CURVE's debut 'Blindfold' EP is the most talked about and raved about record of the year. THE STUD BROTHERS meet Toni Halliday and Dean Garcia, the duo behind the band, and discover how one off-hand compliment about Annie Lennox a few years ago eventually lead the tidal wave of acclaim.

Pics: TOM SHEEHAN

THE STATE OF PLAY

"YOU KNOW," SAYS TONI HALLIDAY, CURVE'S extraordinary vocalist, "I always used to think I looked like Joey Ramone, that I had these great long, lanky legs and this huge fringe. It was great, just how I wanted to be."

We honestly can't think of anyone who looks less like Joey Ramone. If anything, she looks like Beatrice Dalle. We tell her so. Undeterred, Toni splays her legs, drops her head and plays us a bit of air guitar. Her jeans are ripped. Gabba gabba hey!

In the surgically sterile ambience of an East London photographic studio the size of a small football pitch, we're watching Curve having their pictures taken. For reasons that will ultimately become obvious, the studio will remain nameless. East of us, there's a dressing-room, to our west a fridge and a couple of miles south there are the obligatory paper curtains, lights perpetually flashing magnesium white, tripods, aluminium ladders, projectors and lenses longer than gun-barrels and thicker than cannons.

Between the curtains and the camera are Toni and Dean Garcia, Curve's other songwriter. Dean is Toni's best friend, her confidant, her common sense, her "brother", never ("never ever") her lover. Tom Sheehan, our photographer, is as ever, trying to introduce some levity to the proceedings, but he's suffering from the ill-effects of too many Heinekens and therefore relies on dirty jokes. Not foul just, well, overly colourful. Dean, who was looking a little uncomfortable, begins to relax and Toni giggles and strikes a few poses.

Back a bit. Forward. A tad to the left. No, my left. Throw a few shapes. SNAP! She's a natural.

FOR Toni and Dean, the last six weeks have moved with bewildering speed. Six weeks ago we gave their "Blindfold" EP, their debut EP, Single of the Week, far more than they ever expected. Since then, they've been interviewed by us, the NME and Sounds. John Peel, Simon Mayo, and Mark Goodier (Christ, what an unholy trinity) have all raved about them. They've already recorded another four-track EP to be released in May and this week embark on a mini-tour of Britain.

Six weeks ago they were ensconced in a basement in Kentish Town. Now they're throwing a few shapes in a studio the size of a small football pitch.

The "Blindfold" EP has been in the shops precisely eight days and already people are bleating about music paper hype. It's simply because when we (or indeed any other hack) stumble across something as excellent as "Blindfold", we find ourselves floundering for suitable adjectives, relying on an emotive gush. We love the record. It's f***ing brilliant.

A funny few weeks, Toni.

"Oh yeah, we're really surprised by it all because our initial ambition was just to create a bit of interest in the band, interest in the record, we just wanted someone somewhere to like it. And that was all we wanted to achieve, we never had any other ambition. It's extraordinary, we're still quite shocked about the response. It's all been down to you two guys anyway."

We'd love to think that was true, that it was us, that we were at least partway responsible. The fact is, anyone with a pair of ears would rave about Curve. From the off, "Blindfold" blows you away. From the raging ecstasy of "Ten Little Girls" (Toni sounds like Liz Cocteau on amyl nitrate) through to the coy, poisonous title track, "Blindfold" astounds.

The only thing that worries us about Curve at all is what really ought to be worrying them. Like others who've enjoyed (suffered?) sudden acclaim, Curve are now under enormous pressure. People might turn on them just for the sake of it.

"We can't look at it like that," says Dean. "All this stuff is encouraging, it just makes us want to go out and do more and more. I mean, we were just wombing out, we were down in the basement and it was like our own little womb, all warm and comfortable and we didn't have to deal with the outside world at all. So we're enjoying this, it just makes us want to try."

At the moment, Curve are spending their days back in the basement rehearsing for their imminent Camden Underworld date. And it's sounding...

