Making music and making a living have never been the easiest things to combine. The vacuum in which good work gets created is impossible to exist in for too long before the snakes and ladders enter the equation.

But the way some artists play by their own rules makes following the game endlessly worthwhile. When it comes to examples of how to plough your own furrow, Young Marble Giants are paragons of virtue.

They emerged from Cardiff in 1980 with a sound so unusual they could well have been from space. The band comprised siblings Staurt and Phil Moxham and Phil’s girlfriend Alison Statton. Their quiet sound was built around the brother’s understated guitar and bass lines along with a rudimentary drum machine and cheap organ. Statton’s hushed vocals weave a serpentine route through the sparse arrangements. There’s joyous simplicty in the words. The music appears brittle but there’s an incongrous strength to their brand of fragility.

How amazing is music as a medium that it allows three individuals the freedom to express themselves in a completely unique way at a particular place in time? Young Marble Giants were alchemists of a precious kind of pop gold but they didn’t ever feel the need to repeat the magic formula. There is something poetically apt about the way they did it and walked away. The three and a half days it took to record this album were this band’s moment in the sun.

The record captures the ineluctable sadness in the transience of youth. Striving for lazy perfection and hitting the target is not always something worth repeating, they seem to say. There was no follow-up or a diluted chapter two. They took one shot; their aim was true.