Gig preview: Brix and The Extricated at Long Division festival, Wakefield

There's a recurring motif in Brix Smith Start's engaging rock 'n' roll memoir The Rise, The Fall and The Rise about her experiences of visiting Disneyland in California.
Brix Smith Start. Picture: Amelia TroubridgeBrix Smith Start. Picture: Amelia Troubridge
Brix Smith Start. Picture: Amelia Troubridge

“It represented different things in different times of my life,” says the 53-year-old guitarist, singer and latter day fashion guru who’s perhaps best known for her time in the long-running post-punk group The Fall and to whose lead singer, Mark E Smith, she was married for six years.

“As a small child in the beginning it was a place to escape my parents’ troubled marriage and my extremely dysfunctional life. My Dad [a child psychologist] would just drop me at my grandparents, he didn’t really engage with me, he’d go off and do his doctor things or dating things or whatever, my Mom [a TV executive at CBS] worked all the time so my grandparents would take me to Disneyland and I loved it there.

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“Basically I think it is one of the greatest art installations in the world in terms of it takes you out of your own reality and puts you in a different reality. It can make you forget about your troubles if you look at it the right way.”

Brix SmithBrix Smith
Brix Smith

While she appreciates “loads of people hate Disney”, she says: “When I look at it I don’t see the bad stuff, I just see the art of it and the way that it’s emotional puppeteering and the way that it can control the masses, it can control people’s emotions whether to make them scared or happy, they use effects, they use music, they use ambient noise, put you into structures where you believe you’ve gone back in time, it’s the suspension of disbelief and for me as a child it was a complete safe haven and I forgot about my problems when I was there.”

Later in her life, it “became a source of inspiration” for her music. “A lot of people who are big Fall fans don’t realise that there’s so many Disney-like ambient sounds from walking around there sampled onto all their favourite records.” She says she learned a lot about layering and juxtaposing sounds from Walt Disney’s theme park, which was close to where she grew up in Los Angeles.

Mickey Mouse became a symbol for her too, “like some kind of post-modern god, a big brand symbol like Coca-Cola, but safe somehow and funny, you could trust him”.

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By the end of the book readers can see the journey she goes through with Disney. “On one day it changes from the happiest place in the world to the worst place, but I still crave going there,” she says, “because I craved to be taken out of any painful reality. At times where I’m depressed in my life or having some kind of trouble I go to Disneyland as a safe place, it’s my Switzerland.”

Brix Smith with her former husband Mark E Smith of The FallBrix Smith with her former husband Mark E Smith of The Fall
Brix Smith with her former husband Mark E Smith of The Fall

Around the age of 15, the girl born Laura Salenger became nicknamed Brixton by her friends at private school after her Anglophile music tastes – in particular the Clash song Guns of Brixton. Five years later she met and fell in love with Mark E Smith at a Fall concert in Chicago. A few months later she travelled to England with him and they were married.

Now living in a tiny flat in Manchester, where Smith would ‘refrigerate’ pints of milk on the kitchen window ledge and wash clothes in the bath, the harsh reality of the North West in 1983 was a world away from privilege she’d known in the States or the romantic image of England that she had in her mind from watching Mary Poppins or Peter Pan.

“Manchester in the early 1980s was not the Manchester of today,” she says. “Then it was not so hot, but now it’s OK, and part of my heart is Mancunian, they’ve really looked after me over the years and almost taken me in as one of their own and for that I am grateful, but on the day of my arrival I did not expect what I saw.”

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Smith had gone through one of his habitual phases of firing members of The Fall, so Brix joined as a guitarist. (He liked her self-taught style, he said, because she sounded “like Lou Reed”.) Two of the tracks she’d written while she was in a band in the US became Fall songs, with Smith’s clever and enigmatic lyrical input. So began a creative partnership that was to last six years and incorporate The Fall’s most melodic and commercial albums including Perverted By Language and This Nation’s Saving Grace.

Brix SmithBrix Smith
Brix Smith

The marriage – and Brix’s time in the band – ended when Smith left her for another woman. It was, she says, the hardest thing to write about in her book; they had, after all, in her eyes been “soul mates”.

Years later she recognises: “Soul mates can come together for brief periods in one’s life or can stay with you for your whole life. I believe that soul mates are souls you’ve known before in other lifetimes or you’re meant to meet in this lifetime. We were so opposite in so many ways, there was no reason why we should ever have met in this world, but I think there was to make that music. It was magical, I honestly think it was such a fantastic collaboration between he and I for the time that it lasted.”

Traumatic as it was at the time - “I felt kicked to the kerb” – she says: “I allowed myself to feel terrible, I allowed myself to be controlled by him. At the end of the day nobody can control you but yourself, I allowed it to happen and he allowed it to happen as well.” She now also feels in some respect that Smith was “brave” to do “what felt right to him” knowing there would be “political repercussions on a million levels because of our work together”. “Everybody thought he was insane but he did what he felt he wanted to do.”

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Brix’s next relationship would be with another musical maverick – the violinist Nigel Kennedy. The world he inhabited, which included mixing with Charles and Diana, was very different to Manchester. “I found it easy to adapt to, it wasn’t an unpleasant world,” she laughs. Though it didn’t last, the pair remain on friendly terms. “He hasn’t read the book but I saw him recently at the Festival Hall and we were really happy to see each other,” she says. “Hopefully he’ll be happy with what I’ve written about him, I haven’t been unkind.”

Brix Smith with her former husband Mark E Smith of The FallBrix Smith with her former husband Mark E Smith of The Fall
Brix Smith with her former husband Mark E Smith of The Fall

Today she is married to the fashion entrepreneur Philip Start. The pair ran a chain of stores together at one point and Brix has appeared on television a number of times as a style guru, notably in the Channel 4 series Gok’s Fashion Fix. Her interest in fashion stems from clothes shopping trips with her mother, she says. “She let me create my own identity from the age of four of five. She told me, ‘Nothing is wrong, put stripes with paisleys, put checks with dots, put tartan with iridescent, express yourself’. It made it really fun.”

While Start continues to run his shop for men, Brix has returned to music. The urge to write songs again coincided with starting work on her book. “I sat down in the privacy of my house with my dogs and nobody else and I had only about three or four guitars left, I’d sold most and given some away, and I took out one and I started playing, although I could barely remember how to tune it, and pretty much within the first half an hour I don’t know what happened but I’d written a new song and I’d begun singing with a voice that I never knew I had, it was a new voice, it was a voice that had lived a life then was free. It was the craziest thing. I started weeping, all this weird stuff started happening and I realised that whatever creative channel had been blocked was now fully flowing and open.”

She’s now touring with her band The Extricated, who include former members of The Fall, and has a two albums in the works – one solo and one with the band. “We’re in discussions with a few record labels,” she says.

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The Rise, The Fall and The Rise is published by Faber & Faber, priced £14.99. Brix Smith and The Extricated play at Long Division festival in Wakefield on Saturday June 11. For details visit https://www.musicglue.com/long-division/