ABOUT 3 o'clock on Thursday afternoon, Philip and Stuart Moxham return from a recording session in North Wales. Their car, on loan from their mum, had broken down, leaving them stranded for two days.

Now they sit in the shabby front room of a small rented house that Philip shares in Adamstown, one of Cardiff's poorer areas, drinking tea and catching up on the week's music papers.

"It says here you're the future of rock 'n roll, Alison." Philip sounds a mite surprised but very pleased. Alison Statton shrugs and looks bemused. Not long ago, the Future of Rock 'n RoII was working as a dental nurse in Cardiff's Heath Hospital.

Alison is 21 but she looks younger, thanks to her simple print dress, her dazzling white plimsoles and ankle-socks, and the auburn hair she wears in a fringe and ponytail. She's been described in the press as "wholesome" and "fragile" and like a country girl raised on Girl Guide rambles who's unprepared for city life. I ask her how she feels about these graphic assumptions.

"I don't know where they got that from," she gives a puzzled smile. "I've lived in the city all my life -- and never been in the Girl Guides!"

Philip is sitting on the floor beside her. "I think it just comes from physical appearance." he suggests.

Alison frowns. "I dunno. l suppose I'm sort of fairly quiet."

Over by the window, Stuart Moxham joins in. "You do look incredibly neat and clean and things, don't you?"

"Mmm," Alison remains dubious as she lights a cigarette. She may look "wholesome" but she's' practically a chain-smoker.

Stuart laughs. "Phil looks like an Oxfam advert. He doesn't just buy Oxfam clothes, he has that starving image."

Philip, tall, gangly, gentle, grins back at his brother. "Yeah, they should call it Moxfam."

For the Young Marble Giants, the last few months have unfolded like a fairy-tale, shooting them from provincial obscurity to sudden fame via their debut album, Colossal Youth. Things happened so fast that, for now, they're still signing on and still rehearsing in Philip's front room.

As in all good fairy-tales, they were saved from the very brink of despair and frustration.

"We gave ourselves three months," says Stuart. "If we hadn't got anywhere by Xmas, we were going to disband."

Instead, the band found themselves with Rough Trade and working on Colossal Youth. The album, recorded in Foal Studios in North Wales, was finished in only five days but it's as refreshing and complete a debut as we're likely to hear all year; the strange tales of three people and their drum-machine. Fragments of melody float across dark spaces and softly clicking rhythm. Their effect is almost magical, utterly refreshing.

And yet it's a very basic, simple pop. Alison's cool, clear vocals are the icing beneath which Philip's bass scuttles crablike around rhythmic figures or rings out, tangy and plaintive, on lead while Stuart supplies steady chuka chuka guitar or smudgy peals on his extra-cheapo '60s Italian organ.

It's all so deft, so quiet, so telling: while the lyrics vary from delicate heartbreak tales like 'Brand-New-Life,' jokey surrealism as on 'Choci Loni,' the random images of 'N.l.T.A.' or the sardonic protest of 'Credit In The Straight World.'

An all-round success. And -- with those rave reviews and nearly 8,000 copies sold in less than two months -- you'd think the band would allow themselves an iota of satisfaction.

I'm disappointed that we didn't go far enough,' Stuart frowns in concern. "There aren't enough weird sounds, it's very straightforward and smooth. We'd like to sound a bit rougher, like a European station on the radio at night."

I raise my eyebrows at this, appreciating the clarity of Colossal Youth, but I'm more taken aback when Stuart and Philip reveal the nature of their latest recording session. One of Stuart's projects is a solo EP of "testcard music."

"Six instrumentals that are totally inspired by, and totally imitate, the music you get with testcards on television," he explains. At 25, Stuart is the eldest Giant and by far the most loquacious. He's lived in Berlin, and generally has a little more savior faire than the others. He also writes most of the songs.

Just now I'm staring at him in horror. But why, I demand, do you want to imitate testcard music?

He laughs. "We think it's great. Any kind of ambient music just isn't listened to seriously but It has a lot of merits. We've been influenced by testcard music, by nursery rhymes, by popular classical music -- all that light, fringe stuff.

"The sound of those great big cinema organs, fairground music" -- Stuart is getting quite carried away -- "I don't listen to it as much as, say, Radio One but I enjoy it a lot more."

Due first, though, is a Moxham brothers single, 'This Is Love,' with Stuart singing, under the name of The Gist. As with YMG lovesongs, it's very minimal, very romantic and very haunting. But that's another story.

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THE Young Marble Giants story begins several years ago when Stuart Moxham had a friend who had a guitar. "He could play about four chords and I was really flashed out by that."

Stuart learned to play and urged on Philip, who later switched to bass. Alison, meanwhile, began singing in makeshift bands with school friends, never playing real gigs but performing in front-rooms and garages.

The three came together in a band called True Wheel which soon fell apart and, after various personnel shuffles and changes, Young Marble Giants took shape.

"It was, like, our ultimate band," says Stuart, "our first and last chance to play only the music we liked. If it didn't work, we were really fucked. We knew we'd have to go back to shitty jobs."

In 1979, looking for gigs, the new Young Marble Giants found Cardiff a desolate provincial wasteland. An unknown band playing their own, unusual brand of music -- distilled from a ragbag of influences from Booker T to Kraftwerk, Duane Eddy to Eno -- were not exactly welcome in the tiny circuit of Top-40 and Disco clubs. There was just one suitable venue -- another local band, Reptile Ranch, had started gigs at a coffee bar called Grass Roots and it was here that YMG played their handful of live sets.

