The Mark Of Cain Celebrate The First Vinyl Release Of Breakthrough Album “Ill At Ease” By Going On Tour

In 1995, The Mark Of Cain released their breakthrough album Ill At Ease. Twenty eight years later and twenty years since its last physical release. Produced by Henry Rollins, a fan since his own band played with TMOC in 1992, and featuring the singles First Time, LMA and Tell Me plus crowd favourites Interloper, The Contender and Pointman. Ill At Ease took the bands trademark brutal bass-heavy sound and lyrical themes of isolation to new terrain as they made the leap from relative obscurity in hometown Adelaide to the main stages of legendary festivals including the Big Day Out, Brisbane’s Livid Festival and Homebake. To celebrate the release The Mark Of Cain will tour, playing the album in its entirety for the first time, across all states this November-January starting in Adelaide at Hindley Street Music Hall. Hi Fi Way spoke to John Scott about Ill At Ease and the tour.

First things first is Kim okay after the accident that he had? Some people are saying that the tour is cursed.
Well, it’s interesting because it’s not cursed, but we wouldn’t have been able to play the two earlier shows that he was down for, because I ended up with the metapneumovirus that’s going around in New South Wales and somehow got me here in Adelaide. Now our drummer Eli had it as well. I was out for two weeks. I was sick, like worse than Covid and so we wouldn’t have been able to play those first two shows anyway. Kim’s good. He has got a pelvic brace on, which is a couple of titanium rods that are drilled through his skin into his pelvis and like a Meccano on the outside. He’s having that removed and it’s like pulling an arrow out of your stomach. Two days after he said let’s rehearse on Saturday, so I think we’re already, we’re back to it.

The interest in The Mark Of Cain continues to grow, you must be stoked that these shows get bigger each tour?
Yeah, it’s weird. I can’t explain it. We get a lot of people turn up, very dedicated fans, which is great, and they bring their kids sometimes, so they’ve got that intergenerational thing going. I don’t know that we are getting lots of new fans. There must be a couple here and there, but it’s nice that our legion of fans are still out there and still going to shows. We’re all older now and I’ve always said to Kim that we won’t flog a dead horse. When we get to a point if we announce a tour and you get a hundred people want to go to see you, it’s like, yeah, probably time to finish.

Right from the outset, did you ever think that the lll At Ease album would have the impact that has and still continues to have?
I didn’t, I remember writing the songs and feeling it was strong album for me and of course we just always played for ourselves and if people like what we did, that was a bonus. I think once the gravitas of someone like Henry Rollins put a bit of focus on us too, that helped. I wonder if we’d recorded that and released it and there wasn’t an involvement whether or not it would’ve had the same amount of interest from people, but nevertheless we’re always grateful for that. Henry was an important part of the production and the production values that he brought to that when we mixed it. It’s an interesting one and it does warm the cockles of my heart if I find out that people are still enjoying that album or have just discovered it.

Do you think working with someone like Henry Rollins that the same result could have been achieved with anybody else or do you think that he brought something quite unique to the whole process that was needed for this particular album?
I think it’s a couple of things. It’s all a bit of happenstance and being in the right place at the right time. I think firstly that Rollins was very much of that, MTV in the nineties was really big and you had Triple J starting to really reach all youth. It was just a confluence of events. I was always so in awe of Rollins and Rollins Band and Black Flag to have him show interest in us, and in fact, I had Chris Haskett his guitarist had asked us before Henry that if we ever wanted someone to produce an album, he’d be happy to do it. I think that that really helped. Here’s a guy renowned for hardcore, his work ethic, no bullshit and he’s backing us. I don’t know whether the same result would’ve happened with anybody else. He did bring good production values as well and helped me feel a lot more comfortable with my voice. He had some really good ideas for not having such long intros and stuff like that into our music. So, it all worked. It was great.

How were those recording sessions, and did you know that you had such a powerful group of songs or did that not come until after the recording sessions were finished?
I think there was a couple stand out that I was really happy with. I knew it would scrub up and I think Contender really came out and surprised us. Pointman became what we’d hoped it would be. That was really good. LMA ended up being a nice little gem that was just nice in the way that recorded and particularly the tapping intro, there was a couple of overtones that came in that just made it an amazing, I can never repeat it. It was just one of those things that was captured with a little bell type sound. It was just interesting. We worked hard at fashioning those into solid pieces of work.

