|
Curve has never really been a band. Not in the traditional sense, at least. Yes, those are guitars you hear. Bass and drums as well. But such sounds coming from a Curve record indicate the presence of a "band" the same way storefronts in a spaghetti Western indicate the existence of a real town: Behind the facade there are a few tricksters pulling strings and making the whole thing happen. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce the members of Universal recording artists Curve: on vocals, the captivatingly cantankerous Toni Halliday! (Cheers, flowers thrown on stage.) And on most everything else, Dean Garcia! (More cheers, then quizzical looks.) Uh, Dean? Where are you? Hiding behind the samplers again? OK, so keyboardist, bassist, programmer and drummer Dean Garcia is a bit shy. "I'd be happy to be behind my amp, really," Garcia says from a hotel in Atlanta, awaiting the first show of Curve's American tour. "I'd be happy to be left in the dressing room, quite honestly.... I get very scared onstage and stuff. I prefer to be the funny, mysterious one in the back, y'know?" And that's the role he occupied for much of the band's career. While Halliday prowled the stage like Siouxsie Sioux's bad-ass younger sister, Garcia kept a low profile, surrounded by racks of equipment. Even on record, though he wrote all the music that swarmed around Halliday's visceral vocals, he preferred to ensconce himself in multiple layers of looping guitar swirls. Now, however, there's a new disc, Come Clean, which pushes Garcia's electronic pulsations right up front, sometimes even closer to the front than Halliday herself. There are some guitars mixed in, but not to the same degree as before: This is a different Curve, one that's more stripped down and, as Garcia describes it, "a bit spikier." Like it or not, the 1998 model of Curve is a shining techno machine that refuses to be covered by the camouflage of classic rock 'n' roll sounds any longer. Hey, wait, you may be saying--whaddaya mean there's a new Curve record? Didn't they break up? Not exactly, Garcia explains. "We weren't apart at all, really, because we saw a lot of each other," he says. "It was just the situation at the time was kinda all messed up, and you have to step back from things sometimes in order to fix them. We decided to stop for a while because it just wasn't fun." Garcia and Halliday's first band was State of Alert, a late-'80s outfit that signed to Virgin Records, promptly spent a lot of Richard Branson's money, then just as promptly disbanded with nothing to show for it but bad feelings. A year later, Halliday and Garcia reconvened, apologized over cocktails and decided to start anew as Curve. No sooner had they released a debut single than the British music press were hailing them as the latest saviors of rock. Catchwords such as "Goth" (because of Halliday's makeup), "industrial" (it was angry and electronic) and "shoe-gazer" (those swirling guitars) were tossed about, but no one could pin down what made the band great. Unfortunately, after a string of EPs and two albums in two years--1992's Doppelgänger and 1993's Cuckoo--the buzz that surrounded them became a roar, one that the duo tired of shouting over, so they simply quit before they lost control. During Curve's downtime, Garcia worked on TV soundtracks while Halliday sang with Leftfield, Freaky Chakra and her new band, Scylla. Then, Garcia says, "I just invited her over one day and I had this track going, so I gave her a mike and said, 'C'mon, have a sing on this,' which she did. I think she felt it was the best thing she'd done in ages, she felt that spark." It's a feeling he says they've felt throughout their relationship, beginning in the first days of State of Alert. "We did connect quite quickly, but never in a sexual way," he says. "It was always a platonic, sort of upstairs, head-space kind of way. I think we're karmically linked or something. We feed each other with inspirations and ideas. It's a very strong feeling we have for each other, to the point of it being quite destructive as well. That's why we stop doing things sometimes--it's like a brother and sister kind of thing. There is some strange, funny link, and I have the feeling I will always have her in my life." So there you have it. Curve: Two people, a few friends to help them play live and a creative link that borders on psychic. They may not be a band per se, but they probably wouldn't do it any other way. |
|