"We'd be playing to about 20 people," says Stuart. "And most of them would walk out 'cause our music wasn't fashionable. We were so quiet, people didn't know what to make of us."

Grass Roots was repeatedly vandalised and, finally, closed down. But before it did, Reptile Ranch organised a Cardiff compilation album, Is The War Over?, and it was this record which brought YMG to the notice of Rough Trade, who promptly offered them the chance to record their own album.

"We were amazed at their attitude," Stuart still sounds a little incredulous. "I mean, we were so desperate and naive we'd probably have signed anything." His laugh is half-elation, half-relief.

Later, he confides that at first the bend felt a little paranoid that Rough Trade "were laughing up their sleeves at us, 'cause we couldn't understand why they liked us. I mean, we're not really into that new music and most of their bands I'd never heard of."

He smiles at the memory, then leans towards me. "Actually, one of my ambitions now is for Young Marble Giants to be the first Rough Trade band to get a, Radio One Record of The Week. I mean. we may use avant-garde sort of styles and sounds but we use them in a pop way; we try to be accessible. I think our stuff is pretty commercial, really."

As the band have mentioned that a major aim is to make a living from their music, I ask if this means they may leave Rough Trade for a major label. To ensure financial survival?

"No, not just to survive," replies AIison. "If we wanted to be millionaires, perhaps we'd consider it, but..." she dismisses untold wealth with a shrug of her shoulders.

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CARDIFF Art College is a typical dribble of glass end concrete blocks. Tonight, the Young Marble Giants are playing their first hometown gig in nine months. Several weeks ago, they tried to get a gig at the college and were rejected because they didn't have a "name."

Now it's different. Along he corridor that leads to the canteen-cum-dancehall, a few tatty posters, to which YMG press-cuttings have been hastily Sellotaped, advertise the night's entertainment. Alison Statton, on her way to the soundcheck, eyes them with dismay.

"They're making such a big thing of this," she says, utterly serious, "it's bound to be a disaster."

She's nearly right. Technical hitches, a poor PA and cack-handed mixing all but ruin the sound. For most of the set, the band can't even hear their own drum machine. Afterwards they sit around looking drained and depressed while stewards clean up the dance floor tossing piles of empty beer-cans into large cardboard boxes and shouting drunken jibes at each other -- "live sex on stage" -- in a pissed attempt at at smaIltown wit.

Alison Statton surveys the debris through unhappy eyes. "That was our worst-ever gig," she murmurs. "I feel terrible."

The Young Marble Giants have had little live experience. Apart from their occasional Cardiff gigs, four in London is their sum total. Onstage, they're extremely static and a little po-faced. Alison sings with her hands in her pockets while the Moxham brothers loom gauntly on either side of her, each with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

The effect is a cross between the casual and the terrified.

"We don't move because we're so scared," explains Alison.

Stuart embellishes a little. "As well as that, it isn't particularly dance music, it is minimal. I think we're quite English in a way, very restrained.

"But some of our songs, like "Choci Loni," are quite funny, and people don't seem to realise--"

"It's probably the way I sing them," mutters Alison.

"-- but if they'd all stand around and laugh, we'd be delighted." concludes Stuart.

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AFTER the gig, Philip Moxham and I are waiting in a dingy lndian take-away down a Cardiff backstreet. Philip is the tallest, quietest and -- at 19 -- the youngest Marble Giant.

He's also the band's emotional pivot. He and Stuart are brothers; he and Alison go out together. Band relations seem perfectly amicable. ln the 24 hours I'm with them, the nearest they get to a cross word is when Alison and Philip stick out their tongues at each other.

As we wait for our chaipati and chips, Philip tells me that he's leaving Cardiff. "I'd really Iike to rent a cottage in North Wales for awhile." he murmurs. "Go and do something on my own."

But what about the band? I ask.

Philip smiles shyly. "Well, I've got the opportunity now. As for the band...we'll see what happens," he shrugs as if to intimate that things will turn out alright.

But with Stuart already moving to London, won't there be problems? When I mention this to the band, Stuart consigns YMG to the scrapheap.

"Maybe we won't exist in three months," he declares earnestly. "We may all be doing other things, but I think we have to move on. l'd hate to get stuck in a rut."

One album and a handful of gigs are hardly a rut, I protest.

"Well, it is a dilemma," concedes Stuart. "I suppose it depends on how well we get on with each other. But we may all go our different ways."

"We have to treat ourselves as individuals," adds Alison. "It doesn't work, thinking that the band's got to be in the same place instead of thinking where you went to live. We tried that and it really got on top of us."

"Yeah, we were all living in the same house for awhile." sighs Stuart. "I almost cracked up.

So the Young Marble Giants have no plans beyond a brief European tour in June and the imminent release of their debut single. It's a 4-track which I find slightly disappointing. Only "Final Day" with its sinuous organ line, nursery rhyme tune and chill nuclear holocaust lyric can match the-best of Colossal Youth.

Still, the single does reveal the source of the band's extraordinary name. It comes from the picture of a statue they saw in a book of classical sculpture: the reference read: "Young marble giants greeted the sailor from Cape Sounion as he entered the home stretch to Athens."

It fits perfectly. I can't think of a nicer album to come home to than Colossal Youth.