Goth?? You think Curve's music is Gothic? Vocalist Toni Halliday may be scratching your name off her Christmas shopping list as we speak. "Dark music" she will accept, and when you listen to any of Curve's music, from 1992's Doppelganger to Gift, which releases on September 18th, I think you'll agree with her assessment. She has other things she'd like you to notice about the music she makes with her musical partner, Dean Garcia, but we'll get into that later.

Curve is a duo with friends. Halliday happens to be married to producer Alan Moulder, Garcia played bass with The Eurythmics and both were good friends of Dave Stewart's, and their circle of friends also includes producer Flood (Mark Ellis) and My Bloody Valentine thoughtmeister Kevin Shields. Add a comfy and well planned studio in Garcia's London home and you've got the makings of... what? Depends on what you've got in the first place. In this case, we're talking about Toni Halliday and Dean Garcia, two of the most interesting songwriters of the 90s, writers and players who could do it on their own - and, to a large extent, do - but yearn for certain sounds in just a few certain places ("get Kevin on the phone!") and want an overall sound in another place ("what's Alan doing tomorrow?"). Mostly, it's the duo, working and perfecting until they've made Gift the best it can be... and then popping it in a box on a shelf for a year.

Go figure.

Halliday and Garcia are no strangers to record label problems. As you'll learn in this interview, they became so familiar with them that they basically chucked it. Or so it seemed. They kept up with their fans by running their own web site (a very well done site at that, which you can find at www.curve.co.uk/) and even gave those fans a collection of MP3s, scattered songs that were good enough to make it on previous albums but hadn't only due to space limitations. By giving the collection a name (Open Day At The Hate Fest), Halliday and Garcia inadvertently gave the impression that this was an official Curve release, and despite their repeated pronouncements and proclamations, many people still consider it as such. These things trouble Toni Halliday, though she's still trying to live by a code she adopted after their Come Clean album was mishandled by the record label, and that code is: stay cool and don't let it get to you. If it stops being fun again, that might be the end of the road for Curve, and if the quality of the music on Gift is any indication, it would be quite a loss.

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Cosmik: Come Clean ended a big five year absence, then a few more years until the Net-only album, Open Day At The Hate Fest, and now boom, right away we have Gift. First of all, what was the five year gap all about?

Halliday: You mean between Cuckoo and Come Clean? We felt we'd really stopped enjoying it. It's a funny thing, because now we feel like we've come around full circle, really. All things do, in the end, but when you first start making records and you put your first thing out, you love it and it's great and everything's happening really fast and you're pumping things out really fast. Then this funny thing happens where you suddenly start analyzing what you're doing, and I think Dean and I got to such an analytical level that we actually forgot to enjoy ourselves, so we kind of just stopped. It wasn't a break-up as such, but we just stopped making music. We just couldn't find a way of making music that we enjoyed anymore. We always kept in contact because we've always been good friends, and eventually it just came around that I went around his house one day and he had this track down, and I said "Oh, that's good. I like that thing." He used to tinker away at home on his own. I was around to see him, and his kids and his wife because we're mates, and he (hearing the track) just piqued my interest, really, and we did that and it brought back that old feeling of "oh yes, this is good fun." Then we started working on the tracks that became Come Clean, and people responded immediately and we got a record deal straight away. It just happened again. I suppose you could call (the five year gap) a writing block. (Laughs.)

Cosmik: It's surprising, too, because I've heard of such things happening when the music wasn't working, but that wasn't the case with Curve. Doppelganger and Cuckoo had both critical and fan raves. It seems like you would have been drinking that up.

