The
Mark Of Cain
This article originally appeared in NFH #19 in
the summer of 1990
It's a cloudy
Saturday afternoon in May and I'm walking Avenida Revolucion in Tijuana with Mark Of Cain
lead singer John Scott and his wife Christine, fevered brain cells churning to try to
figure out how I am going to get back in the US without ending up in jail with headlines
blaring "Australian Terrorists Nabbed At Border Crossing". John has already
purchased two switchblades (didn't even try to talk the price down!), has considered the
value in a set of handcuffs and a piggybank fashioned to look like a skull with a WWII
helmet on it (only threat of divorce by Christine has prevented that purchase) and is now
being offered fireworks and dynamite by another streethawker. The mind boggles.
Fortunately,
Christine and I manage to drag him into Los Amigos cafe and stuff him full of machacas,
beans, rice, and plenty of Mexican beer, and with intestines whirling and feet burning
from miles of walking he proves to be much more docile to lead out. Weaponry carefully
concealed we sneak past the ever watchful men in green and back to the safety of NFH
headquarters on the gringo side of things, where John proceeds to tell me the story of The
Mark Of Cain, yet another excellent Adelaide band. In the process, he also tells me off
the record about all the behind the scenes exploits of every other Adelaide band (so don't
mess with me or I spill my guts!). If I weren't sworn to secrecy this article would go on
for days and you'd be rolling on the floor laughing (unless, of course, you're from
Adelaide, in which case you'd be contacting your lawyer).
We'll let John tell
you about the history of the band: "About 1985, late 1985 I had an idea for a four
piece with myself on guitar, someone on bass, a drummer, and a vocalist, and we were a
four piece for nearly a year. And that was with Rod Archer from the Iron Sheiks; he used
to sing for us. He seemed the right sort of bloke to do that job of singing, except that
at the time he hadn't actually sung for a band properly before, and we had a few problems
getting that all happening, and he sort of left. We almost decided to call it quits, but
we used to do that a lot in the early days, before we got to be really
"hire-and-fire" type of guys. So we didn't hurt people's feelings we'd sort of
split up and then re-join later. I had my brother on bass, and we had numerous drummers,
tons and tons, because they just couldn't do what we wanted them to do. We had drummer
after drummer until halfway through 1986, when we got a guy called John Richert, who was
filling in for one drummer that we had who was going overseas, and John Richert ended up
being the best drummer we'd ever had. We wrote all these songs with him, and when the
other drummer came back, we just couldn't do the songs in the same way we were doing them
with John, so we went with John, and he was with us for about eighteen months before he
quit to pursue a career in directing plays and acting. It was with him that we really
started doing well in Adelaide."
The first Mark Of
Cain recording was the single "The Lords Of Summer"/"Can You See Now?"
which came out on the Sydney label Phantom; a bit odd for an Adelaide band since Greasy
Pop seems to be the starting point for so many of them. John explains: "I guess maybe
because we weren't so trendy at the time when we were looking to get on Greasy Pop, maybe
Doug knocked us back. We had Kim Horne, who does a lot of the Mice stuff, do a demo tape
with us, which in the end we didn't like, which is another story...Kim Horne is impossible
to work with. But we sent all these demos all around Australia to all the places like Mr.
Spaceman Records, Cleopatra Records and Phantom Records, and we got this note back from
Phantom from Jules who said "love it, yeah, let's do something", so we put that
one aside, didn't quite believe it, and we waited for the rest of them. But we didn't get
any other replies out of about 20 tapes we'd sent out. So we rang up Jules and said
"yeah, let's do a single", so we went and recorded two songs around January of
1988, I think. So he put that out, but it took an enormous amount of time, and a lot of
that was due to the distance between Sydney and Adelaide. We were sort of out of sight,
out of mind when we weren't talking to Jules on the phone. In fact he signed a band after
he signed us up and their single was out before ours, and they recorded it later and
everything, so we were a bit pissed off about that. And there was a number of other
things...he seemed to want a bit too much control over the product."