Do you think the nineties were some of the best times for Australian music when you look back?
Yeah, it was definitely to me that watershed moment, I think I’ve said before where you had pre-Nirvana and post Nirvana, do you know what I mean? We were around in ’88 and 89 and we were doing okay. Then was lucky in a way that I think Kim and I both went overseas and disappeared for two years because when we came back and really started playing again in ’92 a lot of people thought we were a new band. They didn’t know about our background. With the background of already having some strong songs and a strong performative basis that we could project ourselves on stage which meant that it was a new thing for a lot of people. I think that was good for us. The nineties definitely was a very important time. It was that whole grunge era and you had Big Day Out and you saw the ascent of a number of bands in Australia.

How was the process of remastering the album for vinyl?
When we decided to do it, it also gave us the opportunity, the one thing that Kim and I always had a little bit of an issue with on Ill At Ease was the snare sound was very, had a real wooden pop to it, but because it was a piccolo snare it was just the way it was and there wasn’t much we could do about it. We recorded all this stuff. I think Rollins at the time was like, oh, we’re not sure about this snare. We went with it, you know, because that was the time. There wasn’t like that ability to like say, oh, okay, let’s just swap the snare out for this sound or whatever at that time. When the opportunity came to remaster, that was one thing that it might have been Kim or it might’ve been me, but one of us said we should have a look at that snare.

What we did is we got some software expertise to look at what we could do, just not touching any of the other part of the mix. It’s Rollins’s mix, but just to give that stare a little bit more bottom. I’m really happy with it. It wasn’t too bad. Probably the most exhausting part was done by Eli, our drummer, because he does a lot of digital audio workstation work. He had whatever the software was to pull out where all the snare hits were and then again, align something that we’ve liked just to slightly mix in to that and then work out the volume of that. We all worked on that.

For the average fan do you think they’ll pick up the difference?
No, I think it was more something that was one of those little things that bother you that I’m just glad it’s been fixed. Maybe someone who’s really cognizant of everything we do might go, oh yeah, that’s changed a bit, but I think most people will think it sounds the same.

Was the 1996 live recording that goes with the vinyl package seem like the obvious choice?
I think it’s one of the few choices that we’ve got because even though we’ve done some recordings before, I think that was a good standalone recording that we had. Many times we’ve done live stuff and said, oh, let’s get a recording of it and it’s not that great, or you miss a few instruments or whatever. It was the obvious one of the time, of the nineties. It’s at a time when we were playing, we always played at peak match fit level, but that was a really good time. It encapsulates what we were doing, we were young at our peak performances are probably on that a little fast, but that’s always with a bit of that adrenaline when you get on stage you play a bit faster.

On this tour are you looking to play Ill At Ease start to end?
To be quite honest you normally get seventy percent of that album anyway when we play, but yeah, this is start from the beginning. The interesting thing is Point Man’s in the middle instead of being in the encore at the end, we’ll finish on LMA. Then of course if people want see more we’ll come out and play a couple other songs from other albums at the end.

Beyond this tour what’s next for The Mark Of Cain? New music possibly?
Possibly, I’m still writing riffs, there are riffs. I sort of walk the line of not wanting to repeat myself or repeat what we’ve done where it sounds a little the same. We do have that similar sounding thing to our stuff, but sometimes I just like to do an album of almost like music landscapes that would lend themselves to just cool tunes, they could be two minutes, three minutes long, with vocals or without vocals. Never say never and never say die. We’ve got some interesting rifts that we’ve been working on between myself, Eli and Kim and we have recorded them. They sound good. I’d like to definitely put something out. I just make no promises that’s all because every time it takes us fucking ten years to do an album, but I would love for us to get together in the new year and put some things down and see what we think. Even if we put out a little four track EP or something.

Interview by Rob Lyon

Catch The Mark Of Cain on the following dates, tickets from Feel Presents…