PERHAPS the most pressing matter concerning God's current understudies, Ausgang, is this predilection for nibbling each other onstage: antics that have caused quite an outbreak of paternal depression among the Maker editorial board.

Cub (bass): "I'm getting pissed off about that! All these gay bastards keep sending me stuff. I'm not interested in guys at all. I mean he (shifting the blame to Max) is everything. Man, woman, beast...table. I'm heterosexual. Thanks!"

Max (vocals): "It's just between us, those 'bits'. Playing with each other's bottoms."

Cub: "He's Captain Kirk most of the time anyway."

Matthew (guitar): "He's Uhura."

Cub: "I'm NOT Uhura!"

Max: "Somebody's got to be."

Cub: "I'm going be Scotty or I'm not playing. Sense! Existentialism! Go on (this to an astonished Matthew), you've read Kafka."

Max: "Come on Bones!"

Matthew: "Ah!"

And Ibo (drums) lays on the grass in this sunny Holborn park and says nothing.

Ausgang, in case you're an old maid (for life) and don't yet know, started off a while back as a tithe barn called Kabuki, a Birmingham band of some originality who released the eminently collectable 'I Am A Horse' before accidentally triggering a landmine.

Five hundred paunches edge slowly away from the boys as their random contributions bang off the mullioned windows of Masonic buildings and then burst over my tape recorder.

The very least that can be said of Ausgang is that they are special. They are IT, although both releases ('Teachings Of Web' and 'Solid Glass Spine') on Criminal Damage have been somewhat hampered by cocker spaniels at the mixing desk. But do not despair, for a recent tour supporting Sex Gang only increased their live reputation, whereby a muscular ball of rhythm invades the stage like a musical Robo-chef, and you know what? When patrolling the highways of this land, they didn't once get trounced by 50 bikers in lonely service stations. Not once. Didn't the bikers even appear?

Matthew: "They didn't actually. The only nasty looks we got was from the police in Glasgow."

Cub: "But tell him what it means..."

Max: "Yes, I'm getting to it!"

Matthew: "Yeah, what does it mean?"

Max: "Oh wait a minute, I'm about to explain it! It was based on a domineering woman type thing, where the black widow spider eats the male after, or during, making love. It just seemed a really good idea. The lyric involved a lot of things which tended to crop up in what we were doing anyway in other songs, in our own life."

Cub: "Basically, it's a hairy woman with eight legs. Getting lured into a situation, then getting fucked off, feeling really bad, then doing the same thing again. You just learn nothing from it."

Max: "The lyric illustrates an example. And...I was gonna say something then!"

Matthew: "No you weren't. You just thought you were."

Max: "I was ! I was! It was dead relevant!"

Matthew: "DEAD relevant?"

Cub: "Look, I want no death!"

And he crawls over to the microphone to tell me the following.

"The only way to kill a zombie is to fill its mouth full of salt."

Max: "You've told him now you fool!"

Cub: "I HAD to tell him."

Max: "FOOL!"

Cub: "It's an Alien Sex Fiend gig next week and you have to know these things."

Ausgang, explaining their songs, in case you were wondering, reveals more about them (frivolity, wit and wisdom) than traditional interrogation.

'FOUR TIN DOORS'

Max: "I had to walk the whole way back from Glasgow with no socks on!"

Cub: "Oh you walked did you? We came back in the van."

Max: You KNOW what I mean!"

Outgoing folk, these, even demonstrating the 'Ausgang Tumblers', another facet to have emerged from the Sex Gang tour, when time on their hands led to feet on their shoulders (an earthier version of synchronised swimming), and in the workers' lunchtime paradise sandwiches are deserted as people make a break for the exit, and I tumble from my hammock.

Why all this? Why not a career in homeopathy?

Cub: "I want to offer things I didn't get from the gigs I used to go to, seeing bands that just stood there and you thought, 'Well, it's alright, BUT...', and hopefully more than that. It's sort of a pride thing as well. Offering pride to other people through us, like the old Ant People."

Matthew, surprisingly sober, exhumes some interesting specimens called The Banshees and a short debate ensues, but we are too late. They're dead.

Cub: "That's why we're important because we're carrying on from where they left off. I don't mean musically or image-wise. Just a youthful idealism sort of thing. I don't know if it's being naive. It's for the kids."

He appears momentarily self-conscious, but continues unabashed.

"It sounds stupid, but who ELSE is it for?"

Max: "Exactly! That's what I keep trying to tell them. I really DO have the overriding say!"

Matthew: "What you need is a good kicking."

Well, never mind all that. Ausgang even do their own magazine, (surely you've got your copy of 'Stab The Sun' Big Fat Cock Erectile Tissue Issue'?), filled with anything you care to mention, including bikes. Grimey old Cub is a bikaholic. Has he ever had as 'Christine'-type experience, finding something beautiful just waiting at the roadside?

"I found a Honda once and this guy came round for it a day later. He was really pissed off about it. I haven't found anything lately because I'm scared of getting into trouble."

But by far the biggest test is the Wham! Fantasy. If chancing upon the toothsome twosome, clinging to a cliffside path by their fingertips, what would they do?

Matthew: "I'd write down, 'I promise not to sing any more silly songs' and make them sign it. Then I'd help them up."

Ibo (the clear winner): "Hammer six-inch nails through their fingers."

Max: "I'd just help them. They'd be indebted to me for life. They'd give me presents, and money."

Matthew: "Would they hell!"

They'd chuck you off.

Max: "I'd fight them! I'd wrestle them to the ground."

Cub: "Burn their fingers first, it's more painful."

Well, never mind all that. Time for some more songs (through the arched window).

'BUILT WITH LEAN STEEL'

Max: "A lot of women I've kind of taken notice of lately, in club and that, seem to be real goddesses - six feet tall and absolutely really lovely looking and things, and I thought about the ridiculous nature of me if I wanted to try and chat them up, because I'm a real shortass!" Cub: "It's about really physical girls who walk around and they know exactly what they look like and what you're thinking."

'YOU'VE GOT THE HOTS FOR CHRIST'

Matthew: "About old ladies who go to church on Sundays with their hats on and feel that they're gonna go to heaven."

Cub: "Chanting all this bloody Latin stuff that sounds really weird."

Max: "Getting into a sexual fervour."

Cub: "They think that by going to church it makes them good people."

Matthew: (irate): "I mean, how can the Pope have talks with the head of a country who refuses to let 70 or 80 per cent of the population vote?"

There is a brief, infuriating silence.

Cub: "Well I don't know!!!"

Although, there is a possibility that he does. After all, leather men don't get nerves. But when Ausgang took their sensational sound of sex and brains round the four corners of this nation, emasculating those waiting-rooms we call gigs, with their vivid flashes of steamy, centrifugal, unconventional, pounding post-pernque caresses (Lord, I thought I'd never finish!), didn't anything really vile happen?

Matthew: "He (Cub) spilt orange all over my leathers!"

Howls of contempt.

Matthew: "It was all OVER the place!"

Cub: "Come on! REALLY vile?"

Matthew: "Well nothing vile, happened did it?"

Cub: "Well make something up then. We're supposed to be rockers aren't we?"

Matthew: "When the van exploded..."

Cub: "And I defecated all over Max."

Max: "It was great!"