"ARE WE CONTRIVED? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?"

Toni Halliday's perfectly calm. In fact, Toni Halliday's smiling. She's half an hour into a cosy chat about Curve this and Curve that and at last she's reached the inevitable. The conversation's gently meandered through how visual the music is, how her working relationship with Dean Garcia is miraculously prolific, and what a shock it was when "Frozen" went Top 40, but she knew all along that this was just small talk, the polite prelude to the bit we've all been waiting for.

Over the last few months she's often caught herself wondering how she'd react when the confrontation came, whether she'd be able to keep her temper, whether her resentment would betray her composure, whether she'd tremble or rage. Now the moment's arrived, she's actually relieved, more ready than she thought to answer her detractors.

The journalist is quoting a recent review with, she thinks, a little too much relish. The reviewer had written that her group stinks of fabrication and now the journalist is saying that, when Curve arrived with "Blindfold", it was as if from nowhere. He's saying that they were perfectly formed, that they received the best reviews of any band's debut since The Sugarcubes' "Birthday", that they were immediately elevated to front cover status and that they were so f***ing good, people started thinking that maybe they were too f***ing good to be true.

Toni is, of course, aware of all this. She's lived with the backlash since her past went public. When people discovered she was mates with Dave Stewart and recorded for his Anxious label, when it was revealed that it was Stewart who put her and Dean together and that they'd had bands and recording contracts before, suddenly it was as if they'd betrayed the indie ethic. People became suspicious of her motives and envisaged she was party to some sinister plot to syphon off the accoutrements of shoegazing - the noise, the shambling attitude of amazement - and take it, with the aid of fraudulently disguised musical expertise, to the stadiums.

People in other bands - bands she dearly loved - started saying Curve were fakers, doshed-up musos dabbling with the legacy of My Bloody Valentine not for art but for profit. They were saying Curve were opportunist and people even suspected that Stewart may have been behind the whole thing, a Svengali manipulating a new puppet while Eurythmics took a break. These people pointed to the fact that Curve emerged from a studio rather than the Old Trout in Windsor, and suddenly, instead of "Blindfold" being the searing sound that best embodied where 1991 was going, it became a Frankenstein's monster cynically assembled from the parts of others' inspiration, a summation rather than an ascending star.

The Stud Brothers, who were first to respond ecstatically to "Blindfold" when it was released, went back into print to point out that it didn't matter a f*** whether Curve wore labcoats or loonpants, they made great records and that was that. But the little assassinations continued, the snide asides in other bands' interviews, the dubious reviews... Toni tried not to let it get to her but it was hard. She had to bide her time, await her opportunity. Now she's saying: "Are we contrived? What does that mean?"

The best form of defence is attack.

"IT'S because we weren't normal. We hadn't just left school with no background and no life other than the band. Actually, I think it's quite normal for people to be suspicious. What happened was that people just listened to our record as a record and didn't make any jugements about the people behind it. They went with the record before they'd done any research to find out who Dean and I were, which is exactly right - this is the way it should be. But then they found out who we were and they went, 'F***ing hell! What the f*** have we done? Are we gonna end up with egg on our faces?'"

Toni Halliday laughs, she swears like a docker.

"It's just not relevant... no, well it is relevant and it shouldn't be. I mean, people have every right to be suspicious of us because Dean and I have made a lot of public mistakes and we are older and we have had a life. But what's wrong with being good enough? That's what I want to know. I've never understood what's wrong with the fact that Dean and I were good enough to have another record deal before we did the Curve records, or that I had a record deal with my first band, The Uncles, even before that? What's wrong with that?"

Dean Garcia is, for the most part, happy to sit and nod Toni silent encouragement. But just now he wants to make it clear that no major rethink occurred between what Toni and he were doing before with their band State Of Play and what Curve are doing with their new EP, "Cherry". It was, and still is, he says, an organic growth: "I just know that, if we hadn't done all those things, we wouldn't be where we are now. Those are very relevant things in our lives, they're very important."

The journalist says that most people retain a very romantic notion of talent - that it is somehow best God-given or arrived at accidentally. This may be blithering nonsense but a band like Ride, just leaving school and struggling over their first chord changes until they somehow alight on "Chelsea Girl" seems a lot more trustworthy than a couple who've been around the block a few times happening to hit upon similar sounds simultaneously.