"John left just
as the first single came out, and he left us after that had been released. He walked off
in the middle of a show actually. I think he was under a lot of pressure to get this play
happening and we were playing this really dismal show at the Century Hotel, and I looked
around and mouthed the words to him "Isn't this really fucked?", and he thought
I was saying "Play faster!" so he threw his drumstick, and it bounced off my
brother into the audience and then John stormed off stage, and that was the end of the
show. And I said "I didn't really say what you thought I was saying", and he
said "Too bad, that's it". But then he wanted to do another show, but we decided
we wouldn't continue on with him as a drummer. So it wasn't a really good way to end, but
a lot of people enjoyed it. Then we got another guy called Neil Geiber from Septic
Sawblades. He was a thrash drummer and he really added to us. John was a self taught
drummer, and this guy, while self taught, had a bit more talent...he had a natural gift
for drums, whereas John, he was still good at it, but it was a lot harder for him to do
the fast stuff. And we had Neil for about seven months, and then varying lifestyles having
to do with certain substances (makes motions towards veins in arm), led us to ask him to
leave the band and come back when he was sorted out. We lent him some money to do that,
and he has to pay us back that money if he wants to join back in the band, and that sort
of basically meant that it would never happen."
"Following him
we tried out a young kid from Bendigo named Campbell Robinson, and he turned out to be the
best drummer we've ever had. Within two weeks he had all the songs down pat. We played
with him two weeks after he joined the band, and he's really good. He's been with us since
December 1988."
"In the old days
we had to advertise and I had to go searching out drummers and approaching people and
saying do you want to drum for us, but by this time we had four drummers that immediately
when Neil was gone rang me up and said, "look, I want to play drums for you". We
had Jackie from Where's The Pope wanting to play, and guys from other bands...Life After
Reagan and guys who hadn't been in bands for a while but wanted to do it. So we just did
an audition; this was when we'd gotten to a hire and fire stage. We decided if we wanted
to get what we wanted we'd have to be real assholes about it. So we made up tapes of the
songs and gave it to them and said "learn these for two weeks and then come in and
we'll practice for a week with you", like three nights out of a week, and then we
went on to the next drummer. So that took a month, and Campbell was the last guy we tried,
and he was the best. Jeff from Life After Reagan was pretty good, but he'd been on the
music scene as long as we had, and we thought getting Campbell we were gaining the
enthusiasm that a young guy gets. Me and Kim were at that stage 26 and 24, and here's
Campbell who's like 18, and it was like injecting young blood in the band. This was his
first real band; he'd played in a band called Systematic Death, one of these hardcore
bands, and they used to have to pick up his drum kit in their car and had got as sick of
it as I got eventually. He'd lost his license...one of those usual things."
"So while this
Phantom thing was going on, these two brothers Aaron and Kelly Hewson who'd been playing
in bands for ages in Adelaide decided that they wanted to start their own label. And it
was sort of an answer to Greasy Pop, which was not fulfilling the Adelaide market...what
we thought were the bands that should be on it. We felt...when I say we, I mean the people
associated with Dominator...that Greasy Pop was being a little bit too selective. So Aaron
and Kelly got Dominator Records going and did a compilation album called Are We Still
Here, which had a very broad selection of Adelaide bands and which I think is probably
a better sampler than the Oasis samplers."
"And they asked
us if we wanted to do an album with them. We'd already been asked by Jules at Phantom and
we had to really weigh this up...do we go with Phantom who are going to get the best
distribution and all that, or do we go with Dominator who are home grown and don't have
the distribution, but at least we've got all that control and it's in our hometown, so we
decided we'd do that. So it was a bit of a backward step, but at the same time we felt
that it was the best thing for us. Jules was a bit upset that he'd invested a single in
us, which was an investment that he'd made and probably lost money on hoping that when we
put out an album it was going to sell more, so we probably pissed him off."
"But Dominator
answered all our needs. We went with them and it all worked out in the long run, because
they're getting better distribution all the time and they're starting to get licensing
deals overseas."