"It's sounding f***ing brilliant," says Toni.

HEAVY FROM THE WORD GO

DEAN'S from Kentish town. Toni's from Sunderland, sort of.

Toni's been in bands since the age of 11. At that very tender age all you had to do to join Toni's band was play the Banshees' "Metal Postcard". Perfectly. Being pretty loud and very pretty, Toni didn't have to wait too long to get noticed. Rosalyn Russell, a Melody Maker hack and part-time researcher for some long-since-forgotten regional youth programme, interviewed her.

During the interview Toni did what at the time was not done, she raved about Annie Lennox and her much-maligned band, The Tourists. Russell, being an arbiter of public taste, was astonished, but not quite so much as one David Stewart who, having discovered his one and only fan, was determined not to lose her.

Stewart got hold of Toni's phone number and rang her. Toni, who hadn't a clue what any of the other members of Annie Lennox's band were called, remembers thinking, "I hope it's not the one with the f***ing goatee beard."

Toni met Goatee at Milburn's cafe in Sunderland. Goatee was suffering from an appalling influenza, soon to be complicated by a collapsed lung. Toni, who knew something but not quite enough about drugs, took his wheezing, coughing, and scratching as symptoms of some terrible addiction. She spent the first hour of their conversation paralysed with fear, imagining imminent initiation into whatever substance had corrupted Stewart's system. She spent the next two chiding herself for being so hasty and thinking Stewart was probably the nicest person she'd ever met.

Toni and Dave spent the next few months writing to one another. Dave's bottom line was always the same - Toni had to get out of Sunderland, Sunderland was death. With only £20 in her piggy-bank, New York and Paris looked out of the question. She wound up in London and within a week, with just a tenner in her pocket, she'd found herself a place. Toni is alarmingly resourceful.

Some time later, Stewart introduced her to Dean who'd played bass on the Eurythmics' "Be Yourself Tonight" album, but by then was intent upon starting his own band. He fancied Toni and Toni fancied him but that never happened. The band did. With two other friends they formed State Of Play, by Dean's account an abominable funk-pop band that were to lose Virgin Records more money than any ill-advised balloon adventure ever could. ("We were just bunged loads of money, loads of gear," Dean claims. "We were chucked into this mega-studio and none of us knew what the f*** was going on really.")

As the music and relationships deteriorated so the money increased. At one point Toni decided she just could not cope without the latest state-of-the-art Apple computer. This £5,500 piece of techno-wizardry was only ever employed "to draw little cats on".

EVENTUALLY Dean, Toni's common sense, suggested they break the band up. Toni left that day, a very angry girl. Dean knew she was angry because she would intermittently remind him by way of shockingly worded hate mail. After some time, though, even that fizzled out, and Dean was left thinking what a crap way to lose your best friend. Remarkably, Toni was thinking something very similar. She sought him out.

"She dropped off a tape of some of her stuff downstairs, she didn't even have the bottle to come up," Dean says. "I thought that was brilliant. I phoned her up the next day and told her her tape was shit."

Contact restored, the next few months were spent disinfecting old wounds with Jack Daniels. The next few weeks after were spent conceiving the idea of Curve. Finally, they recorded the "Blindfold" EP. Each song took them less than a day to write and record. The whole thing cost them less than £300 to make. And it's absolutely f***ing priceless.

WIDE EYED AND SCREAMING

IF the "Blindfold" EP is about anything (believe us, it's so brilliantly abstract it could be about anything), it's about the loss of innocence. Or rather its forcible removal. Both Toni and Dean are quite convinced they experienced that way too young. We get the feeling they probably just lost naivety. Sudden knowledge, which is what they both experienced in very different ways, doesn't necessarily annul innocence. It does annul naivety. It's all got to do with dad.

