The Mark Of Cain ProfileIt's been eleven years since the last record from The Mark Of Cain and frontman John Scott blames himself for the long hiatus.
In a recent interview, the band's creative lynchpin said it wasn't just fellow bandmate John Stainer's other commitments (he's played in Battles and Tomahawk for years) that caused the delay.
“It was intensive from the point of view of when we first recorded it, which was like 'Bang, bang, bang – let's get everything down', because John Stanier was here; he'd just done the Big Day Out with Battles, so it was, like, 'Let's get this thing done'.”
“But I keep telling people to blame me for the time it took – I was struggling a bit to get in there all the time, I was working and I had a bit of a meltdown too. I was getting over a bad breakup and selling my house, and you just struggle sometimes to have the energy to go in and record guitars and mix and listen to how it's all going. But I sort of hung onto it in the end – it was a little bit like a lifebuoy, it was the one thing I could look forward to. But it did take a while, and a lot of that was definitely me trying to manage work, getting home to manage family, manage all of the shit that was going on and then also going in at night time to work on it.”
If anything, Scott admits Stainer's influence on the creation of Songs Of The Third And Fifth was greater than ever, despite his other musical responsibilities.
“John Stanier came to us liking the early stuff like [1989 debut] Battlesick and The Unclaimed Prize (1990) – he often used to say how he just loved the feel of those albums,” he tells. “He'd also remind us not to ignore that, because we'd gone from back in the day where it was more obvious where the influences were from, [to a point where] it was more of a riff-a-rama. I knew myself that I didn't want to be writing another riff-a-rama album, something the same. It's two-sided – when a band does something that's the same as their last album, you're, like, 'Oh well, maybe it should have been a double-album release last time; nothing's changed' – but I still wanted it to be us.
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