FOR CURVE, LIFE IS FAR FROM HORRIBLE AT THE MOMENT. Still, I suggest, there's a fear in their wonderful pop music which gives it it's edge, a desire to be protected from the threat of violence.

"Maybe I just think living and breathing is a threat from the word go," says Toni Halliday. "It could be that, I'm not sure. It's instinct. We don't know what we're doing, we're just fumbling around in the dark like every other f***er going through life. And you are frightened and you do feel threatened by things, constantly, on an everyday basis. And you should do, really. There are these monotonous mundane things - most people wanna drop out.

"If they had the courage, they'd just not involve themselves with society. I just can't ignore these things. Dean and I show our intensities in different ways: that's why it sounds like it does. Even my earliest memories are or really manic things happening, when I was like four years old.They really stick, and they f*** your mind up if you let them. I can remember lots of things I wish I couldn't remember."

"I can remember," says Dean Garcia, "this horrible spider crawling up my leg when I was four. And I screamed out in the street, and this man who was just walking past was really affected cos I was so distraught. I couldn't speak to him, I just knocked it off and ran inside. It was really big."

The first memory is the one where you realised life wasn't all cosy and nice.

"It's really horrible!"

CURVE have found their own way of returning to the womb, but we'll ease up here for a second. Life is really pretty great for Curve right now. In the blinking of an eye, their debut EP, "Blindfold" has taken them from unknowns to Buzz of the Season. Its follow-up, "Frozen", is about to captivate and then astonish, and their first tour has just begun. Best thing is, their breathless and deaflessly hip guitar scree is married to - get this for radical - a singer with a voice and an indentity. And some songs. And words too. It's like baggy never happened! Hosanna!

There's also the attitudinal gloss that Toni Halliday is every bit the Pop Star others have cited/sighted. She was worried that the new video for "Coast is Clear" might be too glamorous, but eventually accepted engineer boyfriend Alan Moulder's verdict that it wasn't. I'd recommend a recount. It's approximately twice as glamorous as, say, an exquisite sapphire palace designed by Grace Kelly and Montgomery Clift.

"But I always thought of glamour as Patti Smith, that sort of wasted thing..."

That too. Toni wasn't sure about meeting me because.. erm, I think I reviewed your solo album once long ago.

"You did, yes."

Erm, I think I was fairly horrible about it.

"You were very horrible about it. Very."

Erm, at least I didn't like that and I do like Curve. I mean, it'd be worse if it was the other way around. Then I'd be wrong as well as horrible.

"Oh you didn't actually say whether you liked it or not. You were just horrible about me personally and my relationship with Dave and Annie."

Curve, as you know, are signed to Eurythmics' label Anxious. When they took the exquisite "Ten Little Girls" along to Mr Stewart, Toni was "shitting myself from the inside out, without a doubt. I could feel my kidneys, my intestines, all of that. Like there's that noise, a sub-frequency, that can make you reverberate and explode from inside your skin..."

Fortunately Dave Stewart's reaction on hearing the tape was this: "F***! Yeah!" And the rest is, thanks in no small part to the Cuddly Studdlies, pop history. It occurs to me to be positive so I say: "You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart". What a great title. What a great idea for a song. By gum, I do like that title.

"It was a great song," enthuses Toni. "When you get a woman standing there singing, 'Take me to the desert where there's got to be/ A whole lot of nothing for you and me' - y'know? You think: whooooah! On that same album, 'Savage', there are some wonderful lyrics, she's phenomenal: 'I need you to pin me down just for one frozen moment/I need you to pin me down so I can live in torment/I need you to really feel the twist of my back breaking/I need you to listen to the ecstacy I'm faking.' It's... oh, do you know what I mean? For a female maybe it's..."

It's Okay, I think even some of us dumb brute males can tell that's, shall we say, happening.

CURVE attack some fascinating themes with some striking imagery themselves.

"Coast is Clear' was written in 10 hours from beginning to end, everything," Toni recalls. "And I even went to see Ride in between, and came back, and Dean had put down this fantastic thing..."

I was arrested by the chorus: "It's never enough to swallow those pills/Now I'm sick, now I'm sick, and always will be."

We share one of those funny little moments where no one quite knows what to say but it's not a problem.

"I am sick," proclaims Toni, "but I'm totally convinced that every single person I've ever met is sick in the same way."

Who's taking the pills?

