ZITTY, TEENAGED AND FRESH FROM A GARAGE THEY ARE NOT; AS FOR BEING INDIE, ASK DAVE STEWART. STEPHEN DALTON SEES WHAT IT TAKES TO LURVE CURVE

Boy meets girl, forms brilliant pop group and demolishes entire music industry. It's an old story and Curve singer Toni Halliday refuses to retell it for the 100th time this week Instead, she hands responsibility to new recruit Alex.

"Dean and Toni have been friends for a long time, then they bad a big bust-up because that's what friends do, then they got back together and decided to form the most kicking rock'n'roll band in the whole world."

..and they lived happily ever after? If only things were that simple. Curve's high-speed ascent to indie-god status has made runaway success look easy, but the band did extensive homework before first blasting into public view with March's highly-rated debut EP Blindfold. Four slices of spine-chilling noise, the finest of which - Ten Little Girls' - featured guest rapper JCOO1 and instilled the fear of God in everyone who watched it set Snub TV alight.

Fresh and furious thunderbolts from heaven? An attractive fantasy, but Curve core members Toni Halliday and Dean Garcia enjoyed long and winding pop careers before arriving at this latest project. Both are long-time pals of Dave Stewart, to whose RCA-linked Anxious label Curve are signed. It was Stewart who persuaded Toni to leave her native Sunderland and seek fortune in London, playing benign godfather while she floundered in MCA art-pop twosome The Uncles before introducing her to Dean - former Eurythmics bassist who toured the world with Dave and Annie in 1983 and played on their Touch and Be Yourself Tonight albums.

In 1986, the demonic duo joined ex-Eurythmic Olle Romö and Feargal Sharkey's former drummer Julie Fletcher as State Of Play, a dreary techno-funk outfit who looked alarmingly like Hazel O'Connor's awful Breaking Glass punk band fronted by Roxette's Marie. The crazily-coiffured session crew released two singles - 'Natural Colour' ("negro fun pop": Mansfield Chronicle) plus 'Rock-a-Bye Baby' ("doing wallpaper an injustice": Halifax Evening Courier) - and what Toni calls a "hateful little album" entitled Balancing The Scales. Signed to Virgin, but with an Anxious publishing deal and handled by Eurythmics manager Kenny Smith, the band split so acrimoniously that Dean and Toni hardly spoke for five years.

"It was all for the wrong reasons," recalls soft-spoken Dean, a 30-something married man with two children. "All very manufactured by the management company and record label, everybody was put together in this package just because they were talented. It must work, you know, but it just didn't."

Moving to Anxious in earnest, Toni's solo career took a nosedive with 1988's pedestrian adult-pop LP Hearts And Handshakes. Both she and Dean fell back on transatlantic session work while the Curve Master Plan slowly took shape. No doubt advised and encouraged by her long-time boyfriend Alan Moulder, who co-produced both Blindfold and current Curve EP Frozen after working with the likes of Ride, My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus And Mary Chain, Toni identified recent trends toward one-syllable melodic noise bands and set about constructing the perfect pop vehicle. Almost too perfect.

Several months before the first Curve release, Toni consulted indie insiders about the best press officers, pluggers and contacts required to hit the right targets. And she got them. Third time lucky or lust for fame at any cost?

"She needs to be successful," confirms a close confidante of Toni's. "She never wasted any time and she's always been clever enough to look around and understand what is happening."

But doesn't all this suggest that Curve are cynical dilettantes, surgically striking the battlefield of modern pop with the most marketable package they could contrive? Thunderous pre-programmed percussion and wildly overloading guitars, not to mention menacingly sweet vocals - is this a feast for hungry hordes of indie-dance fans and oodles of much-needed credibility for the label that gave us Londonbeat?

"What's wrong with being cynical?" enquires Toni's faceless friend. "You might be totally naive when you are 18, but there is a point you reach in music where you have a choice between pure and cynical... there is a bit of cynicism there, but there is still something creative and spontaneous. Who would think about getting associated with Dave Stewart to make an indie record?"

Fair point. But some observers naturally suspect the bearded superstar's money and muscle of opening doors for Curve that most indie hopefuls could never even get near. For many, Stewart is Punk Traitor numero uno.

"This really gets on my tits," Toni growls, "because he's a wonderful man and he's sunk half his bloody fortune into this record company. He has been told to stop by his accountant or else he'll go completely and utterly bankrupt, and he still carries on! All the money he's made from this so-called artistic industry has been sunk back into the music. Name one other pop star who has done that."

Maybe so, but few bands start life with the luxury of their own 16-track studio in their basement or the confidence to drop nonchalant statements like "we just felt we needed major distribution, especially in Europe." Toni protests that Anxious is just like any indie label, but RCA's distribution clout has made a world of difference to Curve's selling potential.

To be fair, nobody can buy the sort of hysterical attention Curve have attracted. "We thought we'd get completely slagged and everybody would hate us," whispers Dean, the eternal pessimist. "But all we did was send a record, a white label, to a few press people and expected it to be completely ignored. Everything has come from that... there's no money behind it; anybody can send a record to the press."

What about the music? "I just get a drum machine pattern going and Toni will sing a melody she loves about something she feels for. It's not contrived at all."

If Curve are contrived, they have contrived themselves just like thousands of other bands. No shadowy Svengali hovers in the background because, as Toni remarks, "record companies and managers are just not capable of doing that". The fate of State Of Play proves her point amply.

It seems the duo have not attempted to conceal their pop skeletons, as writers who conducted the first Curve interviews can testify. However, Anxious were extremely reluctant to supply press cuttings from Toni's solo career for this interview while the singer's file with her former press officer has "mysteriously disappeared, which sounds very Toni." Curiouser and curiouser.

Toni herself is perverse enough to make a true pop star. A scrawny but photogenic 26-year-old with bottle-black hair who frequently draws (slightly exaggerated) comparisons with Beatrice Dalle, she spent her bohemian childhood trailing around the Mediterranean with a wayward hippie father who walked out when she was just eight. In other interviews, he was a "common thief" and "con man" robbing from rich people's yachts; in ours, he becomes a "socialist" and "free-thinker" liberating property to feed his hungry family.

Similarly, she claims Curve is a five-way democracy but cuts short our photo session before new permanent members Debbie Smith, Alex Mitchell and ex-Blockheads drummer Steve Monti can pose alongside her and Dean. She also denies sex symbol status but pouts alluringly from the foreground of every band picture.

It's no wonder some pundits are still undecided about Curve. The NME, after claiming the band "stink of fabrication", grudgingly made 'Frozen' Single Of The Week. The undiminished brilliance of their second EP has dampened any serious backlash potential for the present, while their recent national tour has confirmed them as Britain's brightest, darkest pop hopes.

Curve's music speaks for itself. All they need to overcome now is snobbery and suspicion, as Dean knows well: "there's too much to do with pose, liking the right people and not listening to the wrong things. The point about us, and hopefully lots of other bands, is we don't care about fucking revolution because that's fucking dead. You can just go up and play the best you can."

(article nicked from 'Vox', July 1991)