TONI HALLIDAY'S IMAGE GOES BEFORE HER. Today, though, Toni Halliday looks relaxed. Then she reads the review of the Jesus and Mary Chain 'Sound Of Speed' album in last month's Indiecator.

"What the fuck does Lesley Tibet mean 'we built a whole career around their guitar riffs'? I wish people would get their fucking facts right!"

Whoooah!!!... Toni is in the mood for going for the jugular. I decide not to remind her of the fact that on several occasions she has lauded the JAMC as her top band. She flicks over the page. I see the image of the Curve "Radio One Sessions" leaping out at me laughing it's head off. That's because it knows and I know that the rating is only a degree above total crap. I reach for my penknife and look at each limb in turn deciding which one I should cut off and offer the Ice Maiden first as Toni turns and looks at me with those laser eyes and set lips. The mouth opens, time to die.

"That's fair. We never wanted it released in the first place." She laughs. The sun is shining.

Toni Halliday is a strange person. She is also very funny, very open, intimidating, overpowering, shy, coy, dangerous, manic, glamorous, laddish, intelligent... she is many things, or so she would have you believe. Sitting cross-legged, inches from her, on a floor in a London studio it's hard not to believe. As one half of the demonic duo responsible for the dark matter that was 'Doppelgänger' could be no one-dimensional being. This has got to be living dark and light and anybody that has delved deep into that first album will know why.

"There are no truly genuine people in our world. How do you know what is going on in their minds and bodies because people are really great secret keepers." she says, smiling. I feel she's testing the water. This is the enigma of Curve, people are never sure whether to take them for real.

All that angst, on-the-verge-of-collapse tension that pervades everything they have done from 'Blindfold' to 'Sandpit' to 'Faît Accompli' has been constantly tainted by a nagging doubt that somewhere, someplace, someone has manufactured them. They are too good to be true.

"Look, we are imaginative people with three dimensional people personalities. I slob around in jeans but I also live like this, and this and this," she says, her arms spreading wide. "If you can't bear to see the same picture of Curve over and over again nor can I. All I know is that Dean and I's time together will be spent cutting off the short wires that aren't connected."

Curve spent most of last year getting 'connected' - in Japan, the US, wherever and whenever - which with hindsight ended up making those short wires live and raw.

JAPAN: "Basically, I got completely pissed every night to numb myself to the place. I found the whole way that they treated women over there completely offensive because I can't handle a country where they call women over 25 'Christmas cakes'. The woman who was our translator was crying, nearly screaming for us to take her with us when we were leaving, but what could we do? In the end I just flew out of there screaming 'NEVER AGAIIIN!!!' "

AMERICA: "The women in the music industry I met seemed to have been bred in a certain way to satisfy their men. Maybe that is what the men want once they have got their cars and their houses. Somebody who isn't too demanding and is ready to feed their ego."

Japan was full of clubs where they used cattle prods to get people out; America was a spread of Mid Western towns full of Lynchian characters and sycophants, bleating inanaties 'Oh gee! What a neat show' after they had sweated buckets and given their all. Toni decided that in America the eternal thought was "Hi we love you subtitled: what can we get from you?". Japan and America welcomed Curve with open arms, Toni and Dean toed the line but always wanted to get back to the safe haven of North London. An experience to eat, to digest, to be sick on. These are the negatives and it is on the negative that Curve's music breeds no matter what they may say. Add it all up, store it and use it. 'Missing Link', their first offering from the album 'Cuckoo', was a reaction to the shit they encountered in Japan. A heavy slab of Ministry-type guitar wrench it seems to dig deeper than earlier offerings, an exorcism of the darkest kind. It is also more focused than the wash of sound that Curve can indulge in.

'I had a heart but I buried it some place / I had a brain but my body won the race.'

"We had just come back from the tour and it was exactly how we felt at the time. We decided to crank everything up and let all the anger, tension, frustration out. It was an exorcism of sorts."

I believe that Toni genuinely thought that but the sincerity overwhelms or even blinds. No matter, Curve like to sound off.

"Of course, because there are a lot of things to sound off about. That's not to say that we are the same people because Dean and I have completely different philosophies. Dean believes the world is run by love, I believe it is run by hate."

That's a heavy burden to carry around. Isn't all the cynicism starting to hurt?

"I wouldn't say that I was cynical, more disillusioned. If you really want to understand the meaning of 'disillusioned' look up the word and it says that it is a 'freeing of illusion'. I am freeing myself of illusion, making my own decisions on the positive and negative sides of reality"

Reality is a pretty nasty thing most of the time.

"I don't want to be frightened, I want to come to terms with my demons. It's the same with Dean. When you reach that deep inside of you it can all just come flooding out of your subconscious. The whole process of writing can be horrific because you can get so far down there you end up not liking yourself and things that people said to you when you were three years old take on massive proportions. They might have been innocent then but they ain't now. While I was writing this album when I had time to kill I did anything so I wouldn't have to deal with myself."

Much has been written about the sex and lipstick image of Toni - the topping of the NME readers sexiest object rubbish. Another carefully orchestrated move by Curve or another one of the personas? Toni flashes that look but this time, this year and in this place there is a different Toni.

"If somebody had asked me that two years ago, I'd have gone for them but I feel a lot different now. I still go through the same shit in my work but I have learnt that in answering those sort of criticisms I have learnt the difference between self assertion and aggression." She is starting to sound like she is mellowing, "Dean has always said that there are more important things than Curve in life and I was the one that said 'More! More! Let's do more!' But I've realised in the last year that a career isn't everything and I don't want to turn around and there is no fucker there. My ambition in life now is to be surrounded by fantastic people, so that when it comes time to label myself in the old folks home I can say 'yeah I had an enjoyable life'."

The tours; the dribbling adulation; the Dave Stewart proteges; pseudo Goth criticisms; the 'falling apart not so beautifully' on stage at last years Glastonbury - Toni and Dean saw more action last year than many people see in a lifetime and it seems to have had a sobering effect. After seven months of soul searching and writing in their Kilburn studio 'bolthole' they have come up with their second album 'Cuckoo' which Toni says is going to "scare her more than Dopplegänger ever did." Curve are preparing to prove that we should believe in them more than we ever did. Will you believe?

(article nicked from 'Indiecator', dated August 1993)