JULY 13, 1998: 

Curve

"I don't dream well, I must admit. The dreams I do remember are always quite horrible, like lice and biting things crawling all over me. I don't really question whether my subconscious is that dark or not but there must be some twisted thing in there somewhere."

Toni Halliday, who alongside longtime bandmate Dean Garcia forms the essence of Curve, is struggling to answer my question regarding the nature of the beast inside. More accurately, I'm wondering if her recent marriage to producer Alan Moulder might signal the death knell for the group's doomy, gloomy electro-funk.

"In my conscious life, I'm extremely happy," ventures Halliday. "I'm married to the man I want to be married to - I'm really in love with him. We're financially secure, we have a nice house, and everything in my life is perfect. So maybe there has to be some kind of imperfection inside somewhere, to make this kind of music."

Still, considering the possible impact of wedded bliss on the gritty anathema that is Curve, Halliday is quick to point out that the music is still all sex 'n' spiderbites.

"It hasn't changed one bit. It's still dark as shit all the time. The way I write - the lyrical content of it - it's very much to do with my subconscious, really. I never really think about where it comes from or anything, I just open up my mind and off it goes."

Come Clean is the band's first album in four years and it's far and away their best yet, full of dark, layered, labryrinthian production and Halliday's hallucinatory vocals. The much-needed hiatus allowed the pair to go their separate ways for a while without actually breaking the links forged by sonic epicenters Doppelganger and Cuckoo. In the interim, Garcia stuck close to his two young children and Halliday formed the all-girl crushrock outfit Scylla and worked one-off projects with Leftfield and Freaky Chakra, among others.

"Where we've been is just having lives, really. We've been taking a bit of time out to reevaluate what we really wanted to do and how we wanted to do it, which is important, you know? It just took longer than we thought because we did different things, like getting married and so on. That's something you need to do sometimes."

- Marc Savlov

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