Toni Halliday has decided to hide behind unflinchingly cool shades. Like the late, lamented Greta Garbo, she'd rather the scary world outside didn't intrude on seriously private thoughts.

Yet, instead of sealing herself off into a hermit-like existence, she's decided to blend into the crowd by dressing down and softening the previous airs and graces. She's always been a star inside, the brightest in any firmament. Someone at RCA Records knew this and tried to mould her into a non-pouting mannequin spewing out torch songs for the heavily neurotic three years before Sinead O'Connor's ascent. The derision rang out loud and cruel.

Now, Toni Halliday fronts Curve, currently the coolest group in indiedom, and the same vultures and hypocrites want to know everything about her. This she takes in her determined stride, chatting amiably over cappucino in Maida Vale while ex-boyfriend and songwriting partner, Dean Garcia, crosses the 't's and dots the 'i's. They've waited too long to be spotlighted to let that mis-spent youth dent their forward surge.

"I was 22 years old when I made that record." Toni doesn't flinch at the memory of her solo LP. "That was four years ago and I'd just split up with Dean in a band before it. I just wanted to do it all on my own - it was an expulsion of all the horrible things that had happened to me. And I think I needed to do that - it was a progressive step - to get to the mental stage I am now."

"It's funny," she continues, "but I've had letters from people who've bought both my solo LP and the Curve stuff and liked both. My solo LP, melodically and lyrically, wasn't that different to what I do now, just musically."

INITIALLY, CURVE used steely tactics normally confined to dance acts to gain attention. They pressed up 500 white labels of the 'Blindfold EP' and sent 'em around the industry with no information bar the group name. The strange, haunting music literally 'spoke for itself' and the response was positive, unhindered by any prejudices pundits might've held about Toni's solo work. The lead-off track, 'Ten Little Girls', was quiet without being too gimmicky - by alternating Toni's breathless whoops and hollers with JC 001's serrated and savage rap over guitars by turns sadistic and muted, they'd created a new genre, 'indie-rap' (sounds crass, I know).

This hushed experimentation has been carried over into their new single, 'The Frozen EP', four kaleidoscopic nuggets from Curve's well-protected inner world, with light-handed grooves, much sonic trickery, some electronic splashes, unhinged guitars that aren't ashamed to caress and lyrics that, for once, show an appreciation of the language.

Toni and Dean are intent on developing things even further, while avoiding retracing their steps or just making do and treating Curve as a mere job. They're both enthusiasts and serious music fans - if you think songs can't alter your life-pattern, ask these two - who enjoy most aspects of being in a band.

We discuss the importance of words in conveying powerful emotions and Toni admits to being drawn in by the information singers impart, how much of themselves they put on wax. They absent-mindedly knock dance lyrics until I remind them of the golden age of disco (for example, Jackie Moore's 'This Time Baby' - sheer poetry that still stands up to scrutiny). Mind you, Toni does think Jaz Coleman is heavily political in Killing Joke - ie she takes him seriously - so Curve like loads of dross and tack as well, not just painfully hip stuff.

When I can get a word in edgeways, I suggest Curve songs are always twisted, sick but not sick in a graphic hardcore mutilation sense: there's something unsettling about them, something not quite right amidst the desolate beauty.

"Most people get to a stage in their lives when they really don't know what's going on," Toni posits, "or why things... happen."

Dean: "They need to speak to someone who's non-biased just to off-load all this stuff that they feel."

Toni: "Everyone reaches a crux in their lives when they start re-evaluating things. It's normal. When I was 25 that happened and I got pretty sick mentally. I don't know if I've recovered, really. Curve isn't really therapy for me, more of an expulsion of demons. Dean was going through the same kind of thing as well, so in a way, that's why the music was very aggressive - it still is - because it was trying to push out all this stuff as quickly as possible... All that resentment and anger, not directed at certain people or anything, but directed outwards rather than inwards."

Dean: "Our music just reflects opposite things - things going together that shouldn't normally go together. We're just very interested in that, 'cos the overall effect becomes really abstract and people can bring their own individual baggage to bear on the music."

