And things ain't lightened up since they balked from their first stab at stardom in '93. "We were screwed up," admits Toni, now 33, wincing while recalling a toilet tour of the States, remembering how Curve's terrifying wall of sound - six strings and sequenced sonics roaring together in a religious rush for freedom - was squeezed and squashed into tiny venues. "We met Blur out there and they were saying the same as us: 'Fuck this!'. We felt like we'd sold our souls to the Devil." Being too far ahead of the game didn't help much either. Curve Mk I pulled parts from The Prodigy and made out like Marilyn Manson, ditching the comedy but adding high-octane tragedy, a full five years before both those bands would slice their sounds through the mainstream. "People thought we were cunts because they couldn't understand us," reckons Dean. "We were banging our fucking heads against a brick wall," says Toni. "Music's much more amorphous now. We could work with Crystal Method, Nine Inch Nails and Dr Dre and it would all sound right. Big beat, industrial, gangsta... we can span all those."

Their forthcoming third album, and the remixes flying from it, does that and then some. Constructed in cohorts with Steve Osborne, Tim Simenon and Halliday's hubby Alan Moulder, Come Clean is Curve grunged down, beated up and fucking scorching. Huge won't be the half of it. The worldwide Sony corp has already swiped its first single, Chinese Burn, to soundtrack speedfreak-surrealist Minidisc TV ads. And throughout, Toni's disturbed, distorted, darkened vocals make Portishead's Beth Gibbons sound like The Spice Girls. "All we can do is wait for the reaction," says Toni, acknowledging fate to be one of the few factors affecting Curve's profile that she can't control. Meanwhile, touring again is on the table. "I just want to hear the thing through big fucking boxes," says Dean, talking like an addict about "thrashing it up" for rock gigs and remixing live around the club circuit. "We just want to fuck with things," he says. "We've always been intense people," says Toni.

"We always will be."

(article nicked from 'ID', December 1997)