University Of London Union (supporting Boo Radley's)

IT'S one hell of an entrance. Make that entrance. She appears like the Angel Of Death: skeletally thin, perfect raven-black hair, and no face at all until at least the fifth song. An ominous, mesmeric silhouette as certain and fateful as the final Tarot card. Glamorous? Believe it, babies. Like Alice Cooper's eye shadow, Alvin Stardust's leather glove, The Sweet's jackboots, Curve seem to carry the leering, creepy, intangible threat of deviant indecency. Exciting? You know the bit in "Gloria" when Patti Smith goes "I'm gonna Uh! Uh! Make her mine, Woo-argh!"? Of course they are.

So that's what all the fuss is about (by eight o'clock tickets are changing hands for figures approaching that of Tottenham Hotspur's FC's debt). All your favourite bands are hanging around the bar, blissfully unaware of their own imminent obsolescence. Because it's time to come clean with you, readers. Everything we've been going on about for two years was only the dry run (well, we needed the practise). This is the real thing.

And doesn't Toni Halliday just know it. Her self-assurance is outrageous. She swoops from the clopped, proper-but-malevolent tones of Grace Slick's "White Rabbit" or Sioux's "Peek-A-Boo" through throwaway Cocteau whoops into a lazy, deliciously corrupt-sounding mid-Atlantic semi-rap drawl, always with the air of someone who knows they hold the whip-hand. Word filters round that she deliberately hurts peopIe for amusement, and you can well believe it. Every song shudders under the power of its helicopter bass lines and razorblade guitar, and the room is filled with oppressive claustrophobia. Curve are the last rites on the Madchester party, and I won't shed a tear. Just when you're sure Toni must have done some sort of Faustian deal to get this good, the lights come on momentarily and you can see that the Beatrice Dalle comparisons are wrong. Her skull-like eye sockets and thin lips have a different kind of beauty: they're too cruel, too untouchable to be merely "sexy". Suddenly she vanishes. The smoke clears, leaving only a forest of arms upstretched in awestruck surrender. Follow that.

It's just not the Boo Radleys' night. Which is a shame because they're coming on amazingly well. To think I had them marked down as the runt of the noisepop litter. Just pick up the "Every Heaven" EP for evidence of their new-found versatility: from slightly grating "classic" (read: Sixties) pop to pedal-kicking sonic overload to tearjerking elegy. "Tortoiseshell" in particular swirls with the same vaguely Oriental, terrible sadness as My Bloody Valentine's "No More Sorry" (one day I'll write a review without mentioning that band).

"Kaleidoscope", too, brings a lump to the throat like little else since New Order's "Ceremony".

But Boo Radleys are not a pretty sight. And it does matter. Sice, the singer with the Ray Reardon hairline, makes up at the back for what he lacks at the front, but it's in vain. Screaming teenage indie-chicks are notable by their absence. They'll never get on "Top Of The Pops". Instead there's a depressing prevalence of lads in tee-shirts, only here for the ruck. The biggest applause comes in the last five minutes when they, uh, kick out the jams, motherf***ers. People I trust wander out muttering "Boring". I think I'll stick with the records.

The mind inevitably returns to the "support" band, on only their second London showing. Curve are in such control of their destiny that it can't be long before they're controlling you. Something wicked this way comes. It's time to give yourself over.

review by Simon Price (nicked from 'Melody Maker', dated 11 May 1991)