“You can’t be trusted for a minute. That noise is unacceptable to the neighbours. Just moderate it a bit, will you?” Barbed Wire, from Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci’s first album, Patio, closes with the sound of an irate mother breaking up one of the bedroom recordings that, together with sessions culled from radio stations in their native Wales, comprises the bulk of the LP. They were in their mid-teens when they made it, and cherubic singer and organist Euros Childs’s voice hadn’t even broken.

Next month, the five-strong band start work on their fourth album and will be able to claim 21 years apiece, apart from Euros’s sister Megan, who is 25, plays violin, and is entrusted with Gorky’s chequebook. The band’s name, which even their champion John Peel describes as cumbersome, sounds like an effort to mimic the unwieldy polysyllabic progressive English bands of the past, such as Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera. “I’m afraid it makes less sense than them, though,” says guitarist John Lawrence. ‘Gork’ was school slang for a dimwit, ‘zygotic’ has been hijacked from GCSE biology, and ‘mynci’ is a misspelling of monkey. Unfortunately, it’s too late to change.” Age has not robbed Euros of a stunning choirboy clarity, nor the band of genuine enthusiasm and self-effacing modesty traits absent from a host of other young British groups.

Where Britpop bands creep out from between Paul Weller’s legs to create a cultural orthodoxy of second-hand Beatles albums and Small Faces CD reissues, Gorky’s have chosen to plunder a different back catalogue the legacy of late British psychedelia. Their audience is a weird mixture of supportive peers, entranced by a music that seems to them to be without precedent, and a few delighted former hippies comforted by traces of Soft Machine and Kevin Ayers. Much of last year’s Bwyd (Food) Time LP, notably bassist Richard James’s Eating Salt is Easy, seems to take as a starting point the folk-mantras of the 1960s Celtic group The Incredible String Band, who walked the brilliant/rubbish tightrope with less caution than their bearded contemporaries. To a London-centred media, Wales seems more exotic and harder to decode than Seattle or South Central Los Angeles, and, to some extent, Gorky’s have played this to their advantage, although there are problems. In deciding to raid a fancy-dress shop for Bwyd Time’s cover shoot, and in dressing themselves in medieval garb, they created the oddest sleeve photo since, well…the Incredible String Band’s The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, and confirmed press ideas of them as psilocybin-gobbling space yokels. “It was a joke,” says Euros.

The fact remains, for comedians such as Lee Hurst and Hale and Pace, the Welsh are the Pakistanis of the 1990s: the race you can stereotype without losing your liberal credentials. Thus Gorky’s decision to sing in Welsh, most of the time, might be construed as a political act. But the majority of the band speak Welsh as a first language, and it seems appropriate to a song such as Sdim Yr Adar Yn Cnau (Birds Don’t Sing Anymore), their new Amber Gambler EP’s beautiful and affecting lament for the oil-slicked Pembrokeshire coast. Melody Maker described the band’s use of their native tongue here as “bloody-mindedness”. “Where we grew up is bilingual anyway,” argues James, “so not to sing in both languages wouldn’t be a true representation of us.”

But Gorky’s won’t be drawn on nationalist issues. Reviews in Welsh-language magazines ignore their English-language songs, and Megan describes a television programme about Welsh bands using shots of them crossing the Severn bridge “as if we were going over the border, betraying them”. Lawrence sounds positively bitter: “When the Welsh Language Society put on shows, they make a fuss if we ask for Pounds 300 to cover costs, but they don’t complain when they have to pay a middle-of-the-road Welsh band a grand.” You’d imagine they’d be thrilled by Gorky’s, a populist exportable vehicle for the Welsh language. “I don’t think they want the language to go outside,” says Euros.

On the train back to London, Megan talks about playing the pedal-steel -guitar-led Heart of Kentucky, from the new EP, to bewildered Epic Records executives, suddenly afraid that Gorky’s might transmute into an unmarketable Welsh country & western band. But that is Gorky’s prerogative. So they signed with Fontana.

There is a family precedent for breaking the mould. Euros and Megan’s dad is a music teacher who plays medieval instruments. He reckons he could write Euros’s songs himself in two minutes.

In September, they play America, where they will doubtless be swooned over. The band’s very isolation makes them, ironically, a distinctive commercial international proposition: they are originals. Euros speaks of Japanese fans asking the band to autograph English/Welsh dictionaries. “Now that’s something, isn’t it?” he adds, with undisguised pride.