Although Dominator
has a reputation of being Adelaide's hardcore label, and although John's tastes tend to
run towards hardcore, he says he doesn't want to play that sort of music himself because
he wants something more challenging as far as song structures go. He also has an outlet
for his thrashier tendencies in serving as the drummer for Harry Butler's band Fear And
Loathing, who make occasional forays into that sort of thing. I hadn't realized that he
moonlighted in FAL before, so I asked him about the seeming inconsistency of playing in a
serious band like Mark Of Cain and then in a silly one like Fear And Loathing.
"Well",
says John, "When I joined I used to say "Well, what's all this sort of bum
humor?" There's a lot of bum humor all the time in it...I used to think there was
some sort of homophobic elements in the band, but it was always fun with those guys."
John is pretty
gung-ho about Dominator in general with good words for all their bands, like Hoot McKloot,
Hot Tomatoes, Order Of Decay or the Scumbags. He feels that while Greasy Pop has been very
good for getting one side of Adelaide heard, it has stifled these other bands because they
haven't had an outlet. He takes particular exception to comments that Liz Dealy made in
the last Noise For Heroes to the effect that Dominator bands tend to be composed of the
same few people re-arranged in different lineups to form all the different bands, and to
back up his contention he runs me through the lineups of all these bands. He finishes with
the comment: "I mean, I don't want to get in a slagging match, but Greasy Pop have
got a lot to answer for." Hopefully this sort of rivalry can be made a positive
thing, since when one guy runs a label, it's unfair to expect him to devote his limited
energies into music other than what he's really interested in, and both Dominator and
Greasy Pop deserve credit for doing what they can to support the music they like.
Prior to The Mark Of
Cain, John had played in bands doing various punk and mod covers around Adelaide. He had
started playing guitar when the Pistols first came out, and as a result, he learned by
playing to the odd mix of Hendrix records and Pistols tunes. In school he didn't fit in
with the punks or skinheads, and he had some friends who were sort of mods and rode
scooters, and he rode a scooter, too, so he sort of naturally fell in with them. He found
himself playing guitar in an r'n'b band called the Vents. This lasted for about a year and
a half, and then after some group changes they began to do a "punk jukebox" sort
of thing. The songs Mark chose to play were Joy Division and Echo And The Bunnymen songs,
and those were the first songs that he sang live for. Shortly thereafter he was sacked
because he "didn't like the Stranglers very much, and they all did, and they all
smoked a lot of dope, and I didn't. The usual sort of thing."
After some fitful
starts at new bands the Mark Of Cain emerged, inspired by a mix of Joy Division and a
variety of books that John was reading at the time. "All this stuff that I was
reading, because I just didn't feel like I fit in very well, even in the scene I always
felt just outside of it, and that's how my brother felt, which is why we liked Joy
Division, because it had that alienation side of it. And we felt if we were going to play
something it was just natural for us to go for a music that we felt moved by; to try and
achieve that same amount of emotion ourselves. Like when I listen to a Joy Division song I
get goosebumps, and I wanted to play music that gave me goosebumps, my own music."
"In the first
year it was very heavily Joy Division influenced. I think we were still learning to play
and we didn't play a lot because we still had a lot of problems with drummers, and when we
did some people liked us and some people didn't. We were at a time when it was all
"play fast", and that's all anyone ever said to us was "play faster".
About the time John Richert moved into the band...he was also influenced from that area -
Joy Division - but when he joined the band it became the Mark Of Cain. There was obviously
that derivative flavor there, but it was still our own music. We started playing and
people started coming to see us a lot, and we supported Big Black in 1987 in their last
tour of Australia and following that, two weeks later we played at the Royal Oak, which
was this little hotel that we always played at and we'd make maybe $70 a night, and the
next week it was packed, and after that most shows we played were packed, and it was as if
playing with Big Black allowed us to play to a broader audience and all of a sudden a
whole lot of people were coming to see us. It just seemed to take off from there, and it's
gotten better and better. The last time we played was like a week ago tonight, and we
pulled 350 to 400 people...we have a very good reputation in Australia."
