London EC1 King's College

A VOICE ECHOES OVER DYING FEEDBACK, "Ladies and gentlemen, due to an unforeseen inconvenience, we ask that you immediately make your way to the nearest exit... In other words: "Run! Fire!"

Curve, who are two-thirds through their set, shuffle offstage sheepishly in the confusion. At least they managed to play their new single before the fire alarm went off... But only barely.

As far as the current spate of comebacks go, Curve rate pretty low against the triumphant returns of The Verve and Echo & The Bunnymen. But they do, still, have that singer. There she is, black leather jacket, buckets of eyeliner, hair tied up in an ebony fountain like a goth Pebbles Flintstone. In the time since Curve self-destructed in 1994, it's been easy to forget that Toni Halliday, for her time, was something of an iconic pop diva.

Frankly, though, other than the fact that there are less scowling histrionics from the ice-cool Halliday, not much seems to have changed. All is severe and very, very dark. There is a vaguely experimental use of electronics - Curve always were (fact!) the proto-Garbage - and all their songs sound exactly the same.

But once Curve have established that they can still play the old songs with frightening intensity, that they can still make noises like coughing seagulls actually sound melodic, and that their new songs ('Coming Up Roses', 'Forgotten Sanity') boast the grinding beats, morose basslines and atmospheric whooshings that made them so good years ago, something somewhere combusts and out we go. Annoyingly, this happens just as we begin to get a glimpse of a 'new direction': the heavy drum'n'bass of 'Chinese Burn'.

So was this a truly incendiary comeback gig? Or was someone merely trying to conceal smouldering spliffage a bit too close to the emergency exit?

Sadly, we may never know.

review by April Long
(nicked from 'New Musical Express', dated 29 November 1997)

thanks to Parsley Rascal for these photos - to see loads more click here.