"Oh, it's not meant in a literal context. It's jumbled really. And very abstract. It's just... lots of things make you wanna go... uuurrrgghh..."

Seethe?

"No, not seethe. Vomit."

Ah.

"I find it difficult to use things without some emotional basis. It doesn't seem right otherwise. It just falls out, freestyle. I suppose it does relate to close friends of mine. There's just certain things in this world that make you sick. When I went to Amsterdam, we went to this amazing fish restaurant and had this amazing food, and then we went down to the red light district, and I saw... f***ing dogs licking women. And I'd just had my dinner. Oh, to me it's quite obvious what 'Coast Is Clear' is about."

"It's very abusive," adds Dean.

Does it have a happy ending?

"Oh yes," says Toni. "In classic Hollywood style."

I'm sorry to harp on about this, but there's also a line about not blaming your father for the love he showed.

"Yes well... I get confused about it. I'm just very very non-committal, I always have to apologise to everybody for it. I can't commit to a reason for anything, really, cos I don't f***in' know. I'd love to be one of those enlightened visionary people who just know, who feel with every pore. Who know why things happen. But I am not one of those people. I'm just telling you the truth - I could sit here and make up a million stories, but the fact is I don't properly know what I write about. I wait for everybody else to tell me what it does for them."

Two records, two titles, "Blindfold" and "Frozen". Both things which prevent someone from acting/being/doing.

"Ultimately... both Dean and I have been through very restrictive periods in our life where we couldn't get past certain things, and they had to take their own course, but they were wasted years. And you're just a victim of the course it takes, you see. There's no choice, you just go with it cos you can't physically get out of that situation. We've both been very frustrated. And now we just wanna go. We've been trying and giving our best for years, standing at a brick wall and bashing our heads on it. Long enough. Being able to write these songs is the ultimate release. It has to come out.

"Same in anything. A guy's a carpenter but he really wants to be a plumber. And no one'll accept it, they say, 'You're a carpenter, for God's sake, you don't know anything about plumbing'. He goes, 'Yes, but I do, I do, I really do, please believe me'. And maybe five years down the line someone gives him a go..."

"The good song gives something away," says Dean.

"And the minute you do that," continues Toni, "you realise 50 million people in the world feel exactly the same. Coming back to this fear thing - people are frightened that people don't want to know how they feel. But you've just gotta be yourself. That's good enough for me. That's the ultimate thing.

"Cos everyone feels the f***ing same. 'Cept nobody shows it. No one's willing to do that. What we've tried to do is break down our own fear - growing old, all these fears that accumulate through self-protection. We've tried to go f*** that."

Rarely can such cheekbones have sworn so vigorously.

"At the end of the day, if you have a natural instinct to do music or art, then you know it, that feeling's more intrinsic and fundamental than anything."

TONI and Dean have created a "womb-like" atmosphere in their basement studio. They shut all the doors and it's their cocoon, their world. This is, seriously, a key to why their records are so true.

"Ah, the only thing you gain with age is fear. Lines and fear. Fear just comes on you. You pass your driving test when you're 17 and you're straight off down the motorway at 80mph, there you go. You don't give a flying f*** about anything else in the road. But you pass your test at 24, like I did, and you're much more conscientious. You've just gained fear."

That has some benefits.

"Oh, of course it does. It's through fear that Dean and I work together, because we know we can just be ourselves, uninhibited. We're old enough to realise what we need to function. To be left alone! In the summer we're gonna take three months off to write a good album. Oh, and we wanna spend some time with our families and be a bit f***ing normal."

WE haven't reiterated the life stories yet. The life stories! Good heavens! Are the life stories as exotic and intricate as eveything previously written about you suggests?

"It's not incredible," laughs Toni. "It's stuff that happens to a lot of people."

I guess a lot of people learn to speak English at nine, join their first band at 11, sign their first record deal at 14, leave it at 15...

"But the rest's really normal! Have you ever met a single person who hasn't been f***ed up by their parents?"

I wasn't. I mean, I think they could tell I was managing quite well under my own steam.

"Well, I can chill out with my parents now, but the only thing you can't control in your life is your upbringing. You just can't control it. You're a f***ing child, y'know what I mean? You're an amoeba. A sponge. There you go. When I was growing up, all of my friends and me were screaming and scrapping till the cows came home. Once you got to the age where you could shout back, you did."

