In celebration of the The Killer Is Within, The Mark Of Cain’s 1995 ‘CD mini-album’ release, frontman John Scott, in his usual articulate manner, talks us through how that final release for Dominator records came about.
Hindsight was written around 1992/93, I’m guessing. I’m not totally sure how this song came about to be honest. When I came back from working in the Middle East in late 1992 I had a tape of riff ideas I’d recorded onto an Akai 4 Track, and I think this may have been one of the song ideas.
I recall I wanted a song that was slow and had a real chugga chugga foreboding effect to it. This might have been one of the songs that germinated pretty quickly from an initial riff to a more concrete song – which sometimes happened. It was probably developed at the cellar beneath an antique shop in Port Adelaide. That’s where Interloper and The Contender and a lot of those songs were developed. That was Kim, me and Aaron. Sometimes it’d just be me and Aaron rehearsing for some reason. I can remember developing Interloper that way. Anyway, Hindsight had a lot of parts to it, starting with the guitar intro, drums, then Kim does a really nice bass slide and we all join in to start the song proper.
I had the lyrics already – they were partly influenced by the Jim Thompson novel, The Killer Inside Me, about a small town sheriff who is actually a cold blooded killer and of course no one suspects him. The lyrics deal with addiction and corruption, “and to say there were no signs in the city that could purge the sickness from my skin, is a lie, a fantasy”, is about the internally denying there could be any help available, that you are somehow on a set course. The line “Responsibility’s a burden to bear and a promise so hard to keep”, is pretty obvious I think, about letting people down, about letting yourself down.
The version of Hindsight on the EP The Killer is Within, was recorded at Mixmasters Studio by Mick Wordly in Adelaide. We were looking at recording songs at a few different Adelaide studios to see where we wanted to record Ill At Ease. We later re-recorded a version of Hindsight that appears on IAE at Tony Nesci’s studio with Rollins producing. The EP also has an earlier version of Tell Me on it, recorded at Big Sound Studio, also in Adelaide (Darren McBain and Dave Lokan), a version which is actually my favourite of the two, the other being on IAE. The other songs are live versions recorded at the Great Britain Hotel in Melbourne by Roger Esnouf. There were Drive On, Battlesick, Details and Attrition all from different albums and a good representation of us at the time.
Dominator Records released the EP. We also had a film clip for Hindsight as well, which was put together out of extra footage Kristian Moliere had left over from his short film Cold Comfort. The noir representation of two white collar criminals driving through the bush and hitting a tramp, and then subsequently murdering him to cover their tracks, was just the type of look and feel we wanted.
One thing we often noticed when we played this song live is that often a fight would break out in the audience. It was some weird kind of magik shamanic vibe that made guys want to punch each other out. It doesn’t happen so much these days, I think due to the fact the audience is now older and just want to chill. That’s fine by us by the way.