"We used to really like Devo's first album, and the whole thing about 'You should live in Akron, it's such a hole.' We thought 'Oh dear' and then we looked around us and thought, 'Christ, they should live in Cardiff.'"

The Grass Roots coffee bar was a social advice center in Cardiff with a practice room for bands. People too young to go to bars could go there and catch a load of music you couldn't get at the regular venues in Cardiff. The Young Marble Giants first played there to an audience of one, and the following time to seven. "Most of them walked out," recalls Stuart Moxham, "'cos our music just wasn't accepted."

By December last year, the band had almost discarded the idea of success, when Rough Trade, the distributors of the Cardiff compilation LP Is The War Over? (to which the Young Marble Giants had contributed two tracks), approached them with an enviable proposition.

"They offered us anything we wanted on the strength of those two tracks," says Stuart. "We chose to do an album 'cos we had enough material and we thought that if we did an LP on Rough Trade straight away, then they must have a lot of faith in us."

The result of this mutual trust is Colossal Youth, the freshest and most innovative album this year, and the subsequent single, "Final Day." Stuart's brother Philip works his bass around the hollow click of a drum machine, while Stuart adds clipped guitar or simple, tuneful organ notes. Alison Statton's vocals are delivered equally simply and so clearly that she might be reciting poetry at school. The music is precise, unadorned and quiet.

The subject of Cardiff is one about which YMG have especially strong views. "There's this tremendous apathy there. The shop across from where we used to live sold one copy of our album, and the compilation LP sold about a hundred in the whole of Cardiff. We were desperate to break out, but when you've lived there all your life it seems impossible to do." How did this affect the music? "We made it as extreme as we could."

it also made them considerably introverted to the pressures of performing, and this lack of confidence used to hamper their live appearances. "We're only just starting to realise, especially since we went to Europe in June, that people have actually done the ultimate thing. that is to put their money on the table to buy our record...and they actually like it.

"Before we went to Europe, we were told we sold 8,000 records. We were very pleased and everything, but it doesn't really mean anything, it's just a figure. Then when you go over there and all these strange come up to you and say 'this is the beat record I've heard for years,' you start to realize that they've been at home listening to it, and that it means something to them."

"The music exactly expresses the relationship between the three of us and as individuals," continues Stuart. "It's a very pure representation of us, but we've changed from that so that we can't help but be different in the future."

"What's happened basically is we've had traumatic experiences the whole time we've been together. The latest one is that the whole structure that produced the LP has been broken down, and so now all the control, all the power struggle that's going on has completely dissolved. It's much freer."

The album was recorded in only three and a half days at Foel Studios in Wales -- a very short time in which to produce such a precise piece of music. "One of the criteria when we wrote the music," says Stuart, "was that we should sound like a record when we play live. So we just went in the studio and knocked it out. Most of them were first takes.

"I'd write a riff, and I'd say to Phil 'do you like this?' 'cos it really got to my guts straight away, and if it got to his gut straight away he'd say 'yeah' and work on it. There are lots of songs that I've written with riffs that just didn't get to you straight away, so we'd work on them for a while. Then we realised that if we had to work on something for awhile, it wasn't immediate and so it wasn't any good, and we'd leave it out. We could easily have done it, but it would just be album tracks."

"A lot of the lyrics are about exercising myself," he continues energetically, "my feelings about my relationship with my girlfriend. I'm also really into the English language and words, so often it's just mucking around with words. It's mostly very personal. John Lennon said that you could always tell which songs he'd written and which ones Paul had written for the Beatles, 'cos Paul wrote about made-up people and made-up situations. I don't write contrived things like that, writing about Mr. Nobody.

"I think Alison can relate to them really well. In retrospect, though, it is frustrating not to sing the things. I'm not writing songs 'cos I want to be a musician, I'm writing them 'cos that's the only way I've got to express myself."

Stuart admits that this is the only obstacle in the future, though his position as vocalist in his new group, the Gist, should reduce the gravity of the problem. A single, "This Is Love," will be out in September and is Stuart's first experiment with "testcard music," the muzak on British TV before programming starts. Testcard music?

"It really is good music," replies Alison earnestly. "You tend to ignore it because it's background music." Stuart explains in more detail: "What happened was that Alison was III for a while when we were writing all our music stuff in Cardiff, and so Philip and I wrote some instrumentals. Instead of crediting them to YMG, we decided to do it as a testcard EP under the name of the Gist.

"As far as the Young Marble Giants are concerned, we're carrying on doing gigs, going to America soon, and we'll just see what happens. We don't want to disband or anything, but at the same time YMG is that album and that single and the fact that we were in Cardiff. That was the motivation for it all. Everything has really changed for all of us and we've all really changed as people. So we couldn't make that LP again, we couldn't do the same music."

This summer Stuart stayed In London to concentrate on the Gist, while Philip was on a farm in a remote part of Wales. Each goes his own way, yet the Young Marble Giants will continue to create music of considerable strength -- in whatever form it takes -- as long as they maintain this structure. "When we were recording in the studio," says Stuart, "we went to this place in mid-Wales and when we were finished doing all the mixes, we turned all the lights out and listened to it really loud. It was all I could do to stop crying." Now it's your turn.