Halliday: Yes, I suppose, in a way, it did seem like that, but I think that there were other things that were kind of important for Dean and I. The main thing is that this is our life, it's really short, so we must pack it with things we really enjoy all the time. It's quite hedonistic, I suppose, in a way, because we were just totally and utterly into having a good time, enjoying ourselves. It's funny, you know, I have a friend who stopped going around to see people and stopped doing things that are boring. He'll only go out and make the journey and go and see people if he knows he's going to have loads of fun. Even though I know I'm not as hard and fast with that kind of philosophy as he is, I do understand where he's coming from. I really do. Even though he's taken it to an extreme level, I do think we do spend a lot of time doing things we don't get a lot of enjoyment out of, and if Dean and I were going to do that we'd become the kind of people who had boring, horrible lives and had jobs that they fucking hated, and came home to husbands and wives that they didn't like, either, and lived in places they didn't want to live.

Cosmik: That bad? (Laughs)

Halliday: (Laughs) Well, there are those people out there. That's why that film, American Beauty, was so brilliant and struck a chord with everyone. There but for the grace of God go I.

Cosmik: And youth only lasts so long, as well?

Halliday: Yeah, exactly. It's not going to be so long before... um...

Cosmik: ... knitting.

Halliday: Knitting. Yeah, knitting. We've got plenty of time for that.

Cosmik: Then there's Open Day At The Hate Fest, so you were back in it again.

Halliday: But Open Day At The Hate Fest was not an album for us, and we keep on saying over and over and over again, "this is not a new Curve album." All it was was a collection of MP3s that we'd put up that were tracks that had been lying around the studio from all different stages of recording, from Come Clean onwards. A lot that we put up, like "The Birds, They Do Fly" and stuff like that, they came from sessions we did for Come Clean that didn't actually make it, but we still felt that, "well, that's still a really good song and a really good track, and we must do something with it later on." It wasn't like it was stuff we had no intention of ever using. We'd never do that. So we started putting them up, and then we started getting people going "oh, you know, I can't get MP3 because I haven't got a player," or "I have, but I want to hear this on a proper record," and the demand got so much that we finally said "fine, we'll put it out, but this is not a new Curve album. We have a new album that will be coming at some point." But this is basically a cool kind of fan-based thing, really. It's there for the hard-core people who want everything available from us.

Cosmik: And yet you have to realize that to your fans it is a Curve album, with very cool songs that they love.

Halliday: Yes, but we did tell them that we didn't put it together like that. We didn't use any of the people that we usually do, we didn't go into studio and mix it, we just did that at home on our mixers, we didn't use our usual producers.

Cosmik: You don't feel the same thing that the fans feel when they're anxiously waiting, so you put anything on that web site and they're thinking "Hey! Here's something! Something from Curve!" So telling them "this is not an album" is like telling your kid "the bed is not a trampoline!"

Halliday: (Laughs) I know. I suppose we feel the same way as Beck felt about that Mutations thing, which he was going to put out on Bong Load and his label didn't allow him to do that. That's what he got so pissed off about, the record company saying "No, no, that can count as one of the records you're going to make for us." He would never have made that record if he knew it was going to come out on a major label. He only did that record because he thought they they'd agree that he could put it out on this tiny little indie label, and it was some other side of what he did. He didn't want it to be a full-blown release, as such. That's how we saw this. It didn't warrant a full release. We got asked by retailers who wanted to buy stock from us and put it in their stores, and we wouldn't allow it because we saw it as a very tiny thing while the real record was coming.

Cosmik: There's a lot of speculation and debate about the future of the music industry going in the direction of the Internet. Even though it wasn't an actual Curve album, what do you think after your experience with putting something out there for people on the Net?

Halliday: I think it's a long way off, but I think that once it does go, it'll go really fast. At the moment, I would say that Net-based sales for any band are about 1% of the market. I really do think that. It's a small percentage. But the Bundesbank just did a survey on the music industry, and it's mad, it's insane what goes on with this industry that has a 90% failure rate. So that means there's a 150 billion dollar per year industry based on 10% success. That shows you how much money they're making. They also looked at how the Internet was going to affect this 150 billion dollar a year industry. I don't have all the figures in front of me, but they said within five years that it would be at 50% of the retail market coming from the Internet, and within ten years it would hit critical mass. It is mind-boggling to think that people who buy records are still prepared to pay for the shop. To actually walk into the building. But the little, independent, tiny shops, I think, will always be there because they are actually giving the customer service. The reason you are actually paying for that retail space is that it's real expertise behind the counter. Those kids behind the counter actually know what the fuck they're talking about. You don't get that in a HMV. You don't. They have no idea what they have in stock, even. You can't go up to those people and say "Have you heard any cool records lately? What about this, what about that?" They have no idea what you're talking about.