"Ah, but I don't think that's accidental," says Toni who, at 27, is not old enough to be Mark Gardner's mum by any stretch of the imagination. "If anything, I think that whole thing's quite contrived. I mean, when I was at school and punk was happening, there were certain people who were natural punk rockers, who were just like that all the time and, when punk arrived, they didn't look any f***ing different to what they'd looked like three years before. They'd fallen into their time while all these other people who dressed up in the clothes and did the thing, they weren't really that interested, it was just a thing to go along with, just the right record to carry round under your arm.

"It's the same now. I think if you were at college or school now and you were thinking of setting up a band, you'd want your woolly jumper and you'd go and buy yourself a Jaguar guitar and plug into an AC30... That's not accidental."

The journalist points out that there's a beautiful irony to Curve's current predicament. Chapterhouse, who are assumed to be of the same ilk as Curve, are currently getting it in the neck for being Southern softies who know nothing of life outside home and college. Toni, on the other hand, comes from Sunderland and has been about a fair bit. She's paid her dues but people are saying she didn't pay the right ones.

"That's very narrow-minded," laughs Toni. "It doesn't really matter. What matters is whether you can communicate with people on both levels - live and in a writing situation - and I'm really happy with how we communicate on both levels.

"To be quite honest, we had so much good press that I think it's quite well balanced now to have some people who are not convinced. I mean, if everyone was going round saying we were f***ing brilliant all the time, it would be like the worst nightmare on the planet and you'd be sitting here talking to two complete assholes. The main thing is we're not frightened. The one thing that's really saved us is our age. We're old enough not to take any notice when people say stuff like, 'Oh they're not a real live band because they use machines'. Our response is: 'Well? So f***ing what? This is the future. This is what it's about". We're confident in ourselves and we believe in ourselves. And unless people have been incredibly nasty, other people's opinions just don't affect us, they're not important at all."

So, the journalist asks, you don't think Curve are somehow typical...

Toni laughs: "There's nothing typical about me."

MUCH of Toni's atypical life has been well documented - how her roguish father left her and her mother in some Mediterranean port, how Toni met Dave Stewart after expressing her admiration for Annie Lennox in an interview, how she and Dean fell in and out and in again. What people seem to have missed somehow are the formative years, the years that shaped the vitriol splits from nearly every Curve record, the anger behind the new "Die Like A Dog", the edge that, contrary to popular belief, gives Curve a glamour lacking in their contemporaries.

Toni was drinking alcohol at three years old - they do that on the continent. She was a regular in Sunderland pubs at 13, plastered in make-up, conning the barmen into serving her halves. On her 15th birthday she went out with her mates and got so plastered she was bedridden for three days afterwards with alcohol poisoning, puking purple - Pernod and black.

She has to watch her drinking these days. Her mum is an aggressive drunk, still bitter at her husband's desertion. And Toni scared herself on Curve's first tour.

"It was just so mind-bogglingly f***ing boring, just slog. For the one hour that you're on stage which is just totally inspirational and wonderful, there's the other 23 hours when you're hyping yourself up, just trying to think of ways to fill the time. I'm not really into getting completely pissed out of my mind every night, going out and picking up tons of people and clubbing it but that's what we did on the last tour and when we came back, we were both ill. I mean, really sick in the mind. I was seven stone, I was sick, really ill. We were drinking like shit, just completely stupid.

"This time we thought, 'What can we do to try and stop this thing happening?' because the kind of tour that we wanna do next year splits bands up - y'know, they turn on themselves because they're so bored and there's nothing else to do so they just start going at each other. We want to do a lot of touring but we don't want it to become the bane of our lives so Dean's idea is to use the time in a creative way so that we don't end up hating each other."

Years in Sunderland pubs and watching other bands fail have taught Toni Halliday. Curve will spend their spare time on tour next year writing their second LP. She's not about to blow it now - this is all she's ever wanted to do, since as far back as she can remember.

While Dean was at school, obsessed by the joy of putting sound over sound on a tape machine, Toni was following the runaway route to stardom.

"The first records I was ever exposed to were my parents' and I remember Leonard Cohen making me realise how powerful music is because I used to sit and watch my mother cry to Leonard Cohen records. Even as a young child, I thought, 'What is this stuff that makes people cry? I'd love to make people cry'. That was my initial understanding of music - that you could get to people in such ways that you could make them cry.

