The Mark Of Cain ProfileIf there's one thing that any music fan can take away from a performance by Adelaide stalwarts The Mark Of Cain, it's the confronting nature of it all.
Perhaps it's the years spent honing their craft into a tightly-wound, well-trained unit which feels as militaristic as their lyrical imagery, as powerful as their compositions, and as forceful as their live sets.
Perhaps it's their somewhat reclusive nature, or perhaps it's the almost adversarial façade they offer when they take to the stage.
Whatever the case, perhaps it's lifting the veil somewhat to explain that founding members Kim and Josie Scott are actually far more approachable, forthcoming, and charming than their work may suggest when they speak to The Music.
In fact, the first point of order is far from being their music, but a brief humorous discussion of South Australian accents which all of us – this writer included – share.
But we're not here to talk about accents, rather, we're here to chat about how The Mark Of Cain will be returning to the live stage this month as part of 4ZZZ's ZED51 celebration in Brisbane, then embarking on a string of headline dates across Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide.
However, this long time between drinks, though. Is it a case of not wanting to oversaturate the market, too much of a good thing, or something else entirely?
"I think a lot of bands are pressured to tour," muses Josie. "That's all they are and that's all they do.
"Kim and I work, Eli works as well, so it's a case of when the time is right, and there's no point oversaturating. I think it's nice to make it something that's a bit more celebratory when we do get out."
"The band is a big part of our life, but we don't rely on it for our income," echoes Kim. We get to choose when we do it, how we do it, what kind of music we write. That's always been probably an essence of the band – that we don't compromise on how frequently we have to tour or how what we write, whether it's liked by people or not liked because we're not so dependent on it.
"But we're also getting old," he adds. "That's the other factor. We're getting old, and touring is a young person's game."
The Mark Of Cain first formed in Adelaide in 1984 as a quartet featuring Josie on guitar, Kim on bass, Gavin Atchison on drums, and Rod Archer on vocals. Though they were all hard at work curating a slow-growing audience, this line-up would not last long.
Archer left in the mid-'80s, with Josie taking on vocals, and soon, a revolving door of percussionists would sit behind the kit.
John Stanier (of Helmet, Tomahawk, and Battles fame) became their ninth drummer in 2000, and sat behind the kit for close to 13 years, before being replaced by Eli Green, who has since become their longest-tenured percussionist.
Given their history extends back over 40 years, Kim's comment about getting older isn't far from the truth, though one could hardly tell either watching them or the crowd.
"I don't move a lot, so it's not really an issue for me on stage," Kim admits with a chuckle. "Josie probably is, and the drummer's always probably the most energetic. But from looking out to the crowd, everyone's a little larger than they were in their youth, and the capacity for drinking is probably less.
"But what we are seeing is a lot of the people that have been with us for a long time show up, but they're starting to bring their kids, and we're starting to see some new people getting into the music that hadn't heard us before, which is good."
Kim also recalls one incident in Sydney when, two tours earlier, one fan had his femur broken in half after a stage-diving punter landed on him. "We almost need to do a public service announcement at the beginning of the show saying, 'You're not as young as you thought you were. Don't go back to your youth'," Kim offers.
Josie also recalls going to see the Sex Pistols perform, where current frontman Frank Carter had to stop the show because "these fucking old fucks were in the circle pit, and one of them fell over".
"Yeah, there's more bald heads in the crowd than there used to be," quips Kim.
"There were periods of time, obviously in the youth, where some people would make it all about trying to get on stage and stage diving off," explains Josie. "People are a lot more sedate these days, and they're watching to enjoy it all now. A big difference."
Though the shows might have changed, one thing that hasn't isn't is The Mark Of Cain themselves.
Earlier this year, Josie announced that after a lifetime struggling with gender dysphoria, she had decided to "embrace, rather than endure" who she really is, and identify herself as a trans woman.
"It’s been liberating to finally live as myself albeit challenging at the same time, but the happiness I feel outweighs any obstacles I’ve faced so far," she noted at the time.
Alongside the announcement, Josie also pointed out that this changed nothing about The Mark Of Cain itself, expressing that they'll continue to write, record, and perform the same kind of music as ever, though she may just "look a little more androgynous" as she does so.
Indeed, part of the band's desire to hit the road again this year was to tell their fans, supporters, and well-wishes that nothing at all had changed in the world of the band. In fact, she viewed her own news as being so inconsequential that she hadn't even thought to announce it at first.
"I always say the least interesting thing about the band is me being trans. It's just nothing else has changed," she explains."We didn't want to go out and have some people go, 'What the fuck? What just happened?' so I wanted to put it out there and, yeah, I was nervous to do it."