Cosmik: Can't do that at Tower, either. Deer in headlights.

Halliday: HMV, Tower, you know, any of the big mega-stores.

Cosmik: Oh! I didn't know what you meant by HMV. Never heard of that. Maybe a UK thing.

Halliday: It's exactly the same as a Tower. No expertise.

Cosmik: They still have customers, but I keep waiting for it to thin out. The cool shops around here aren't any more packed, either, which is why I wonder.

Halliday: It comes back to the confidence of the customer. I think it's not there yet. There's a lot of suspicion, still, about the Internet, especially for buying. The Internet is NOT anonymous, you know? It's really easy to trace people and to find out what's going on, and there's all this cloak and dagger suspicion about it that I think will dissipate in the next few years, and then the Internet will have a massive impact on sales.

Cosmik: So it'll tie in with the tightening of Online security.

Halliday: Yeah.

Cosmik: It is a little scary at the moment, with all the hacking going on. You and Dean are obviously Web-Savvy, being very much involved in your own Web site. Do you spend any of your own time thinking about the potential of the Web and how to utilize it, or do you have people who do that for you?

Halliday: No, we do that. That's what we do. It's funny, our manager is flying in today from LA for the Reading Music Festival, and he's coming over to have a big brainstorm all about how we're going to use our web site, how we're going to deal with it in the future, and how we're going to deal with MP3s in the future, and how we're going to do it all through our site. We brainstorm a lot.

Cosmik: The site is extremely well done.

Halliday: Dean did that. All of it. We never used anyone.

Cosmik: I do most of my pre-interview research online, and I have to say this is probably the best web site I've seen. A lot of them I go to, it's like "ugh!!" This one was the opposite. I especially liked the 360 degree view of the home recording studio.

Halliday: (Laughs) That's funny, isn't it?!

Cosmik: It's beautiful! It's also beautiful that it didn't feel antiseptic. Nobody cleaned and vacuumed for those pictures, so it feels realistic.

Halliday: Oh, no no no. It's very funny, because both Dean and I are very ordered people. You go to his house and it's really tidy, you come to my house and it's really tidy. Then you come to our studio and it's where all the mess of our mind goes. (Laughs.) Because we're just so ordered that it just has to go somewhere.

Cosmik: Or there may be an explosion?

Halliday: Yeah! So it's put in there, and it's ab-so-lute CHAOS! Just chaos and mayhem.

Cosmik: And I'm willing to bet you know where every single thing is in that chaos.

Halliday: Oh, we do, yeah. We do know where everything is.

Cosmik: You could reach into the middle of the mess and pull out exactly what you need.

Halliday: Yeah, we'd know exactly what place it was on the floor (Laughs).

Cosmik: (Laughs.) I must have spent half an hour just moving around that virtual studio, looking at every single item, speculating on what brand of guitar this was and what brand of synthesizer that was, what software was on the screen, the works. It was very entertaining.

Halliday: Good! That's what we wanted. We enjoyed doing that.

Cosmik: Some of the long gaps between releases have been legal issues, problems with labels and such. Are those same headaches still with you now, or have they been fully resolved?

Halliday: They're long gone for us because we've just stopped caring. Not stopped caring about what we do, or anything like that, but we just stopped really caring about things like "are the label doing this," and "are the label doing that," and "if they don't do that we don't stand a fucking chance," you know? Fighting this battle that you can't win because Sonique's record is coming out this week. That's what the battle was for us. We thought our record was better than a Billy Meyers record, but someone at the label didn't, so you just start bashing your head against the wall and having a war that you can't win because someone has decided to prioritize a Billie Meyers Kiss The fucking Rain record, a woman with a terrible voice, I'm sorry. Absolutely pedestrian, MOR, fucking bollocks shit, basically. And someone thinks that's better than your fucking masterpiece, as far as you're concerned, and that someone is really important in the label. Because that's what they like: bland, horrible shit.

