The Mark Of Cain: What’s This?

The Mark Of Cain play the Waterloo Hotel on Friday and the Sands Tavern, Maroochydore on Saturday.

Mark Of Cain gigs are becoming an event to cherish. The notorious Adelaide three piece are becoming les and less frequent visitors to sunny Vegas, and not only for the first and obvious reason that springs to mind. While the Spinal Tap-esque drummers seat has finally settled with United States based ex Helmet skinsman John Stainer, who must also split his time other projects (none the least is alt metal supergroup Tomahawk), the band are finding other more pressing issues holding up time spent on the road.

“It is getting very infrequent,” frontman John Scott confesses. “It’s actually not all that due to John Stainer’s commitments overseas. Me and Kim are just progressing in our careers. Kim’s got a family too, and it’s just one of those things. You get older and you’ve got a day job. It was easier to tour a couple of years ago, but as time goes it gets harder and harder. John, even if he lived here, we’d still be touring at the infrequent rate that we do.”

“I just put things into this perspective. If the band was our one and only shot at making money, we’d be a lot more worried about getting out there, or if it was more of commercial concern as well. As you get older you have to find a balance, really.”

Seventeen years have now passed since The Mark Of Cain’s first live appearance, not mean feat by any stretch of the imagination.

“When I was younger I breathed lived and shat music, but as I’ve gotten older the time just gets harder to find. I guess if John lived he we’re rehearse more, and write more, and we might be releasing more often. It’s still very important to me, but there’s no desperation to make it.”

Does the more relaxed attitude to touring make the band experience more enjoyable for you when you do spend some time out?

“Yeah, I’d kind of thought about that. You see, as some bands get older, they start to compromise a little bit. The realise that it’s an industry that they’re involved in, and they start to write things that are a little more commercial. Not everyone, some people stick with it and do their thing. I’ve always maintained that as what we’re doing isn’t really commercial, you can write what you want to write, and that’s what makes it enjoyable. We do what we want to, and you look forward to it more. You take time off work and it’s more special.”

Compromising their musical integrity seems even less of an issue for The Mark Of Cain now that it ever has. Their last album This Is This is one of the most fierce albums the band have ever put out, and certainly one of the most intense listening experiences of the past year or two.

“We’ve always tried to write stuff that doesn’t sort of tie us down into a particular period. Basically This Is This was a different type of album for us, because we were writing with John, and we went into the studio with a couple of songs that weren’t really completed, when we usually go in with everything done. We’d usually write, write, write, then roadtest, roadtest, roadtest, get it all happening and then record.”

“We don’t write those Linkin Park kind of songs with those Backstreet Boys kind of choruses. That is a commercial style, it straddles the heavy thing and is still nice and melodic. We can’t do that.”

“I think everybody can write a song, or has a song to sing, probably a movie to make. We get together and that’s what we do. I’d like to be able to write more, but the only way we could do it would be to have another drummer and say, ‘we’ll write all these songs’, but at the end of the day it’s bad for that guy, because he’s doing all this work and we say, thanks, John’s coming over to record, and I couldn’t really do that.”

“Personally I’m getting to the point where because of the infrequency of The Mark Of Cain touring that I’m kind of looking at doing another band, not setting out to make it, jut maybe another couple of people from Adelaide, write some songs and do something different. Longevity wise the Mark Of Cain could just keep going for another ten years because it’s something we can do. It’s all good. It’s really do it yourself.”