For the most part, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Most fans either shared messages of support, realised the importance and resonance of some of the band's lyrics over the years, or simply asked the important question regarding tour dates.
Josie admits there were "a few dickheads" who let themselves be known, but as Kim would put, "it's a good filter" for their fanbase.
"I was sort of hoping it wasn't just the heaviness of the music that people resonated with, but the lyrics," she explains. "I think if you get the lyrics, you understand the outsider's side of it. The analysis of that, and I guess the use of using military imagery as a metaphor, when you look back on it now, it was about survival, about getting through a situation, and the resilience you need to try to get through.
"I thought, 'Well, hopefully the lyrics have resonated with people,' because I don't think it changes anything much in the light that I am trans, but it also shows there's some things in the lyrics that have become more evident in regard to the the outsider imagery and that I was always writing about. [1995's] Ill At Ease, that was the statement.
"I think that the positivity was just a really nice gift from the universe that made me recognise there's been an authenticity throughout the band, and there probably is a way of interpreting some of what I've written as masculinity as a beard, and the aspects of performing or being performative when you've got another identity.
"So it does bring up a lot of those things," she explains. "But overall, we're so happy that people supported it, and that any of the dickheads were really shouted down and removed themselves actually."
One of the reasons for The Mark Of Cain touring this year is the anniversary of their This Is This… record, from 2001.
Released close to six years after their third record, 1995's Henry Rollins-produced Ill At Ease, the group entered the new millennium with a record that would become their first to enter the ARIA charts, peaking at an impressive No. 26.
It spawned a pair of singles, including Familiar Territory and [R] Retaliate, the latter of which would even peak at No. 47 on the singles chart, neatly sandwiched between Spiller's Sophie Ellis-Bextor-featuring Groovejet (If This Ain't Love) and Ellie Campbell's Don't Want You Back.
25 years later, it still holds up – a statement the band themselves agree with. "We've just had it mastered for putting it out on vinyl," Josie recalls. "Kim and I were asked to have a listen to it and I A/B'd with Spotify just to make sure it was okay, and I was like, 'Jesus, this is good.'
"I was actually thinking that the sound is excellent, the mix is great, everything's sitting right. I remembered back to doing vocals with Andy Gill, and just how I felt that there was real individuality coming through each song. When I look back on it, I'm really proud of that album."
"It was obviously the first album with Stanier having joined, so it was probably different for us to write because, previously, every other album had been road-tested significantly on the live circuit with nearly every song being played live for, at times, a year or more," Kim recalls.
"Then you go to the studio and you've really worked out what you want in the songs. Whereas this time, maybe 50 to 60% of the songs were previously in existence before Stanier joined. So there was a little bit of a slightly different approach to that album.
"And as Josie mentioned, the ones with Andy Gill were probably incomplete songs, even in the studio," he adds. "They were riffs that Josie had either brought to the table or in some cases Stanier had brought to the table that needed to be worked on. And that was where it really worked well with Andy Gill doing the work he did in the live setting."
For the Scotts, it was something of a purple patch in terms of their creativity. Throughout the '90s, the Scotts had been influenced by the likes of Helmet, then Stanier joined the group. Going back further, they'd cited Gang Of Four as an early inspiration, only for guitarist Gill to come on board to help with their fourth album.
"As 16, 17-year-old, I had a scrapbook where I kept cuttings of articles out of the NME and whatnot, which took three months to get to Australia because I'd have to go pick it up from a newsagent," Josie remembers. "The Gang Of Four were one of my favourite bands.
"I love that first album, I thought Andy Gill's guitar, I always suspected it influenced Steve Albini, and that was sort of ratified for me actually because David Yow from The Jesus Lizard said that when he was working with Andy Gill, they rang Steve Albini.
"He said, 'Hey, I'm with Andy. He's the guy that influenced your guitar sound,' and Steve agreed that was correct; [Steve] loved that metallic sound that [Andy] got," she adds. "And working with him was fantastic because he was someone I really highly regarded.
"To spend a solid month working with him in London, just absorbing it all and experiencing it was one of the highlights for me, definitely."
While there are these live shows on the horizon, and with mind paid to classic records, the elephant in the room is that of new material.
Not that anyone is counting, but it took 11 years for The Mark Of Cain to follow up This Is This…, with Songs Of The Third And Fifth arriving in 2012. 14 years have since elapsed – their longest gap to date.
In that time though, they've not been sitting on their hands. They've toured, celebrated the 30th anniversaries of 1989's Battlesick and 1995's Ill At Ease, and they've been working away behind the scenes.
Somewhat ironically, however, their sporadic existence is partly to blame for the lengthy wait for new material, but fans likely won't have to hold their breath much longer.