Cosmik: Because you don't have to think about it. It's disposable.

Halliday: Yeah. So when you actually stop giving a flying fuck about any of that, you start again. We made Come Clean, we had a really great time, really enjoyed ourselves, it goes to a major label and then you start going "oh, fuck," and you start not enjoying yourself again because of all the stuff that shouldn't even warrant you thinking about but you have to think about it because this is your precious baby, you know what I mean? Then that happened. When decisions like that were made about Come Clean, for instance, we had to stop thinking about what this industry was, could do or could not do for us, because it was just going to kill our love of music, so we had to stop caring about stuff like that. Whether the label was going to do this, or whether the label was going to put enough money behind it, whether they were going to [get it played on] radio. We just stopped caring about all of that. And then we just really started having a good time again, but we almost lost it again straight away on the first record we'd made after five years. It was like back - straight back to this really worrying, not enjoying yourself stuff.

Cosmik: But you control the degree of that, don't you? Isn't some of that self-induced?

Halliday: I suppose it is self-induced, but when you've toiled over it and put your heart and soul into it, of course you're going to care for it. You don't just then throw it to people who've had nothing to do with it, and the first time they hear it is when they get a CD-R that some manager is playing for them and saying "what do you think?" That's the first involvement they've had with your record.

Cosmik: It's frustrating, but it's that way all over. What is it, in particular, that you object to in the process?

Halliday: Think about what the band or the artist has done before that to get to that stage. It's not responsible. It's like a painter painting a painting that he thinks is the best thing he's done in years and years, and then just go walking down the street and giving it to a tramp. No, of course he's going to try to get the person, the best gallery to show it in, the best stage, the top quality buyers to come look at his painting, the right people to get it into a museum... you know what I mean?

Cosmik: You mean your music's being taken and tossed to people who don't give a shit.

Halliday: He's going to fight his hardest to protect what he's got, and that's what we do. Yeah, in a way it is self-inflicted, because we care. We really care about what we've done. But we can't care anymore about what some label thinks about what we've done.

Cosmik: How did you get to the point where you could let it go like that?

Halliday: It was a kind of psychological amputation of that part of our brain that cared about what any record company cared or did about our record, because in the end, if it was going to happen it would happen on its own through the music in its own right.

Cosmik: When you go to make the next record, does this ever affect your working or your creativity? Does it creep into your brain and block you?

Halliday: No... I mean, that's why we stopped for five years, because it did start creeping into our brain, and then we put out Come Clean and it started to come back again and we just chopped it off and said "No, we're not going to think like that anymore because it will just become a creative block, so we'll just get on with the business of making music, which is what we do well."

Cosmik: To that end, you hired a new manager named Graham Bell to deal with the business side in the States. Is it safe to assume he acts as a buffer between you and the record label people and lets you get on with it?

Halliday: We're not dealing with any of it. We chat with him, and he says "ah, this is happening," and we say "ah, great." (Laughs.) Whereas before it was like [in angry and frantic voice] "that's happening? Why?! And what's going on with that? What's happening with this!?" Which we did. Now it's just like every time he rings I just go "oh, that's fantastic. Thank you very much. That's brilliant."

Cosmik: No more crap, no more tension, just the distilled report.

Halliday: Yeah, because I think both Dean and I have got the kind of... What's the thing that he had in Hannibal? Have you read the book?

Cosmik: No, I haven't.

Halliday: Oh, it's fantastic. There's a thing he has where he can go into his memory where he can't feel any pain at all and he can take himself away from his pain. He goes into his memory and he's just there physically, but he's not there mentally so he doesn't feel anything. I think both Dean and I have the capacity to go down quite highly destructive routes, so it's better to have Graham in there to deal with it.

