Young Marble Giants

Young Marble Giants
Alison Statton, Peter Joyce, Philip Moxham, Stuart Moxham in about 1978/79
Background information
Origin	Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Genres	Post-punk
Years active	1978–1980 (Reunions: 2003, 2007-2009, 2012, 2014)
Labels	Z Block Rough Trade Domino
Past members	Philip Moxham Stuart Moxham Alison Statton Peter Joyce
Notable instruments
Rickenbacker, Hayman Bass, Tokai Stratocaster

Young Marble Giants are a post-punk band formed in Cardiff, Wales in 1978. Their music is constructed around the vocals of Alison Statton along with the minimalist instrumentation of brothers Philip and Stuart Moxham. Statton's cool vocals and the band's melodic, minimalistic arrangements have proved influential in the development of indie pop. Their early sound was a sharp contrast with the more aggressive punk rock that dominated the underground at the time. Young Marble Giants have only released one full-length studio album, 1980's Colossal Youth.

Young Marble Giants were formed from the ashes of 'True Wheel' which also included friends Matthew Davis and Louise Porter (later signed to EMI) Stuart Moxham wrote the majority of the band's songs, and his writing was often deceptively simple-seeming, giving the YMG's classic work a fragile yet powerful quality. Their sound was characterised by Phil's prominent bass lines (a Wal bass), Stuart's rhythm guitar (a mapleglo Rickenbacker 425) and Galanti electric organ lines and Statton's tentative vocals. Stuart Moxham's girlfriend Wendy Smith lent Stuart the money to buy the Rickenbacker. Smith, an art student in Cardiff (and later in Nottingham) at the time the YMG's were forming, photographed the band's US tour and also designed cover art for several singles and albums by Weekend and The Gist, Stuart Moxham's later project.

Very early in their existence, there was a fourth member of the band, Peter Joyce, who was a cousin of the Moxham brothers. Joyce was a telephone engineer and an electronics whizz, who had made his own synthesiser from a kit. This was a small touch-sensitive keyboard with an attache case-like box of circuitry, with several knobs and dials. It made sounds similar to Eno's synths in the early Roxy Music and Kraftwerk, who employed similar 'low-tech/high-tech' electronics. The YMGs used tape recordings of Peter's home-made drum machine (Roland didn't release the Boss DR-55, the first fully programmable drum machine, until 1979), since they had no desire to have a drummer. They were also interested in (by today's standards primitive) state of the art effects devices such as ring modulators and reverb units, with the emphasis always on simplicity.