The beautiful Sonja Kristina and her band of virtuoso music students took Curved Air into the charts with one of the era’s more unusual hits, Back Street Luv.
I’ve always been staunchly progophobic so this is an unlikely favourite, but in 1971 the indisputably, ineffably and quintessentially prog Curved Air caught my ear – and everyone else’s – for a moment with this unusual and sublime tune, which went to No.4 in the charts to give them their only hit.
I have a soft spot for their singer Sonja Kristina not just because of her beauty but because when I started working on the Hackney Gazette, writing a pop column in which I indulged my personal preferences above and beyond the call of duty (essentially punk and reggae, and the rest be damned), she got in touch about her role in a musical theatre production with another former pop star from Stoke Newington, Helen Shapiro, (who had made her musical debut in a school band alongside another local celebrity, Marc Bolan).
A week later I received a lovely handwritten letter of thanks from Sonja, whom I knew only as an otherworldly beauty from the Top of the Pops of my youth, along with a signed photograph – which I must still have somewhere in a drawer. At the age of 19, I was beyond thrilled to find that my new job enabled me to rub shoulders with the idols of my youth.
I now learn that Sonja, whose sultry stage presence and sexual magnetism won her many (mostly male) admirers, had been recruited for Curved Air after her stint onstage in the West End musical Hair, notorious for its full-frontal nudity, and that the other members of the group were the house band for another theatre production by the same producer. I also learn that she had briefly sung in The Strawbs, replacing Sandy Denny.
Kristina, who married Police drummer Stewart Copeland and had a family with him, is quite obviously a formative influence on Kate Bush in particular, as superfan
Katie Puckrik shrewdly observed when presenting them with a lifetime achievement award a few years back. I rather like Wiki’s suggestion that Kristina’s stagecraft was informed by her previous job as a croupier in the Playboy Club, which makes me imagine her preceding every song by calling out “Faites vos jeux!”
Curved Air wore their experimentalism on their puff sleeves, not least in their band name, which was taken from one of their primary influences, avant-garde composer Terry Riley (his composition A Rainbow In Curved Air), but I have to confess this is the only song of theirs that I really like. The rest is too proggy, with its ever-shifting time signatures and elaborate neo-classical arrangements jostling for attention amid hard rock tropes; and just too dramatic, betraying their roots on the musical theatre stage.
Nonetheless, they’re quite unlike any other band of that era (or any subsequent era), with Royal College of Music graduate Darryl Way’s violin to the fore alongside the complex polyrhythms of extravagantly named drummer Florian Pilkington-Miksa, and the equally elaborate keyboard noodlings of Royal Academy of Music graduate Francis Monkman, who would go on to create suites that took up entire sides of albums.
* Trivia fact: Curved Air’s 1970 debut album, Air Conditioning, was the first ever picture disc.