CURVE's new album, 'Cuckoo' is a blood-curdling riot of pain and paranoia. So, it would seem, are Curve's lives. As CAITLIN MORAN finds out when she talks to TONI HALLIDAY and DEAN GARCIA about intensity, extremity, bad relationships, heroin and car crashes.

'Koo Stark: KEVIN WESTENBERG

THE F***-U SOUND SYSTEM

YOU KNOW THAT SOUND. Walls of metal-on-metal, chainsaws-in-the-distance, blood-on-the-walls, head-on-the-door guitar. Death-funk things happening in the bass area. Drums thundering and firing like several civil wars on-going in an echoey adjoining bathroom. And that voice. Lisping over words of hate, smooth as barbed wire, retching over things that, on the whole, were probably best left unsaid.

"Have you got anything left to say before I shoot myself?"

Curve have a new album out. They nearly didn't. The very existence of the band is a hugely improbable case of Fate playing silly buggers - the Gods seeing just how far they could push it, just how much antagonism they could inject into a series of relationships and still produce records.

HATE

"THE day I moved into my new flat, Dean pulled the plug on the band," Toni says. We're in Camden's triumphantly shabby Good Mixer pub. The Mixer eschews such conventions as a beer garden or patio - instead the citizens of Camden can wander outside and appreciate an assortment of tramps and drunks, artistically arranged on the pavement.

"It totally ruined all my plans," Toni continues. "I had everything resting on our next band cheque. And as soon as the banks and building societies knew I was broke, they came rushing, claiming their pound of flesh. Like vultures."

At the moment, we're going back over the past - most of which you know. That Toni has had a recording contract since she was 14. That she left and joined several bands before State of Play, where she met Dean Garcia for the first time, decided he was a great guy and then, due to Dean breaking up the band, nearly lost the house she'd just moved into. About how they didn't talk for months, years - both too proud, too scared to approach the other.

"And then a copy of Toni's solo album appeared at the bottom of the stairs in my flat," Dean says. "And I was so annoyed with her for not having the guts to come upstairs and knock on my door; just hand it to me instead of running away..."

"But I didn't leave it there," Toni protests, swinging round and facing Dean. "I never went to your house, I knew nothing about it. Someone else left it there."

"Are you sure?" Dean asks.

"Yes - I didn't even know your address then. I knew you were in Hampstead somewhere, but I didn't know what road, what number."

BABIES HEADS

AT around this time, Toni was satisfying her craving to make music by creeping into the studio that her boyfriend, Alan Moulder (top producer who does Curve, the Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine - basically, anyone with that "Nyeep nyeep"), worked at during "Dead Time" - i.e. they'd start at midnight.

Because they were both too broke to afford tape, they'd take other peoples reel-to-reel demos, and cut the blank tape off the ends of the reel. Then they'd splice together all the fragments, and record on them until 8am, tidy up, and go and have a huge greasy breakfast ("with beans, lots of beans") before going to bed.

Still, there was still an uncomfortable silence in Toni and Dean's relationship until Julie, Dean's wife, invited Toni and Alan around to the Garcia house.

"When she said 'come at 6.30' I thought, 'This is going to be a long night'," Toni recalls. And it was. Through the comforting fug of a battle and a half of Jack Daniels, Dean and Toni's past was cut open, cleaned out, and stitched up again.

"We came to agreement about 1 am, probably at the highest pitch of drunkenness," Toni recalls. "And decided that, with all our emotions sorted out, we had to start sobering up. We had to eat. We started making spaghetti bolognese, realised there were no onions, so I got in the car - still drunk - and drove all round Ladbroke Grove trying to find onions. Found some in the end, in this shop under the flyover. They were massive. Like babies' heads."

DEATH BECOMES HER

DEAN and Toni are in the Maker discussing out-sized vegetables because, as important people who don't believe in poetry are wont to say, they "have product out"

The new album, "Cuckoo", is extreme. Curve have thrown everything into this - Dean sings, Toni plays guitar, everything is slowed down, speeded up, scratched, slurred, beaten up, broken down - whatever it took to get the sounds from their heads onto tape.

"Unreadable Communication" the closing song on side one, is possibly the most intense piece of music to be recorded this year. A doped-out breath of bass and Toni's hushed keening are slowly overtaken and drowned by a massive overload of guitar, which then crashes to an impossibly low rumble, "like it's been pushed off a cliff", Toni begs through clenched teeth. "I would like you to kiss me, to crush me, to lick me, until it drives me crazy". It's like My Bloody Valentine if they were evil. Curve are Wombadelica with '666' written on its forehead.

