hell yeah!'”
Two years have elapsed since the release of TMOC’s last album, ‘Songs Of The Third And Fifth’, and while the band has no solid plans of any more recording, they certainly aren’t quitting any time soon either. “We're not prolific in that sense. Time is always an issue, we are all getting old and we've got families and jobs. We could try to write with Eli, that’s a possibility. We've always said as long as the stages have ramps and wheelchair access we'll keep playing.”
Written by Nicholas Atkins
The Mark Of Cain Tour Dates Australia
Sat 15 Nov - Rosemount Hotel (Perth)Fri 28 Nov - The Zoo (Brisbane)
Sat 29 Nov - Coolangatta Hotel (Gold Coast)
Fri 5 Dec - The Gov (Hindmarsh)
