The Mark of Cain’s Battlesick is 30 years old and will be played at The Gov
Three decades ago Adelaide band The Mark of Cain dropped its debut album Battlesick and frontman John Scott says the record began a 30-year journey.
Confidential
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BATTLESICK took Adelaide by surprise.
It was 1989 and pub rock, while past its prime, was still a force to be reckoned with.
The Australian charts were dominated by the over-polished hair metal of Def Leppard and the even more shiny pop of Roxette.
On the city’s fringes lived a thrashy, punk underground led by the groups on the Greasy Pop label and surf bands from the southern beaches.
Then The Mark of Cain’s debut record landed and didn’t sound like any of this.
It sounded like Joy Division went to a party with Big Black.
It was dark and brooding, with lyrics that focused on war and alienation and serial killers.
The riffs were precise and brutal, with brothers John and Kim Scott creating a guitar-bass symbiosis that only blood relations could pull off.
On the cover was a David Hume Kennerly portrait of an American soldier in Vietnam, manning an M60 machine gun, crucifix dangling from his neck, head in hands.
He looked incredibly weary, as though the war had drained him completely dry. He looked battle sick.
As an album it, it was one heck of a calling card.
The Mark of Cain is here, it said, and we’re not happy.
***
Let’s wind it back a few years, though. Back to the Scott brothers’ home in suburban Clapham where their father tried to dissuade a young John Scott from joining the primary school orchestra.
“Our home was anti music, in a way,” Scott says.
“It was a very strict engineering discipline type of household. I had some musical aptitude that was discovered at school, and they said you should be in the orchestra.
“I remember being told, ‘join if you have to, but whatever you do, don’t choose violin’. I’m not sure why he said that. So I chose cello. That was my introduction to music.”
Constant renditions of God Save the Queen and simplified orchestral pieces didn’t really sell the experience to the young cellist, and he almost abandoned his musical ambitions.
Thankfully, for rock fans, Scott discovered the electric guitar in high school, right about the time that punk rock was fundamentally changing what being in a band meant.
“Suddenly you didn’t have to be good,” he says.
“You didn’t have to be Eric Clapton. Maybe you could learn two or three chords and make a band!”
A friend helped fuel the fire, supplying Scott with records by The Buzzcocks, The Sex Pistols and Magazine.
“Somehow I also fell across Jimi Hendrix – which is diametrically opposite to what The Mark of Cain ended up doing – but Hendrix was a huge thing for me,” Scott says.
“I was right into The Clash’s first album too, but by the time they got to London Calling my English teacher was listening to them and I was off them.”
After a couple of false starts Scott found himself playing in the Kingbees, a mod-influenced outfit playing raw, stripped-back rhythm and blues.
The Kingbees not only gave Scott a musical outlet, they also taught him a particular way of running a band – disciplined and tight.
The Kingbees practised three times a week, and if you stuffed up a song in rehearsal you didn’t laugh and go on to the next track – you stopped and played it again, and you kept playing it until you got it right.
They were valuable lessons that Scott would later take to The Mark of Cain.
Along with music Scott was also devouring literature, pouring over books existentialists like Albert Camus and Herman Hesse.
It was Hesse that introduced to the young reader to the concept of the mark of Cain.
“I thought that’s a great name for a band! Hesse’s interpretation was not of being someone who doesn’t fit in, and that’s how I saw punk rock and all the people I was hanging around with,” Scott says.
Those people were the punks and rockers that lived at 205 O’Connell St, North Adelaide – people that Scott had been introduced to through Harry Butler, editor of punk fanzine DNA.
“The Primevils lived there, some Bloodloss people lived there, Fear and Loathing – it was a little degenerate den of inequity,” Scott recalls.
By this stage The Mark of Cain was a going concern, with John on guitar, brother Kim on bass, Rod Archer on lead vocals and Gavin Atchison on guitar.
“Once we had a name I started thinking about how I wanted the band to look,” Scott says.
“I was into Joy Division at the time, and I’m thinking I wanted a three-piece or a four-piece, and I wanted my brother, who was into the same music, to be in it. I liked the mod/skin kind of look, didn’t like the long hair look, and I always loved bands that had a cohesive look like the Buzzcocks. I thought it was good to have a similar style – it was never mandated, but we were just into the same look.”
That look was militaristic, and it matched the brutal assault that was their live sound.
TMOC took this look and sound to the band rooms of the Royal Oak Hotel, the Queens Arms, the Aurora, the Centralian, the Tivoli and the Producers.
Some punters, Scott admits, said, “What the f… was that all about?” More often, however, they said, “I’m not sure what that was, but it was great.”
***
Battlesick was released in August of 1989 on local label Dominator Records.
The band was now a three-piece, with John Scott on vocals, and the album was filled with his tales of ordinary people overcoming adversity.
There are no love songs on Battlesick, at least not in the traditional sense.
“The lyrics were from all from the books I was reading at the time,” Scott says.
“I also had an interest in serial killers, loners, oral histories of guys in Vietnam or World War II. I was really interested in how people pushed through ridiculous situations.
“Then I had this idea of ‘battle sick’, of just being worn down by the battle. Not necessarily war, just the day to day continual battle. Of course I’ve always liked the strength and imagery of the military stuff.”
Scott admits that Battlesick isn’t as cohesive as later LPs.
“You listen to Battlesick and it’s a bit schizophrenic,” he says. “It still has the Joy Division influence, but it also has the newer influences of Big Black, Black Flag and that American hardcore sound.”
But it was good enough to grab the attention of Black Flag and Rollins Band frontman and US punk legend Henry Rollins.
So impressed was Rollins that he released the record on his own label 2.13.61 and offered to produce their next record.
“Like I heard the song Wake Up and I was like, ‘whooah’, I woke up!” Rollins is on the record saying.
“And then I heard the song Battlesick and it was all over for me, that’s just an amazing song. For me, just as a songwriter, that’s the song for which you wish you wrote the lyrics.”
The production offer didn’t happen on the next album, The Unclaimed Prize, but it did on the one after, Ill At Ease.
Packed with tracks that would become TMOC classics – First Time, LMA, The Contender, Interloper – the album thrust the band into the spotlight, and for a brief time turned that spotlight onto Adelaide itself, with a rush of signings from the City of Churches.
The country was taking notice of The Mark of Cain and their hometown.
It’s been seven years since TMOC’s last album (Songs of the Third and Fifth), so the question must be asked … is there another record in The Mark of Cain?
“I reckon there is,” Scott says. “I’m not saying it’s going to be out next year, but I think there’s one more. And that will be the full stop.”
SEE: The Mark of Cain, play Battlesick in full October 25 (sold out) and 30, The Gov.
Special guests: The Messthetics (ex-Fugazi)
TICKETS: thegov.com.au