Cosmik: The new CD gave me a new favorite Curve song, which is the title track, "Gift." The music is seductive enough on its own, but man, there's something dangerously edgy about that beckoning vocal where you sing "Do it to please me" under the music. It just crawled into my brain and I keep hearing it. Curve can't stay away from the edge.

Halliday: Yeah, that's good, though. I think that's where we want to be. I think that's a natural, predisposed character, really, that we really do shy away from all things bland. I can't imagine anything worse, I don't think, I think we're quite good at knowing what we are.

Cosmik: This album is being released by Hip-O, which is a really smart label, hip, cool, they know what's what and all that, but I'm hearing "Want More Need Less," and I feel like it has the hooks and the groove to be a hit. Do you think a small label has the push to make it happen?

Halliday: I don't know. I think if they got a bite on something, they would definitely go with it.

Cosmik: When you were recording that particular song, did you feel anything special brewing?

Halliday: Oh, I love that song! It's one of my favorites on the album. I think it's a really joyous moment and just very much at ease. When we did it, everything we did just came out really fast. I just loved the melody, and I love all the guitar work on it. I think it's fantastic and just really joyous to me.

Cosmik: It is, and I hope you don't mind the term "hooks." A lot of artists seem to take it as a putdown, but it's not meant to be. That song is loaded with hooks.

Halliday: Oh, no, I love hooks! Dean and I always try to ram in as many hooks as possible.

Cosmik: The main hook in that song, it seems to me, is just ripe for the charts.

Halliday: I won't argue. We think it's a huge single. But then again when we put "Horror Head" out, which came off the first album, Doppelganger, we thought that was a huge hit. I think Dean and I did that all the time, you know? We'd put records out and we always thought they were nice little pop albums full of nice little pop songs. I've always thought that Curve have made great pop. It might come in a different guise to what people presume is pop, you know, like... it doesn't sound like Backstreet Boys pop, but still, there's melody there, and there are hooks, and we've done that on every record we've ever made. We love pop. We love guitar motifs and keyboard things. I love that record by The Cardigans, that Gran Turismo record, and the reason I love it is that every single song is a winner. It's got like ten hits on it, as far as I'm concerned. Every single track. You put it on and you listen to it all the way through because you don't want to miss a song.

Cosmik: And you find yourself getting kind of pissed off at the general public for not paying any attention to it at all.

Halliday: Yeah, I know. Exactly. So we strive to do the same thing with our records as well.

Cosmik: Yet nobody ever talks about Curve as a pop band, which isn't fair at all. I've read articles defining Curve as everything but. I read one a few days ago that only talked about Curve as a goth band.

Halliday: I know, and I never understood that tag. I always wonder "is it because I've got black hair? Is that it?"

Cosmik: Or that there's one picture of you out there that's high contrast, so you have a very white face and very black hair.

Halliday: But that's just one shot. I've never worn white makeup in my life, or black nail varnish, or purple lipstick, or purple highlights in my hair, I've never worn patchouli EVER! I have no idea where that goth thing came from.

Cosmik: They're still hearing one aspect and putting you in a tiny jar with holes in the lid. I can hear an eeriness and a kind of mournful vibe to a lot of your music, and if that's what they're latching on to...

Halliday: What, like the Cocteau Twins? No one called them a goth band, and they were really sad and mournful.

Cosmik: Exactly. How about this one: "A noise band." Maybe a sound band, but noise sounds like a putdown. Somebody already made a label so they roll you into it because it's convenient.

Halliday: That's what I think, as well. I think it's just laziness, unfortunately, or lack of vocabulary in some cases. It's definitely there. It doesn't just happen in America, it happens all over the world. We've been called "goth" in England and we've been called "noise merchants" and the whole gamut of labels, but not once have we been called a pop band, and I'd really like to be called that.

Cosmik: How long was spent on recording The Gift?

