Oxford Venue

Waiting for Curve is becoming something of an event in itself. Every time the audience hears the hiss of dry ice escaping a shiver runs through the place. The strobes come on and everyone cheers, then abruptly stops when they switch off. Soon, there's nothing left but the high taste of the invisible ice. Then the whole process starts over.

It's a good, tense atmosphere - like something's going to blow. Curve finally take the stage and it's only slightly anti-climatic. They're only human. Boom! Then again...

Curve may only have two songs - the fast one and the other fast one - but in-between the cracks whole planets are slamming into each other. The bodies at the side are the people who got too close to the speakers.

As usual, singer Toni Halliday looks unbelievably good. When the wind machine blows her hair over her eyes and she bends to the left so it falls back into place...there's nothing else, you know? In a black tracksuit top with white lines down the arms and the blanket fog encircling her, she looks like someone leaving the scene of the crime. She looks armed.

Listening to Curve is like lighting a firework then pressing your ear to it. The band shift into fifth gear and stay there, which makes the wind machine all the more apt. But over 40 minutes it's wearing. Curve have yet to display the sense of dynamics that could propel them into the stratosphere.

Still, what the hell. For a while they're exactly what you need. Tracks like 'Frozen' and 'Blindfold' rip it up every which way, the twin attack of human effort and blind technology resulting in a low, fast throb that reaches all along your spine.

There's little doubt that Curve will be very big indeed. Much depends on the coming months so see them now, while you can still get on the stage and jump back again.

review by Graham Linehan (nicked from 'Select', dated 1991)