"And then, when I grew up in the Seventies, I saw all this footage on TV of The Doors and that, and I saw how someone could get up and make whole crowds of people go so totally f***ing wild that they wanted to take off all their clothes and just lie in front of this person. And I realised you could push people emotionally and I became fascinated with how Jim Morrison got into this total manipulation of audiences and how he'd research it. It became quite an obsession with me and then punk came along and I got completely sucked in.

"I'll never forget listening to John Peel and hearing 'Love in a Void'. It just took my f***ing brain out. Then I started listening to Patti Smith and, to some extent, Debbie Harry, and they became kind of figureheads to me - y'know, because they were just going, 'It's my life and I'll do what the f*** I want!' I got into the sex and the glamour and the overall kind of... dignity. Yeah, dignity because, even though it was debauched and in the gutter, it was really proud. It was arrogant. It was enormous. This was something that took over the whole f***ing world.

"At 11 I was already into the glamour. I had my black eyebrows. I remember the first ever picture I saw of Siouxsie she had on an SS outfit with crotchless knickers and peek-a-boo bra and suspenders and a Nazi armband and it was just like... you just can't ignore stuff like that can you? And that's when I got into the sex, into the red lips of it.

"It was really inspiring and that was it. When I was 11 years old, I knew I wanted to be a singer and I told my mum I was gonna leave home when I was 16 and go to London and I did. I just knew..."

THE new Curve EP is called "Cherry". It was going to be "Cherry Blade" but Toni discovered there was already a band with that name ("A f***ing great name incidentally"). There are four tracks - "Clipped", "Die Like A Dog", "Galaxy" and "Cherry", all very different, all indisputably Curve. During "Clipped" Toni sings, "There's no truth. There's no lies". This is about as good a philosophy as any other the journalist has ever heard. Too many people want absolutes and Curve are wise enough to know absolutes absolutely don't exist.

They know nothing is pure. Londonbeat sold millions of records on Anxious last year and that's what, indirectly, finances them. They were going to call their debut album, which they're mixing right now with Flood, "Pubic Fruit" but figured there might be problems with record stores. They are going to call it "Doppelgänger" now because Toni likes the analogy between the legend - breathing life into clay - and recording - breathing life into recycled vinyl.

The journalist says it doesn't really matter what the f*** it's called because no one can ever make out what Toni's singing about anyway. There's an impression of menace, of anger being vented, anxiety assuaged but that's about it.

Toni's delighted: "Hahahaha! To me, as a listener, all the records that I prefer to listen to don't actually tell me anything at all. What they do is make me think... they tag you and spark something, a memory, they put you in a place , take you back or take you forward or keep you in the same place. They're not specifics, they're not telling a story, they're not doing anything. They're just lines that strike you. I work in a very similar way.

"People always say to me, 'Why are the vocals always mixed so low in the balance? Why can't you have the vocals a bit louder? No one can understand what you're saying unless they play the record about 15 times'. And I say, 'Exactly!' By then it's too late, you've got 'em!"

THE journalist wants to know if she's saying anything, if she has a purpose.

"Well, I feel very aggressive towards a lot of things actually, very general things, like the way people talk to each other. The makes me really angry. And just how much living in London successfully actually takes out of a human being if you're to maintain any kind of balance in your life. People aren't rational and it has nothing to do with reality. A perfect example of this was when I was in traffic the other day and this guy started rolling back on my car and then revving forward and then rolling back again. He was about this far from my front bumper, so I beep my horn, just once and he starts screaming, 'F*** you!' and getting all abusive and I'm thinking, 'Is that f***ing normal or what?'

"The way that people react to one another makes me really angry because there's like no real sense to it, there's nothing vaguely normal about it. That's the sort of thing that seeps onto our records.

"Is that contrived? I don't think so. We react to things day-by-day, as we go along. We don't do radio-mixes, we make the records and make them available and then, if people want us, if Radio 1 want us or 'Top Of The Pops', they come to us. We don't go to them. They come to our party. We're not interested in theirs. Like, I'm not going to sing live over a taped backing on 'Top Of The Pops' - that would destroy the whole mesh of the record, the whole point. We either do it all live or we mime it all and have fun with that or we don't do it at all.

"Dean and I make records to be bought, not to be sold. That's very important to us, to make records that we want to make rather than to make records for other people. And if they do well, it encourages us to stay on our path, to want to dig deeper, to want to do more and pursue... something. And most of all, it encourages us not to be frightened."

Curve contrived? No fear.

(article nicked from 'Melody Maker', 26 October 1991)