Halliday: It happened real quick, though we've been quite lazy in putting it out. We spent maybe six months or something like that. We tend not to spend too long on records because of our... (laughs)... pursuit of fun. We tend not to because we get bogged down and bored.

Cosmik: Now I have this mental image of you and Dean running out of the studio and heading straight for a roller coaster every day.

Halliday: (Laughs.) Well, that's quite a good mental picture of us, really. But we, Dean and I worked for two or three months on it, getting the songs together, and then Ben Grosse, the guy that we worked with on the record, came over and spent a month in London. Then I flew to LA and we mixed it for another month. So five or six months.

Cosmik: When you say you've been lazy putting it out, do you mean it's been in the can for a while?

Halliday: It has, yeah, for about a year. But we're happy now. The record's coming out and that's what is important.

Cosmik: That must have driven you crazy, though. If I had something like this just sitting on tape, I'd be wanting people to hear it. Chomping at the bit.

Halliday: Oh yeah, but we knew people would hear it eventually. It was just finding exactly the right avenue, the right people to put it out with, trying to keep it smaller so we didn't have the same kind of "Billie Meyers problems" that we had on Come Clean. So it was just gentle probing around trying to find exactly what we thought would be best for this record.

Cosmik: It must have been nice with your name recognition, having the clout to shop labels the way you wanted to instead of having to play games.

Halliday: Yeah, it was good. It worked for us. But we had to sell within the Universal group. We weren't allowed to shop outside.

Cosmik: Did anyone else play on the album? I only have a pre-release so far, so no liner notes.

Halliday: Yes, Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine.

Cosmik: That's one of those bands that slipped under my radar somehow. What does Kevin play?

Halliday: Kevin is My Bloody Valentine. He is God. Guitar player. My Bloody Valentine are one of the best bands of all time. Totally seminal band. You should get Loveless. Kevin has affected millions of guitar players.

Cosmik: What did he do on your album?

Halliday: Played on "Want More Need Less" and "Perish." That's about it, and the rest is Dean and I. And my husband, Alan Moulder, played.

Cosmik: Now you've closed the one chapter, the long one that almost took the joy of music away from you, and you've opened a new chapter where you're approaching it all differently. But whether you shrug things off or get upset and fight, you're always going to be the kind of artist who has something to say and something new to add. It's just what you two do. So what direction do you go now?

Halliday: Multi-media. One thing I've been thinking about is where the arts meet, like ballet. Ballet is really an amalgamation of dancing, music and set design, isn't it? Three art forms in one. You wouldn't go see a ballet without any music, would you? Or any sets? Or you wouldn't go see a ballet without people dancing and only music and sets. They're all intrinsically linked. That's where we're heading. We're heading to amalgamate more than just music standing alone. Even we don't know quite what that means yet, but we know that it's a fabulous concept. I don't just mean us doing music and someone else doing a video for it. Dean and I don't quite know what that thing is, that next step, but we know it's to do with the meeting of more than one art form, and the art form not just being generated from you, like you making a piece of music and someone else making something from that. It'll be the three things being made at the same time.

Cosmik: You've been doing a lot of thinking about this.

Halliday: Yeah, we have, and a lot of our friends as well. And my husband and his best friend, Flood, who is another record producer, they've been working on the music to this film recently, approaching it in this really odd way, taking atmospheric noises and enhancing them in weird ways, like a rustle, making it really loud and then they've mutated it. They've taken all these things that are already there and amplified them out of the true place they should be, sonically, and it's very eerie. So they've approached this thing, doing this film, which is an art form, putting music to it which is being made at the same time because they're working to film that the director's just pumping out for them to do at that time and then they've got this program on Pro Tools that they can run at the same time and so they can run music to picture. But they're not just doing that because they're messing with atmospherics as well. They're sound designing. They're manipulating sound, they're not just doing music for it. At that point it becomes something very interesting to me. I think "That's interesting... That's odd." That's the way I see it.

(C) 2001 - DJ Johnson