So you still think Curve aren't 4 Real? So you still suspect they're an opportunist muso and a fetching sex-goth who went riff-shopping for off-the-peg angst and then fashioned themselves a juicy 15 minutes of music press affection?

Well listen to this: "Saying sorry will never be enough... I have never known such a liar... We won't be happy till we kill one another... You told me I know nothing at all and I believed you... I am finished with you, please be finished with me... I am here to be nobody's fool... Have you anything left to say before I shoot myself?..."

These are random samples from 'Cuckoo', Curve's second studio LP. It's not an easy ride. Claustrophobic, tense, distrustful, scared, vengeful... there's absolutely no doubt that 'Cuckoo' was made by people with terrible problems. It's painful. It hurts, like eavesdropping on someone else's brutal domestic trauma. It's all knotted-up. There's not a moment of breathing space. There's no peace at all. It's scalded with doubt and recriminations. I'm not sure I'll ever listen to it again. I can't live with that much honesty.

"I know what you mean," laughs Toni Halliday. "I can't listen to the whole record either. Real life seeped in. It's exposed... vulnerable.

"The thing with Dean and me is that we have no idea why we're doing this. We have no idea why we write, what it means and what is going on. No idea at all! With this album, apart from knowing we wanted to keep it within Curve territory yet broaden it more musically, we were completely in the dark. Sometimes I write things and I have no idea where it's come from or anything. And this particular record became like a premonition. Things happened after I wrote them. Scary things. Things it's still hard to deal with.

"During the making of this record, I had to readdress a lot of things in my life - MY LIFE, not Curve or anything, just ME! Like, why I couldn't sit in a room with myself, or why I couldn't focus on the television or read a newspaper or anything for more than a few seconds. And, by doing that, I started to realise loads and loads of different things. And when we came to mix the record, suddenly I couldn't even go into the studio because the lyrics were just too... like... 'Oh my God! I suddenly realise what that means and I don't wanna deal with that'. The record was like an awful premonition."

What are you talking about? What are you really saying?

"OK, I'm not gonna mess around about it. Alan and I went through a very, very hard last six months. We split up."

ALAN IS Alan Moulder who, along with U2 collaborator Flood and Dean Garcia, are the backroom team who make Curve happen for Toni in the studio. Toni and Alan have been lovers for years but, during the making of 'Cuckoo', that all fell apart, creating what Dean now refers to quite charmingly as "quite an awkward situation". It got so that Toni and Alan couldn't be in the same room together, so Toni did the only thing she could. She walked.

"I was perfectly prepared to scrap the album," says Dean. "It became utterly dispensable. All I was concerned about was that Toni was OK and able to continue in the future. I didn't care whether the album came out or not. You can't believe the uncomfortableness of it all. And, in the end, that's why we decided to go with it and finish what we were doing; because we liked that feeling on the record."

It was touch and go for a while. Toni took a month and a half off while Dean and Alan mixed. She went back to Sunderland, back home. And while they sent her mixes to listen to, she tried to trace the roots of her disaster.

"I couldn't understand why I couldn't keep a grip on a fantastic loving relationship with somebody who I'm madly in love with. I mean, there's no pissing around about it. I had to find out why I had been feeling all these terrible, disconcerting things. Like, why I absolutely cannot stand humiliation of any kind."

Who can?

"No no no. You don't understand. I just see red. I could pick up a bottle and just smash it in someone's face because of it. If someone tries to humiliate me in any kind of way in front of other people, I could easily kill them. So I started thinking about it, really thinking and I realised I behaved that way because I watched my father do it to my mother and I just can't bear it."

Slowly, Toni traced other causes of unhappiness back to her past. She realised that she couldn't remember her childhood, couldn't remember the little girl she once was, what she looked like, what she thought or felt. It was as if someone had videoed her childhood, stolen her soul on to the tape and then systematically erased it.

"I have no sense of roots or culture or anything. I'm like this void kind of baby that doesn't really come from anywhere or anything. And I just felt this massive urge to go and seek that out and find all my little brothers and sisters all over the world and just go and relate to something that was mine and came from me."

What she discovered were character traits in the female side of her family that went back four generations; traits of weakness and betrayal and the inability to face facts. She also discovered a void where her father should have been. He had been an adventurer who upped-sticks when she was small, sold off everything and took his family to sea, living a swashbuckling life of fantasy piracy and, she suspects, petty crime before just going ashore one day and not coming back.

"I let my dad steal my heart and, when he left, he took it with him. He just dropped off the face of the earth. Gone. And he's still alive. I wish he was f---ing dead to be honest, and then it would be easier to handle."

When Toni's father left, her mother brought the kids back to Sunderland and then, according to her daughter, "she went into total emotional shutdown, which just proved to me that my mum loved my dad more than she loved us. She was sick, she was ill, she needed help. I'm not blaming her at all. I did, I blamed my mother for years but now I don't. That's what I had to go and do."

Toni's now back with Alan and making a concerted effort to find her father. He was last heard of in jail in Crete. She's contacted the foreign office and taken ads out in newspapers in Malta and all the other major Mediterranean ports. If he turns up, she says, she hasn't a clue what she'll do.

While Toni is explaining all this, explaining why this record will make you flinch and why it just couldn't be any other way. Dean is quietly nodding his assent. It seems he understands Toni deeply. When she says her mother cut her father from all the family photos, Dean laughs quietly. He too lost his father. Never even knew him. Has never seen him. His mother burned all photos of his father before Dean was born.

