article: THE STUD BROTHERS
pic: TOM SHEEHAN

CURVE are extraordinary. Curve are astonishing. Curve are simply and easily this year's best news. Signed to Dave Stewart's Anxious Records, the group release their debut EP, "Blindfold", next week. Upon hearing it, John Peel prophesied that Curve would be to '91 what the Mondays were to '90 and the Stone Roses to '89. "Snub TV" also moved with admirable speed, playing Curve's video a good three weeks before the EP's release. At Melody Maker and other music weeklies, bewildered hacks are wandering their offices, plotting imminent interviews, scratching their heads and asking themselves how an unknown group could, with their first single, have produced pop of such breathtaking originality. Clearly, vitally, Curve are not just a band to be liked but a band to be seen to be liked.

Curve's gorgeous singer and lyricist, Toni (Antonia? Antonella? Whatever, a dead welcome ringer for Beatrice Dalle) and her dark-haired, innocent-eyed partner, Dean (the man with the bass, the samplers, some of the guitars and all the tunes) have known one another for six years. Five years ago, though, Toni began to hate Dean, began to mistrust him. Dean tells us he never hated Toni (who ever could?). Nevertheless, they parted company. Then 18 months ago, at Toni's volition, they got back together and decided to cut the crap.

Each of the "Blindfold" EP's four mesmerising songs was recorded in less than a day. Unbelievable.

"It's gotta be that way now," says Toni "otherwise it's like labouring. You know, too much like hard work. We have to do it on the day, just get a beat going and do it. If it doesn't happen, we get really despondent, but that only happens if we go in with a plan, some idea of what we want to do. We have to do things that we immediately love, that we feel really passionate about. And, if we don't love it at the end of the day, we erase it."

To erase what you don't love, what a perfect pop philosophy. What a perfect philosophy.

The "Blindfold" EP's opener, "Ten Little Girls", is immediately stunning. It took us just four of its thunderous bass-bars and the merest hint of Toni's fireball voice to award it Single Of The Week. And we did that a month before it was released. We just couldn't wait.

What's absolutely wild, what completely blew us away is that half-way through its heaven-kissing chorus, "Ten Little Girls" cuts to a rapper (JC 001) and it WORKS, it really f***ing works. Never more so than when Toni starts singing all over him. Basically JC is jammed so hard into a blur of guitars he's part of it all and not, as is so often the case, a desperate lunge for credibility. Curve appear to be able to do this over and over again, take elements already familiar to us, elements sometimes even obnoxiously voguish, and render them ecstatically fresh. On "I Speak Your Every Word" there are wah-wah's turning to a blizzard of melody. "Blindfold" itself takes a "Funky Drummer" beat and some hippy-dippy sex samples and turns them into a monstrous S&M ballad with Toni shrieking and pleading "You better believe it!"

Toni and Dean love the fact that we get all the songs wrong. Toni says that's what she's always loved about pop lyrics - creative misunderstanding. Even so, there's a disturbed, disturbing beauty to Toni's voice and words. Being vaguely post-Freudian, we'd like to think it has something to do with her childhood.

"I was brought up in Antibes," she says, "and Spain and Greece and Italy and Malta. My dad was a thief, a conman. I think he's in a Spanish jail at the moment, I'm not sure. We were living on a boat. We'd dock in somewhere and my dad would clock one of the flashest yachts in the port. Then he'd take the owners out to some bar, get them arseholed, leave them in the bar and go back and ransack their yacht. We'd be gone before they had time to get a hangover, we didn't even have to pay docking fees."

Ever more astonishing. Curve are truly, truly wonderful. And their "Blindfold" EP is, depending on your mood, a treasure-chest or Pandora's Box.

You better believe it.

(nicked from 'Melody Maker', March 2 1991)