"It's music made by f***ed-up people," Dean says.

"Oh, f***ed-up is such a huge statement, though," Toni counters.

"I mean, we're f***ed up in certain areas. Our lives have been pretty extreme."

How?

"Well, all the stuff with our upbringing - " (Toni's dad abandoning her when she was 11, Dean's when he was younger). "My head seems to do weird things. I saw a dream analyst, he was saying you never die in your dreams, you never bleed in your dreams, you never kill anyone. I've killed people. I had this recurring dream where me and two other people I didn't know would be standing around a bed with a faceless person in it, and I'd be stabbing that person over and over again, I could feel the blade going through the bone, the sucking sound as I pulled it out..."

At this point Toni, who for the rest of the evening has been warm and charming, suddenly looks like the most terrifying person on earth. Her eyes are smoking with black hate and bloodlust. A week before, I'd asked her if she could ever kill anyone. Straight away she said, "Yes. Of course".

"But I know what it's like to die - to be that near," Toni continues. "The week the 'Blindfold EP' came out I was driving my sister up to see my mom, and we were bombing along doing 80mph when this girl just pulled out in front of me. And I thought, 'This is it. You're going to die now'. And I was so angry, I was like begging: 'I'm not ready yet, I'm just not ready yet. I haven't finished'. Then she hit me again, and the car went skidding round and round until it hit the crash barrier. I was screaming at my sister, 'Get OUT! Get OUT!' because I was convinced the petrol tank was going to ignite."

Dean has his hands over his face. The idea of Toni being in danger distresses him enormously.

"The woman in the other car staggered out. She'd fractured her skull and the blood was pumping out in time with her heartbeat, the blood was pouring down her face and congealing on her lips and eyelids. It was horrific."

Dean is now squirming around in his seat.

"Like I said," Toni finishes. "Pretty extreme."

HEROIN...AND SALT

POP stars who have such extreme lives - big highs and then big lows - usually tend to turn to something to level it all out. Toni sees where this line of questioning is going immediately.

"Oh, me and Dean are definitely so near to taking heroin," she says, as Dean looks on and nods. "It just sounds like our drug. We keep saying to each other, 'don't ever take it, not even once,' because we known that if we did, we'd be hooked. Totally hooked. I could get addicted to something that would make me feel that good. Y'know, for a while, I was so sure I was suffering from chemical depression, that I actually had a deficiency of whatever little secretion it is that makes us all happy. I saw a doctor, who said I wasn't, but l was like, 'Lay the salts on me'."

Salts?

"Yeah, lithium, which is what they prescribe, is just, basically, salt."

At this point l get the next round in, and splash out on a gross of Salt 'n' Vinegar Crinkle Cut while I'm about it.

LOVE

"DID you see Truman Capote on that David Frost programme?" Dean asks. It's now quite late in the evening. Toni occasionally starts giggling, and her hand movements are becoming more animated. Her face isn't as immovably beautiful as it seems in photographs - the eyes are warmer, more open. Dean has turned out to be one of the great Chaps of this world, spiritual brother of Justine from Elastica, Chris from Lush, Mat from Suede and Gail from Belly.

There is a small pile of Unpronounceable German Beer bottles stacked on the table, and four empty cigarette packets. Toni has just informed the table that Embassy cigarettes are the only vegan cigarettes, and that it's more environmentally sound to smoke spliffs because cigarette filter-tips never break down and rot.

Dean and Toni's friend, who has just joined us, has told us that Rizla's excuse for selling King Size papers is that they're for "Long-distance lorry drivers who roll up long cigarettes so they don't have to pull over and roll up as frequently". But Dean and Truman Capote (God-like American author of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and other such landmarks of sex, suss and spice)...

"Capote was breaking down emotions - basically into Love and Sex. If you're in love with someone, that can only be ultimately destructive, because you editorialise their personality - you ignore this facet, that facet. You try to change this part of them or that part. But with true love, pure love, you just accept every flaw and crack. And that pure love exists with friends. If you truly are friends with someone, you love them."

"OCCASIONALLY this can be a shitty business," Toni said earlier. "You can't really rely on anyone. And we don't want to."

"All we've got to rely on is each other, isn't it?" Dean said.

"And we do," Toni replied, twining her hands around Dean's arm and smiling. "We do."

(article nicked from 'Melody Maker', 18 September 1993)