"It's when you become opinionated," sighs Dean. "It's happening already with my 18-month-old daughter. The first thing she says to me in the morning is, 'Go away'. She's her own person already. But I encourage it."

"There's a massive baby boom going on now," chuckles Toni.

"And everyone's trying to compensate for their upbringing. So ultimately we'll end up with a generation of children who are the most arrogant f***ers on the planet. Cos you've got all these cool parents going, 'Speak back to me, go on'. We'll end up like 'The Prisoner'. They'll ship all us old people off to Alcatraz. Or even The Isle of Man."

CURVE are now a five-piece, Toni and Dean having recruited guitarists Debbie Smith and Alex Mitchell and drummer Monti after advertising (in this organ) as "a noise band". Every time you land on a reference point regarding the new EP - Kate Bush? Chrissie Hynde? - a contrary one topples it - Simon Dupree And The Big Sound? Enigma? "The Colour Hurts" demands to know "Why do you grow inside me?". "Frozen" itself is sassy enough, but for me the killer is "Zoo", which in fact only narrowly made the cut. This rhymes "occasion" with "but she's only Caucasian", which I feel is sufficient cause for ballistics and ballyhoo. The (rather accommodating) dictionary definition of "curve", you'll be exhilarated to hear, is a "line of which no part is straight".

TONI Halliday says, "And anyway, at the end of it all, the only thing that's vaguely commercial is you."

I'm not sure I follow.

"I mean - I think people are commercial."

Personalities?

"Well, I think to be able to get a bit of you onto the tape, in any way shape or form - that is the most commerical thing you can do. Because people are only interested in other people. They are! They wanna be told that what they're thinking or feeling is normal, that they're not a freak.

"Why'd you think a film like '9 1/2 Weeks' for instance was so successful? It's a shit film, right?"

Right.

"I came out of that film feeling I'd never been so insulted in my life. But everyone in the audience was a couple. And they were all there to see if they were normal. That they weren't real freakthings into weird sex. So to me the most commercial thing you can do is to reaffirm, is to say, 'Yes, i think those things'.

"I always, unfortunately, want binoculars. I can't help it, I just see into things. '9 1/2 Weeks', for example, made me realise that most women don't wear silk slips and have backlights hanging on their bed."

We'll let that one go.

"You could've made a really great film, and more commercial, by showing the reality of it. And people would've been a lot more intrigued. Think of the best films you've ever seen - are they glamorous?

Many, yes. Perhaps not "Last Tango In Paris".

"Yeah, I found that completely repulsive, but it's real, there's something about it. Hollywood generally wants to condition you in a certain way, but the weird thing is we just do not think like that. And all it does is it stops people talking and communicating. They think they can't converse any more cos they think everything they say is gonna be laughed at. People see control in the media and films and think they have to be the same way. The reality of it is, if you're gonna have a tumble with someone, it isn't f***ing '9 1/2 Weeks'."

It isn't Mills and Boon either.

"Yeah - all I wanna see is how it really is."

Toni expresses a wish to read "The Buddha Of Suburbia" and goes on to eulogise "Rita Sue And Bob Too", almost certainly the most atrocious film I've ever seen.

"But I come from the North East, and I'm telling you, that's exactly what goes on."

We find common ground on Mike Leigh, before swerving back to Curve.

"I try to walk around with my eyes open, I love to observe. I'm a bit of a voyeur really. We have this pessimistic cynical outlook that everything's really f***ked, and not clean at all."

"The music not being cleaned up in any way," says Dean, "is among the things that make it special. It has life and movement in each individual part, they play off each other. We just wanted to get away from all that horrible techno Eighties CD music where everything's in it's perfect place, everything dead, you push go and it's all mega but it's all dead. The way I see Curve is as a combination of opposites all the time, where you don't know what to expect next. I see us taking it to another level, really exposed, really vulnerable."

More great things. That's what to expect next. For Curve, fear is a prisoner of war, fear can now be frozen. Step onto that arc, two by two.

"We were just walking down the street today going, 'This is so wild!'" exclaims Toni.

"This has gotta be... we grew up with like The Melody Maker and John Peel and all this stuff. It's our dream come true, y'know what I mean? It's a stupid thing but you always have this fascination - you see someone on the front of the paper, then you read the thing inside..."

You heard the lady. Life imitates life.

(article nicked from 'Melody Maker', 4 May 1991)