IN Germany the Wynntown Marshals have a particularly devoted fan. His name is Oliver, and the five-piece, Edinburgh-based group are his favourite band in the world. Even when his father-in-law was on his deathbed, suffering from cancer, Oliver drove overnight to see the band play a concert near Stuttgart. “We don’t deserve that,” says Iain Sloan, one of the Marshals, wonderingly.

They have made three increasingly well-received albums in the wake of their 2007 debut EP: Westerner (2010), The Long Haul (2013) and last year’s The End Of The Golden Age. BBC DJs "Whisperin'’’ Bob Harris and Ricky Ross have championed the band. Critics have given their albums impressive reviews. Alan Morrison, former Sunday Herald arts editor, made The Long Haul the 10th best Scottish album of the year, and when the follow-up came out, he described the Marshals as “the finest Americana band outside North America”.

The band, who headlined a Glasgow Americana show earlier this month and play Edinburgh's Jam House on October 28 in support of Wishbone Ash (a band still going strong after 47 years), are all personable. They tour as often as their work and family commitments allow, they have a solid fan-base in people such as Oliver, they make excellent music (one leading magazine speaks of them "colonising the shadowland that lies between Tom Petty and Teenage Fanclub".

So why aren’t they famous? Does it matter to them that they aren’t? And what keeps them driving forward?

Sitting in Falkirk’s Acoustic Cafe after borrowing the cafe’s guitars to play an impromptu Low Country Comedown, one of their finest songs, are Sloan and his fellow Marshal, Keith Benzie. Both were in different bands when they first met in about 2003 and they are now the main drivers in the Marshals.

Talking to them, you realise how hard it can be for a band to make a living exclusively from their music. In an online Forbes article in 2014, contributor Bobby Owsinski narrates the epochal events that altered record companies’ fortunes: the rise of MTV in the 1980s, the advent of MP3s and the peer-to-peer filesharing service Napster (and, later, iTunes) and YouTube, where many thousands of music videos can be watched free of charge.

“The music industry has totally changed in that time [since we began],” says Sloan, “so maybe, what might have been your ambition 10 years ago, would be, say, a record deal, and an advance from a record company to make the record. Had we not had day jobs back then, we could potentially have made a living, just by doing music on its own. But the industry changed almost immediately. How long have downloads been around now, for instance? Record companies realised quite a long time ago that you don’t throw six-figure sums at bands any more.”

He remembers one band, friends of theirs, who ended up with a label that was a subsidiary of mighty Virgin Records. “They were on a wage for a while and they got into doing their second album, but the financial belts were tightened. It ended up with the singer keeping the deal and the other guys were paid just for rehearsals.

“Every time you put a record out, you want to see it being bigger than the last one. That doesn’t necessarily mean more sales,” he adds. “It means you maybe want to see more press coverage; you want to sell more gig tickets …”

“More gig opportunities, more promoters,” Benzie chimes in. “There has to be progress. There’s no point either in continually doing the same thing and not seeing some visible progress.”

The Marshals – Sloan, Benzie, Murdoch MacLeod, Richie Noble and Kenny McCabe – are grateful that, unlike a number of other bands, they don’t have to rely on crowdfunding campaigns to finance their albums.

“We have our own rehearsal room that we use as a [recording studio],” says Sloan, “we fund the recordings of our albums, we have a record company [German-based Blue Rose Records] that supports us by putting our music out in 18 territories across Europe – they pay for the press to get done; it can cost a four-figure sum to promote an album just in the UK alone.

“All we have to do is to provide them with an album and some artwork. We’re very privileged to be in that position. Five guys with an average age of 41, 42 – we’re self-sufficient and we’re no longer in debt. We have a wee bit of cash in the bank. Keith and I are very careful what we do with the money. We get merch [T-shirts] made and we have a lot of stock with the CDs on sale at gigs.”

Whenever the Marshals play on the Continent, the bills pile up before they have even played a note. Hiring a van for 12-14 days costs between £1000 and £1,500. Return ferry trips to the Netherlands are between £500 and £750. Accommodation bookings must be made in advance. Plus, considerable amounts of diesel/daily subsistence payments ("per diems") have to be shelled out before the gig fees start to roll in.

Benzie acknowledges that the band has had some financial help over the years – “from friends of the band, family members as well, helping with things like getting Westerner made. There have been steps along the way when we’ve had some fantastic help but as Iain says we’re pretty much self-sufficient.

“That doesn’t sound very rock-and-roll, talking about the finances, but it’s important. It’s real. We’re extremely lucky to be able to do this kind of stuff in our spare time – to play to appreciative crowds, to go to the Continent, to get our records released in all these territories, albeit with a fairly niche audience as our fanbase. If you’d said to me back in 2001, when I was first venturing out of the bedroom with my acoustic guitar, ‘This is where you’ll be in 15 years’ time,’ I would have thought, ‘Yeah, I’m happy with that. Absolutely.’”

Sloan, whose day-job consists of playing pedal steel for such artists as Blue Rose Code, himself favours an analogy from The Wizard Of Oz. “There’s a scene where the curtain is pulled back and you realise what the reality of the situation is. That’s what it’s like with many bands we look up to and admire.

“Even in my 30s and, sometimes in my 40s, I looked at some bands and thought, ‘Wow, those guys are professional, they’re really making it, there’s a lot of money going around.

“But gradually you get support tours with these people and you realise that things are different behind that curtain. Bands like the Jayhawks [long-established US alternative country and country rock band], most of these guys will still have day-jobs. A lot of the bands who featured in the grunge explosion in the early 90s, a lot of them have day-jobs.” One of their all-time songwriting heroes – John K Samson, formerly of Winnipeg outfit, The Weakerthans – works as a book publisher, writing songs in his spare time. Another one they idolise is, they surmise, not exactly rolling in money and “is probably living in a one- or two-bedroom apartment”.

Benzie estimates that there is a vanishingly small percentage of people in the music industry who are top earners. Tom Petty and Wilco, two bands who influenced the Marshals, play full-time and make a reasonable living at it. “But there’s a huge middle-ground between guys like us, who are holding down day jobs and looking after kids, and the guys who can make music a full-time job. We can’t occupy much more of that middle ground. We don’t want to lose our families over it. We can’t afford to tour for four, five months to promote an album – we can’t afford to take that time off work.”

Benzie, a father of two, nods his agreement. “We’re really passionate about this. We wouldn’t still be doing it, almost 10 years down the line, if we didn’t firmly believe that we had something to give. But it’s also about having an outlet. Life is busy and stressful, but having the opportunity to go into the rehearsal room on a Monday night, switch the Fender amp on and start playing, is brilliant. We feel really lucky to be able to have all that.”

While it would be fantastic to sell two million records, Sloan says that if the Marshals’ albums sell in four figures, that keeps them afloat to do the next record. They already have a couple of songs for album number four. It really is all about the music for the Marshals. Fame can wait.

The Wynntown Marshals play The Jam House, 5 Queen Street, Edinburgh on October 28. www.thewynntownmarshals.com