20. Young Marble Giants, Final Day (1980)

Last night, I saw Young Marble Giants play in the Reardon Lecture Theatre at the National Museum of Wales. What a heavenly place it was. Every bit of it seemed to breathe out an air of dusty, lovely learning. I wanted to fold myself up into the plush, faded seats and stay there forever.

And then there were the band themselves. I came to Young Marble Giants very late - last year, in fact, when Domino re-issued their only album, 1980's Colossal Youth, and their other recordings. I was instantly fascinated by the album cover, a bleak, black-and-white photograph of two men and one woman, all of them impossibly young. It made me think of the same doomy spirit of Joy Division's album sleeves, transformed into something unbearably human.

And then there was the music, sparse, sublime, sweet and terrifying at the same time. Final Day was the song that affected me the most, a song about the dropping of the nuclear bomb. Last night, it was moving to see Stuart and Philip Moxham, somewhat older now and cheerier, still making that same raw sound from the bare bones of a Roland synthesiser and the rough plucks of a Rickenbacker. More moving still were Alison Statton's vocals, still summoning up the eerie power of the untrained, flat-vowelled 21-year-old she once was.