THE FIRST time Curve singer Toni Halliday played anyone her latest single, the 'Blindfold EP', she was convinced her life as a popstar was finished.

"We were just certain everyone would hate it," admits the woman who describes her music as a bag of nails with lemon and double cream topping on it.

"I was in Los Angeles and we'd just finished recording 'Ten Little Girls', 'No Escape From Heaven' and 'The Ice That Melts The Tip', all of which were done with extreme angst and felt very angry. So we just expected the worst when we played it to Dave Stewart (former Eurythmic and head of Anxious Records) in my car.

"The tape was distorting terribly, the bass drum was rocking the roof and I was going, I'm really, really sorry. I mean, by then we'd decided it was so bad that we were going to ask him to release us from our contract so we could go and find someone somewhere who might possibly understand it.

"Failing that, we'd decide to release it ourselves. Anything to get it out in some form."

IT'S NOT surprising that Toni and her current partner, guitarist/noiseman Dean Garcia, both self-confessed pessimists, expected things to go wrong for Curve.

Back in the mid-'80s, they'd seen the worst of the music business when their former band, State Of Play, was roundly shafted after producing one rather appalling single.

"It was a disaster," explains Dean quietly. "We were in heavy amounts of debt to both the record company and the management and it just became too much. People started invading our world trying to force us to do what they wanted and we just freaked out."

The situation was one of archetypal music biz interference. As their debut single flopped, the record company rushed in demanding control of producers, engineers, studios and ultimately the songs themselves.

"After a while they finally came out with it and said, Right, you've made your dinky record on your own, now let's do the real one and disco it up."

Ultimately the pressure became too much, the band split and Toni and Dean communicated through a variety of increasingly hostile lawyers' letters. They may have kept in touch but, until last summer, they hadn't actually spoken to each other for almost five years.

FORTUNATELY FOR Curve, Dave Stewart is no fool. He loved the record, perhaps he saw a little of The Eurythmics' strange intensity in its dark, mood-filled tracks. Certainly 'Ten Little Girls', 'I Speak Your Every Word', 'Blindfold' and 'No Escape From Heaven' share his early records' heavy emotional atmosphere.

'Ten Little Girls', already a favourite on Snub TV, Peel and more recently Mark Goodier's show, is particularly impressive. Dean's programmed drums create a raw percussive wall similar to that on early Sisters' records, over which his guitar screams as Toni's voice washes outwards.

The whole thing continues gathering pace until the chorus' manic climax, "Don't feel guilty / Don't go crazy / Don't get paranoid with me", rolls out over you. Just as you begin to succumb to its feeling of immediate threat, it cuts down, Toni's voice disappears and future rap star JC 001 lashes out with a typically brutal mouthful.

It's a near perfect single. Just vicious enough to tempt the underground, just poppy enough to tame the mainstream and intense enough to ensure that no one who hears it is likely to dismiss it. And in a year that has already seen the most eclectic charts this side of the '70s, from Enigma's Gregorian Chants to My Bloody Valentine's guitar trips, it seems destined for some sort of major success.

YET FOR a record with that much potential it's extraordinarily personal. Was it hard getting that feeling onto record?

"Yes, but that's the only thing that's worth giving," says Toni emphatically. "That's all that people are interested in. There's no point in making records if you don't feel anything. We take the risk that people are going to understand us because they'll all have been through the same feelings of crisis that are on the record.

"'Ten Little Girls' is a view of someone else's life, a person who is very close to me who has this fascinating attitude to life, which I could never have. When she was younger she thought that she could rule the world, like she was Queen Shit, no one could tell her what to do, So you'd ring her up and go, I'm really depressed and she'd go, Oh, I'm in a really good mood so f**k off and don't tell me about it.

"At first it seems unbelievable, but in the end you realise that she's just being totally honest about it, because really you do want to say, Don't bog me down with your problems. I know you're my mate but today all these wonderful things have happened to me and I'm feeling really good. The single's not as blunt as that, but I thought it was quite a funny thing to write about.

The strangest thing about Curve, however, is not their ability to put their emotions on record, rather it's that while the 'Blindfold EP' is full of raging emotion, Toni and Dean are perfectly normal, well adjusted people. How do they cope?

"Personally I don't find it unusual," explains Toni, "because I'm suspicious of most people I see walking down the street. They could all be mass murderers in their their own homes or psychotic.

"Everyone has psychotic tendencies in their personality and I think that everyone would really like to let go and show the world what was going on inside them and it would be very different from the outside person. Most people, given the choice, would be more psychotic and this record is just a subtle way of being honest about it."

Honesty in the charts again. The mind boggles.

(article nicked from 'Sounds', March 9 1991)