CURVE RECENTLY made the giant step from their basement studio to touring live for the first time. It's an experience Toni finds "quite thrilling. It's great to get vibed-up and working. it was a bit dodgy at first, though." Even if they did have to employ three like-minded musicians to bring the songs to life onstage and even if they were always swathed in buckets and buckets of dry ice. Oddly enough, Toni Halliday knew this would be her calling years ago.

"When I was 11," she says, regressing a bit, "I always knew I'd be a singer. I never knew I'd end up in a folk club in the North East strumming an acoustic guitar. I always thought I'd go into folk music 'cos my mum was obsessed with folk music as well, like Peggy Seeger, all that fantastic stuff. And I loved it, 'cos I loved the melancholy side of it. Along with Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, they all had this oppressive, heavy thing going and that's what drew me, that was the first real atmospheric music I heard.

"I came to London and punk rock took over my life when I was 12 years old. And that was it. I became obsessed with manic guitars and being able to do whatever I wanted and not caring. Which was very eye-opening for a 12-year-old, I tell you."

It's interesting to ponder how Curve have reacted to the surfeit of positive attitudes, first in dance circles, and now slowly but surely in the co-opted indie arena. If anything, they lean towards the depressing side of things, not wallowing in it, and certainly not being negative for negativity's sake like, say, Ghost Dance before them.

"I was talking to a friend and I went to see Ride at The Borderline at the end of '89 and we noticed this big, kind of positive thing."

Yeah, even those doyens of positive vibrations De La Soul have come across all bad-tempered and in a huff on their new LP - though, to be strictly accurate, 'Three Feet High And Rising' wasn't all belly laughs either.

"'De La Soul Is Dead'... what a title! The minute I heard De La Soul, right, I fell in love with them, and it wasn't because of the positive side of their album, it was just a work of genius. F***ing genius from the word go. Ultimately what got me going was more to do with what they did, how they did it, and how they got it across. They didn't actually write any of the songs for a start, they just made it up as they went along. And I was totally fascinated, just listening in, going, 'Ooh, that sample... it's definitely Hall and Oates. Or... Steely Dan... or Funkadelic'."

DAVE STEWART rears his head in the conversation twice. Firstly, because Curve are signed to his label, Anxious Records, and more pertinently because both Curve songwriters feel he's had a bad deal press-wise and is much misunderstood. They wax lyrical about early Eurythmics LPs but draw a discreet veil over The Tourists, his other successful act. Somehow talk then jump-cuts to self-protection and I wheel out what is fast in danger of becoming a cliche - the fact that disturbed people have a more astute perception of the world.

"Self-protection," Toni starts, "is something you need, or else you end up blinkered. Your mind does it for you, actually. Your mind can do amazing, phenomenal things. And I agree that people who are pessimistic or slightly touched have a lot more of a wider picture of what's really going on. They let more in. They're affected more by things and obviously they live with the repercussions. And I think most people who are visionaries are like that without a doubt... Dean and I are always struggling with bloody mental problems."

One thing I recently noted about Curve's musical burnt offerings - especially 'Coast is Clear', with its siren-like main riff, a sort of electronic cackle - is that, for all their proximity to current indie over-achievers, there's a definite sense of wanderlust, no precise sense of place beyond the inner-mind, the vague subconscious. So are they ravenous travellers?

Toni: "If someone said: 'you can't travel anymore, you have to stay put in England, I think I'd just shrivel up and die."

Dean: "It would be like cutting your legs off."

Having been to Thailand, amongst other places, recently, Curve can mouth off all they want. But haven't they noticed that Europe still gets as short shrift as ever, musically, because of the ingrained superiority of British thinking, an extension of an obsession with privacy that somehow suggests that London is the centre of the musical universe?

"That mode of thinking is outdated, especially now," Toni says, "The fact that they're gonna open Europe up... the Europeans will just go ahead with their own record releases, and not wait for manna to come from England. The Germans and the French are already doing it."

Dean: "The quicker and the more that happens, the better it will be for everyone."

Like, drop-dead cool.

(article nicked from 'New Musical Express', 18 May 1991)