So 'Cuckoo' was cathartic?

"Oh, I dunno," laughs Toni. "I saved myself. I don't think any record could ever save me. I've learned to let go. To forgive. I felt like Joan Of Arc but I just didn't know when to take my armour off. I had no idea. Now I think I do."

As evidence of her new-found strength, Toni offers the example of a new song she's just written with Dean. They were pissing about, doing an acoustic Leonard Cohen pastiche and it turned out seriously good. The first line is, "I am me and that ain't so bad". "So I finally came to terms with it," she laughs. "I don't think what's gone on is anything special. I just think that most people get to an age in their life when they have to deal with all their own shit or else they just end up getting cancerous. I mean, they already know that cancer is an emotionally-triggered disease and if you don't deal with the sins of your past and you can't sleep at night because you hate yourself so much, you're in serious danger physically as well as mentally and emotionally.

"I mean, I'd blush at night before I went to bed thinking of things I'd said to people. You must have heard this a million times, but I think most artists think that they're fakes just waiting to be discovered and at any minute somebody is gonna find out. I mean, there's no such thing as a genuine person. They've done studies on it. There's no such thing. So it came down to, 'Well, what do I feel comfortable with?'. I've learned that much. And I learned it from studying behaviour patterns. You have to deal with your past before you can deal with the future or the present."

WHAT TONI and Dean have deduced from the past about the future of Curve is that they won't be doing the big tours any more. Toni calls it running away and Dean misses his daughter too much. They've also slain their superstitions.

"I used to think life was full of these weird coincidences," says Toni, "but now I realise that it all becomes evident in time."

She offers the album title as an example. It all began when Curve's fan-club secretary kept hassling them for a question to set for a competition. Exasperated, Toni pulled one at random from Trivial Pursuit. It was 'Who wrote One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest?'.

Cuckoo's Nest was, ahem, coincidentally, one of Toni's favourite ever films. She'd seen it over and over when it was released in 1975, and like everyone else, she'd fallen in love with Jack Nicholson's Oscar-winning, spunky McMurphy, liberating the other loonies from the fascist grip of Nurse Ratched.

She went and watched it again, and a week later, out of the blue, label boss and longtime friend Dave Stewart gave her a bootleg of Ken Kesey tripping. Kesey had written Cuckoo's Nest in 1963 and, on the back of the infamy, had launched his Acid Tests on the American West Coast. Along with his Merry Pranksters, he wired up an old school bus, painted it psychedelic with the word FURTHUR on the front, took to the road and sowed the seeds of the hippy counter-culture.

Hounded by the law for his very public espousal of illegal substances - specifically marijuana and LSD - he became an outlaw hero and, although that's all quietened down over the decades, he still became a kind of totem for the Curve record.

"Finding out about Ken Kesey brought it all home to me what it is that we do. We say all this stuff and we do all these things because that is really our job description, isn't it? To delve further. Go on a trip and come back to tell the story. All writers have to do that. To go further - to points that they don't even like. They find things that they don't like about themselves and they have to deal with it. And you do that willingly. You say, 'OK, even if I'm gonna f--- my mind up, I'm gonna do this thing because it's part of what I do'."

Discovering Kesey gave Toni an artistic agenda within which to place what was happening to her emotionally. It legitimised the record, so they called it 'Cuckoo' and decided to segue some of Kesey's tripped-out ramblings between the tracks.

They eventually found him on a farm in Idaho, sent him the album and asked his permission to use the samples. He gave his blessing but, when they asked him to sign a standard release, Kesey declined. He'd never signed anything in his life and wasn't about to, he said, and suggested they just forge his signature like everybody else does. Curve were well up for it, but the American record company freaked, and so there is no Ken Kesey on 'Cuckoo', although Toni's still threatening to release bootleg copies including the segues.

YOUR FIRST experience of 'Cuckoo' will be 'Missing Link', the single and the first track on the album. It's being released quite simply because it was the first track they wrote. That's all. The next single will be 'Crystal', the second track on the album and the second track they wrote. No pissing about here.

'Missing Link' is brutal. It sounds more like Ministry than anything. It is very unlikely to be played much on the radio.

"So, we're hard work," says Toni. "So what? We didn't ever ask anyone to consider us an easy ride. We have to constantly explain that to the record company. Things are hard. Life's hard. Shit happens.

"But having said that, I don't think it's like Ministry at all. Hum me a Ministry song, will you? It pisses on Ministry. You see that's what I like - being influenced by other things and then beating them at their own game. We have approached Al Jourgensen to do stuff with us. We've loved Ministry for a long time, but this is beyond that.

"That's what's so great about working with music. It's always moving. It's been over a year since the 'Doppelgänger' album and music has moved so much and we love responding to that."

So how have Curve coped with riot grrrl?

"Are you joking? It's utter bollocks, you know it is. All the bands are f---ing crap. Fine, if the music was brilliant. But it ain't. OK, the attitude's fine, but the music's got to be the bottom line and the music's crap."

So Curve feel they've conquered the past and cleaved through the present. What next?

"Oh, more. Much more," says Dean. "We just love the process. The feeling of having nothing in the tape recorder and then having something at the end of the day. It's just that thing of getting stuff out of you and printing it on tape. It's f---ing incredible. I absolutely love it and I will never, ever stop doing it, no matter how unlistenable it becomes."

Toni Halliday laughs. There is no desperation in her laughter.

(article nicked from 'New Musical Express', 14 August 1993)