IT CAN'T be easy being a member of a relatively unknown group when you have a big brother who's in a really famous band. And when that really famous band happens to be Radiohead - arguably the act of the moment/year/decade - it must seem to the less eminent siblings that he has mountains to climb and oceans to swim.

Under the circumstances, however, Andy Yorke, younger brother of Thom and one-third of Oxford trio Unbelievable Truth, is handling it all quite well.

"There wasn't much point in hiding it," he sighs, shifting uncomfortably, clearly weary of the subject being raised for the zillionth time. "I could've used a different name - Andy De Freitas or something - but I'd be found out eventually and it'd be much worse. The trouble is, I can't even distance myself and slag him off. Unfortunately, they're such a good band - there's no getting away from that fact."

To be entirely fair, Andy's own little outfit aren't half bad either, and (luckily for him) they don't sound much like Radiohead. Taking their handle from a Hal Hartley movie whose "downbeat intensity and dark humour" they admired, Unbelievable Truth are already amassing plaudits of the "ones to watch out for in '98" variety. And with their debut long player Almost Here set for imminent release, they look well poised to make a sizeable impact over the coming months.

Formed in the summer of 1994 when school friends Yorke, Nigel Powell and Jason Poulster started writing songs together, Unbelievable Truth have had an unnaturally lengthy gestation period. This was due largely to Yorke's sabbatical in Moscow where he spent his final college year studying Russian Language and Literature. The band reconvened during the summer of 1995 where they continued writing and playing the odd gig. Then Yorke again absconded to Russia, returning in late 1996 when the trio finally started to feel confident enough to go in search of a record deal. Eventually signing to Virgin, the band recorded their album last summer, releasing the quite magnificently broody debut single 'Stone' at the tail end of the year.

Likening themselves to a male Throwing Muses or late-period Talk Talk, Unbelievable Truth consciously eschewed the prevailing Britpop mood for a much more emotionally grounded musical aesthetic.

"What we do definitely isn't pop," insists Yorke (who, with his neat buzzcut, docker shoes and sensible pullover, still looks more like a middle-class university student than a future rock god). "The music is quite melancholy, though it doesn't feel depressing to us. I don't think we'll be losing our audiences to suicide. If it's coming out a certain way we can't help that. We can't just say 'let's make it all a bit more 2 Unlimited', just to please the radio stations.

"We work as a collective," chimes in drummer Nigel Powell, who also produced the album. "We write so well, just the three of us. We have quite a structured approach though Andy's quite unstructured in the way he sings. I'm a bit more logical. There's quite a lot of stuff going on in the album but at the same time we're careful how we approach it live. The thing that really excites me about live bands is the idea that if someone is in a bad mood they might play something differently or do something out of character. It makes it a unique experience."

Getting back to the dreaded family connection for a moment, is there just the slightest danger that they might have scored a record deal in the hope that some of the elder Yorke's success might rub off?

"I think it would have been really stupid of the record company if that was why they signed us," Yorke offers. "But I really don't think that was the reason and if it was the reason it's a big mistake. You could do it if you could get a return very quickly, but they seem to be structuring things for us on a long-term basis, and they've agreed there'd be no mention of the family thing in the press release. If they did sign us because of whose brother I am, the worst case scenario would be that there'd be a press interest in the short-term, but in the long term if we were crap we still wouldn't sell any records."

"Besides," he continues, "there isn't a very good history of brothers in different bands. Have you heard any of Chris Jagger's records lately? And didn't Pete Townshend's brother have a band - wonder what ever happened to them!. But there's enough ways to fail in the music industry without worrying about those kind of statistics. And people are going to pick up on the connection anyway and there's nothing we can do about it."

Unbelievable Truth have been compared with everyone from Talk Talk to Crowded House and early REM. How do they see themselves in the great scheme of things?

Jason: "We don't really compare ourselves to other bands much. If you are a respecter of creative music the last thing you should want to do is copy it. The Talk Talk thing I can understand to a point - there's an aspect to their music that we capture, that kind of atmospheric textured sound. But a lot of the similarity is down to the production."

As their recent Dublin gig proved, Unbelievable Truth are anything but a coat-tail tugging outfit content to wallow in glory-by-association. As their growing legion of followers will confirm, they're exceedingly passionate and serious about what they do.

"Our music relies quite a lot on intimacy," York concludes.

"We're not pretending to be the cutting edge. There's always room for music that touches people." n