"One of the issues is when we start to have to play shows, practice ends up becoming being practice for shows," Josie admits. "Before that, we'd be doing fortnightly catch-ups, writing songs, and getting riffs sorted out. So we've got about seven or eight songs.
"The difference this time is Eli's also brought a few songs to the table. He's brought about three or four songs and riffs and in some cases, fully finished songs. I tend to work organically with riffs, then bring them to the band and we work it up to something.
"Eli is the new age dude with a studio and whatnot, and has been with us long enough as the longest serving drummer, that he understands and has had to unpack songs for us to learn them," she adds. "He's come along with some real fantastic songs, and we'll be playing a couple of his songs when we're out live.
"So it's been eight songs so far, we'll probably get another couple done, and then we'll be recording sometime next year. But I keep thinking it'll be the third quarter before we probably get anything out, and then a tour to follow up."
This approach to their craft is actually part of the reason why it's taken The Mark Of Cain so long to come back with a new record.
After all, it's one thing for musicians to constantly churn out songs which may be hit or miss, but the Adelaide trio operate under a shared goal of being in the right mindset to provide high class material, and not once compromising on that front.
"I've never been prolific and just write anything," Josie admits. "Part of it is a quality process, too. I'd rather take 13 years to get ten really great songs together than spend 18 months getting ten shit songs; we just would never do that.
"I can tread the same path over and over, too. I'd have to generate a little bit of living and life to feel like creating [new music]."
"I think the other part is that we had a couple of anniversaries for albums – Ill At Ease, Battlesick, etc. – so you go out and do some tours on those albums, which means you're rehearsing those songs, getting it all ready, getting match fit, going out, and playing them," Kim adds.
"You come back from the tour and you go, 'Let's have a bit of a break.' And then before you know it, that break's three months, six months, and then there's another anniversary album that comes up. So before you know it, four or five years have gone past and you haven't actually created new material because you've kind of just been touring on the old stuff.
"As you get older also, priorities change, etc.," he continues. "I think the recent discipline of us to say, 'Well, on the back of Ill At Ease, let's not drop the ball. Let's play the tour of Ill At Ease, and then we're match fit, let's come back and start writing.'"
Incidentally, any new material that arrives will be the first time that fans have had a chance to hear recorded work from The Mark Of Cain with Eli Green on drums.
It's a little ironic that their longest gap between records has also coincided with the tenure of their longest-serving drummer, but those who have seen the band live undoubtedly know Green's ferocity behind the kit, with the Scotts labelling him an excellent asset to have.
"He came in when he was about 21, and at that stage it was to help us rehearse for when Stanier was available," Josie recalls. "But that actually never eventuated and we realised that here we had a guy who was just fucking awesome, really excellent, and could work out all the song. We have some very difficult patterns and rhythmic stuff to it all that he got.
"Plus, he's a fucking awesome guy; he's just a really nice guy. One of the things that is really important when working is people understanding that you serve the band, and I think that was one of the things I always really loved about John Stanier too.
"Even if I had an idea and he had an idea, he would always defer to me and go, 'Well, look, hey, it's your band. If you want to go do what you want to do, I'll do it and do the best I can to execute that.' And I thought that was really great, because you're not working with people who will sabotage shit because you've rejected their idea or something like that.
"You're just working with people who want to make, serve the music, and serve the band," she adds. "Maybe it's a measure of maturity, maybe it's also a measure of people whose ego is intact and they're solid people. But he's just a wonderful guy, great to work with, and he has a non-jarring personality."
While that always makes it easy, part of what made Green such an asset to the group in those early days was his eagerness to serve as a contract drummer, ready to vacate the kit for when Stanier is on hand.
Given that Stanier is now effectively considered Green's predecessor, the Scotts admit there was likely some missed opportunities when it came to getting new material underway sooner.
"It has been so easy for the last year or two working with him and writing with him," Kim admits. "We should've started five, six years ago."
"I guess he just got to a point where I guess there was a comfort level and he just thought, 'Well, I'm going to throw some songs in here and see what you guys think,'" Josie remembers. "And they were fucking awesome."
Great minds clearly think alike, and while fans eagerly await The Mark Of Cain's sixth album, their forthcoming tour will be the best of both worlds – a chance to relish in the majesty of the past, while looking forward to the next chapter.
Tickets to 4ZZZ's ZED51 celebration are on sale now, and tickets to the remainder of The Mark Of Cain's upcoming Australian tour are on sale now.
The Mark Of Cain – Front Toward Audience
Saturday, October 24th – ZED51, Roma Street Parkland, Brisbane, QLD
Friday, November 13th – Max Watts, Melbourne, VIC
Saturday, November 14th – Manning Bar, Sydney, NSW
Saturday, November 21st – Hindley St. Music Hall, Adelaide, SA
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