"I never knew my father," explains Dean. "He was a Hawaiian GI and he got my mother pregnant and disappeared. This was in the late Fifties and she was an Irish Catholic so there was a big stink about it, she got a really hard time. I'd still really like to find my father though, it seems to get more important as time goes by. I think one day I'll have to hire someone to find him, someone who specialises in that sort of thing. If I can get the money together. I don't think I've got the dedication or the patience to do it myself."

Toni's dad was a different kind of rogue altogether. He was a real villain, a true con-man, a hippy who fell from grace the moment he found himself skint. You see, he had this great idea. What they'd do is sell up, buy a boat and make a bundle selling ethnic nic-nacs on the Cote d'Azur. It was a great idea except that everyone else had had it already. So Toni's dad had another idea, this time not so great. They'd sail into port, he'd suss the flashiest yacht in the harbour, take the owners to a bar, get them slaughtered then nip back and ransack their boat. They'd sail out without even paying docking fees. This worked fine until one day he had another idea. He'd sail off without the wife and kids.

"Yeah," says Toni, "my dad left us when I was eight. He just woke up one day, told my mother he didn't love her anymore and that was it. It was funny, there had never been any arguments, they were always really in love and then one day he didn't love her and he disappeared, left her and us kids in Greece with no money. She had a really hard time getting us all back to Sunderland. We were all really upset, but in a way I think it was better than being dragged through four years of screaming hell with your parents hating each other and you having to take sides. At least it was quick even if it was traumatic."

Traumatic? You ain't heard nothing yet.

"It was traumatic for me from the word go," says Dean "Because I was actually a twin. I said my mother was an Irish Catholic. Well, when she got pregnant she tried to get rid of it because it was so taboo. This is heavy. She went to this dodgy abortion place and they only got half of it out, only got the other one out. I was clinging on going, 'I'm not going! I'm not coming out!' My mother nearly died. See what I mean? It's pretty heavy from the word go, isn't it?"

Jesus. And that is a true story.

BLINDFOLDED

IN Tom's East End studio, no matter what the time, it's always Mediterranean noon. It's knocking on for midnight. Toni wonders out loud how many other photographers work so late, inadvertently supplying Sheehan with an opportunity to tell her what actually does happen downstairs.

Downstairs, just a floor from here, a mere couple of flights, in an identically pristine expanse, brassy blondes decorated with the meagrest wisps of mock-chiffon are being turned into Page Three Lovelies. Yes they are. Oh yes they are.

A second's silence, then Dean beats his chest and Toni offers Tom a few engagingly pornographic pouts and collapses into laughter. Tom's changing the lens. Oh well.

Not naive, not cynical, not a blush to be seen, not a snigger to be heard, just the purest laugh. Pop's innocence regained again. Despite...despite everything.

She's a natural. He's a natural.

Curve are unmissable.

WHAT THE PAPERS SAY

'Simply and easily the most brilliant and surprising record we've heard in well over a year.'
MELODY MAKER February 9 1991

'Curve can't make up their mind whether they want to be nasty or cute and this is the secret of their success. I'm quite crazy about them.'
NME March 2, '91

'A formidable new force on the horizon. Forget the hype, Curve have the power to drive you round their razor-sharp bends.'
SOUNDS March 2, '91

'What a horrible noise this record is. It makes you feel as if you've walked into a lamp-post and split your skull open'
RECORD MIRROR March 2, '91

'It's as if Lush and the Cocteau Twins had impacted in a terrible industrial accident on a teenage girl's bedroom floor... this you should hear.'
TIME OUT March 6, '91

'This is a band certain to make a big, big impression in 1991'
MS LONDON March 6, '91

AND THE ER, STARS

'An amazing single, I urge everyone to go out and buy it.'
MIKE EDWARDS of JESUS JONES on Radio 1's ROUND TABLE, March 1, '91

'It reminds me of an indie Kate Bush. Put me down as a Yeah.'
JULIAN COPE in NME, March 2, '91

'My favourite single of the week.'
SIMON MAYO on Radio 1, March 1, '91

(article nicked from 'Melody Maker', 16 March 1991)