Begin near the end, in the Jazz Café, Camden Town, October 1994; enter, past the spiffy patrons, past the eggshell walls lit blue from below, a sort of chamber orchestra – violins, congas, clarinet, electric piano, sax; pale, lanky classical-inclined guitarist with his back to us; last, stock-still at front and center, is Alison Statton. "Tell me the story," she begins, "of a happy life…" The song is one of the duo’s most delicate – they write as a duo, Alison Statton and Spike, the lanky man – and what these people are about is how pop songs can create, for a few minutes each, their own modest happy life. Statton’s voice and Spike’s arrangements do not project a personality, but present a situation, cleanly, self-effacingly, and self-effacement of restricting a violin line to three notes or a vocal note to five, turns out to be the personality whose aspects we deduce while it hides.

Begin again in Cardiff, in 1978, with guitarist Stuart Moxham and his brother Phil. From distant echoes of London punk they learned that anyone could make a record; they wanted to do it quietly and didn’t care for the sound of punk. Phil brought in Alison to sing; the three Young Marble Giants get a primitive drum machine and play backstairs cafes. They sold a tape of their songs in local shops; an innovation. "Mono cassette recorders were only just available in the late ‘70s; recording was a question of finding an old reel-to-reel in a junk shop and borrowed tape," explains Stuart. Alison’s singing before 1981 has a warm amateurism, a learn-by-doing quality; she’s so unaffected because she has to be. "When I started out I was singing but I wasn’t a singer," she says. "I got more aware of what my voice can do."

Statton and the Moxhams were about to split up when Rough Trade heard and signed them; the cassette tunes became Colossal Youth. YMG’s combination of one effects-pedal-less guitar line, a politely nonlinear bass, syncopated click-talk from the drum machine, and intelligent everyday lyrics placed pop in the living room, an affair of individuals and not of crowds. The LP deployed these sounds across topics from lost love to Cardiff café culture to eating breakfast while watching crowds fill the morning street. The "Final Day" single put these small pleasures into the context of nuclear war; the lyrics list what will happen for the last time the day before the clouds rise, and the whole song rides a taut guitar riff as fragile as urban life itself may be.

In 1981 Stuart and Phil did an all-instrumental EP, six two-minute tunes supposedly meant for BBC testcards. Then Stuart renamed himself The Gist, a name which expanded to include whatever friends he chose to play out with. One of the odder Gist gigs was a rock festival in Portugal, where Colossal Youth had gone top 10, and where one of the supporting bands was an obscure Dublin act called U2. The Gist in the studio did three singles and an uneven album – Embrace The Herd – of minimalist experiments, some of which rose to a confected, miniature, artificial beauty, like those contraptions that fly to the moon in childrens’ books: low-tech cocktail music for delighted intellectuals, with whispers behind it that could well be rumors of war.

Meanwhile Alison, her Cardiff friend Spike, and Simon Booth started making eclectic, cabaret-influenced music as Weekend. "There were a lot of musicians involved, and they all had their influences," Alison explains. The influences flowered on La Variete, their LP, where "Woman’s Eyes" and "Leaves of Spring" are pop songs with more plotlines and less violence than any Jane Austen book. "La Variete," the sleeve said, was "the French term for everything that’s not heavy rock, music drawing on diversity and depth." Their "diversity" started out jazzy (but not "jazz") and lushly pretty, but the late Live at Ronnie Scott’s EP recorded a band overgrown, sax and singing and bass staggering languidly in opposite directions.

Rough Trade abandoned the pop avant-garde when it signed the Smiths in 1983, and the ex-Giants abandoned music. Stuart worked as an animator, helping draw Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Alison moved back to Cardiff, taught t’ai chi, and trained to be a chiropractor. Then ex-punk guitarist Ian Devine asked her to return to pop. "He did most of the writing," Alison says, on their two albums, of which the first, The Prince of Wales, is a satisfying melange of lengthy acoustic riffs and lyrical wit. The U.S. college radio hit was a folky cover of "Bizarre Love Triangle," but the best song was a catchy plea for Welsh cultural autonomy, "Turn The Aerials Away From England." Is there anything specifically Welsh about the earlier records? Stuart, who now lives in Hertfordshire, denies it: "What we did (in YMG) could have come from anywhere that was fairly isolated, really," he says.

Now all the ex-Young Marbles are back on musical tracks. Alison: "Spike and I have always been in touch, we’ve remained friends. And somehow we just ended up talking about playing again. Weekend in Wales was done in a weekend…just jamming and writing it, and then a weekend recording it." That EP combines Matisse-style sketchiness with swaying nods to pre-rock pop; the title suggests that Alison and Spike are trying to pick up where Weekend left off. But the new stuff is more focused; there is a spare sureness to the riffing on "A Greater Notion" that Weekend never reached. The vocals hold a new and careful self-confidence; she is picking her way across a long line of slick rocks at high tide, but she knows she can do it. Tidal Blues adds a larger band (Andrew Moxham on drums) and 10 other compactly excellent songs. "Mr. Morgan" clicks and coalesces around an organ line, resurrecting the Young Marbles’ sound, and is so good it merits a national holiday in its honour. Alison Statton and Spike at the Jazz Café played one YMG song, "Salad Days," as a kind of dirge – with two violins, no guitars – as if to lay the old songs gently in their grave.

Stuart’s first release in 10 years was the eclectic, low-key Signal Path. Half the songs slide in and out of calypso and reggae conventions, and a few harder-edged tunes bring the conversational feel of the Young Marbles into Stuart’s baritone voice. (Another CD, Random Rules, is now out in the U.S.) The orignal "innovator" and the chief songwriter in YMG, Stuart has kept innovating, trying not to stick to one style. Assembling three forthcoming CDs, he says, "I’m choosing from a vast range of materials over a number of years," a backlog of 80 to 90 unreleased songs dating from 1977 to last week. The next record, Cars in the Grass – a live-in-the-studio band project with Spike and all three Moxhams – should be out in January 1995. If it includes repertoire from Stuart’s brief U.S. tour in 1993, it will balance lots of cymbals and bass against Stuart’s weedier, shyer singing, and will, politely, delight and instruct as much as any recent quiet record can.