While we're talking I
play a tape of The Mark Of Cain's solid first lp, Battlesick, which can presently
only be had on Dominator Records out of Adelaide. That should change soon, as John has
just found out that Normal in Germany want to license both Battlesick and their new
lp Fire In The Hole. John listens with animation, and points out that the songs on Battlesick
represent four years worth of material, and comments on the differences between the early
Mark Of Cain material, which is uncannily like Joy Division, and the more recent songs,
which have a harder and more aggressive feel to them. The new lp is all in the tougher
style, and is equally good.
John seems a fairly
positive sort of guy, so I wondered about the depression that seems so evident in all the
material on Battlesick. He replies: "That was the result of four years of
playing all put onto a record, a lot of those are from personal experience. The lyrics are
from how I felt at particular times during my life. But in the past few years I've started
writing characterization type things where I take a portion of myself and put it into a
character and try to write it that way. Because, for one, when I really felt fucked up and
I wrote a lot of those songs, and then to sing them you get back into that fucked up state
of mind, and it's not good to keep on going over those bad times in your life. You write
about it, and to sing it and make it emotional you want to get back into that mental
state, but that acting side of it is a little bit too much sometimes. It used to be that
it was a bit of a catharsis, if you like, that I'd go and sing and feel a lot better for
having done it, but in the last few years going back and singing those old songs about
times that weren't very good times for me, it's almost like it makes me feel worse. The
songs I've been writing now have been still personal, but maybe not always related to
me."
At this point I
commented that he seemed like a pretty upbeat sort of person to be writing this dark
stuff. Christine rolls her eyes at that characterization and John laughs: "I think
that has to do with what armor you arm yourself with. I mean I feel fairly deeply in life
and that, but you just get going and you've got to drive yourself, and there's no point in
getting too bogged down in things. But I don't tend to write when I'm feeling happy. I
never write songs when I feel happy because when I feel happy I feel like going out and
enjoying myself. The only times I feel like writing is when I'm feeling like shit and
locked in the house...I'll feel depressed, so what am I going to do? Well I'll write. And
I think that probably comes from the Joy Division element as well. I mean, I don't like to
be negative, I like to be positive, but in a negative way, so you feel down, but you've
gotta motivate yourself. To some extent I'm fairly happy go lucky in a lot of ways, but in
other ways I get my depressions the same as anybody else, but I don't like to inflict them
on other people. (laughter as Christine grimaces) Obviously that depends...when you know
someone really well. But the last thing that I'd like to do if I was feeling really
depressed is go to someone's house and sit in a depression, because that affects them. I
don't like people to do that to me, so I guess it's just a usual thing."
Battlesick
will get new cover artwork as Normal felt uncomfortable about the imagery of a US soldier
in combat on the Australian release. John is unconcerned with this change...he says at one
point that his original idea for the jacket was a housewife sitting on her vacuum cleaner
anyway. The Normal deal is part of John's rather complex plans for the next 18 months. The
company he works for (totally unrelated to music) has offered him a position working in
Israel for a year and a half in which he is essentially able to bank his salary, and the
deal with Normal means that he can probably tour in Europe easily, so he hopes to be able
to set up a tour for six weeks or so once the records have come out. The plan is to have
his brother Kim and drummer Campbell fly to Israel for a couple weeks rehearsal, and then
head off on tour. John's optimistic about everything working out, and he's unconcerned if
Australia forgets the Mark Of Cain while he's abroad, feeling that sometimes it's better
when a band doesn't wait until it's in a decline to quit. "Lots of bands that I
really like, they keep on going and then they stop, and I wish they didn't, but at the
same time I realize that maybe if they kept going they'd get into a slump, and you start
getting disappointed."
Well, for the Mark Of
Cain, they've hardly gotten to the point where anybody knows about them enough to get
disappointed, so here's hoping they give it enough time for that to happen.
