Brixit and taking back control Brix Smith-Start was a guitarist in the Fall and married to One striking early moment in The Rise is when she decides to lose her virginity its founder Mark E Smith. Leaving the band marked a new by looking up her favourite rock star – whom she declines to name – turning phase in her remarkable life, as she reinvented herself up at his door and propositioning him. “People are like, ‘that’s a weird thing to as a fashionista, wrote a remarkable autobiography do’, but it was empowering. I think it was and, finally, returned to music. By Gary Ryan brave – I wouldn’t be so bold now as to do it now.” It was when her mother moved to Touring Germany as guitarist in the the inner-workings of the Fall, a group Chicago – and newly reborn as Brix – that Fall in 1987, Brix Smith-Start arrived constantly in more turmoil and flux than she discovered the Fall. Listening to their in Hamburg to discover the venue had a Corbyn shadow cabinet. But The Rise Slates EP, it made her world spin off its been overbooked. “People couldn’t get also covers her troubled childhood in axis. She literally bumped into Mark E in and there was a riot,” she remembers. LA, her “borderline bulimia” and a brutal Smith – six years her senior – after a gig “I looked at people lighting tyres on fire rape she kept secret for over 30 years. in the city. “I had found my soulmate,” and rolling them down the street and Smith-Start talks like she writes, she writes. In 1983, she swapped the thought: this is rock and roll.” peppering her conversation with LA Windy City for “grim” Prestwich, When Laura Elisse Salenger’s father therapy speak. Wildly entertaining, she’s moving into his squalid flat, with its disowned her in a neurotic fury aged 17, a combination of hyper self-aware and dirt-encrusted walls and overpowering she changed her name to Brix – inspired uncensored – like someone who has used odour of urine. “It wasn’t at all what I by Guns of Brixton, her favourite Clash up their allowance of damns to give. Her expected,” she recalls. “I probably had song – and has continued to reinvent parents divorced when she was two. Her some fantasy notion of ivy-covered herself throughout her life. Those who mother worked for CBS television, and cottages and cobbled streets. And it was remember her as adding pop sheen and periodically she would stay with her like a Victorian industrial stump.” glamour to John Peel’s favourite outsider’s father – a paranoid and bullying Beverly Was she tempted to turn back? “No. band in the mid-1980s – or fronting Hills child psychiatrist who exemplifies Because I was following my joy and doing forgotten bubblegum indie outfit the the phrase “Physician, heal thyself”. what I felt I was put on this earth to – Adult Net – may have been surprised “There’s a theory that lots of being a singer-songwriter – and having an to see her turn up as sartorial expert on psychiatrists are crazier than their adventure. I was with the man I loved.” the mainstream Gok Wan’s Fashion Fix patients,” laughs Smith-Start. “Whether Married in a registry office in Bury in 2008. Now she’s written a riotous and that’s because they’re absorbing all the merely two months after her arrival, candid autobiography, The Rise, The neurosis and it’s flooding their psyche or, she joined the Fall as guitarist and Fall, and The Rise – a book she claims in fact, they’re so crazy themselves that co-writer during their most commercially- “saved” her – but it’s about more than they’re trying to fix themselves by fixing successful period and brought a creative her tempestuous marriage to notoriously others, who the hell knows?” shift to the band. You feel she opened the splenetic Fall frontman Mark E Smith. In hindsight, she feels his abusive curtains slightly and let some sunlight “People imagined I would rip into behaviour partly lay in his undiagnosed into the Fall’s deliberately bleak world. Mark Smith and throw all the bones on multiple sclerosis. “We had a very With 64 ex-members, the Fall retain the table,” says the 53 year old from her dysfunctional and fucked-up relationship. a reputation as the most dysfunctional London home. “But it’s more to do with Eventually I realised I just wanted my functioning group around. During the other things than the Fall, although you father to love me. But I was not the cause European referendum campaign, a do get a good insider’s view of the band.” of my father’s misery – he was. Once I photo emerged of a Vote Leave poster. So yes, there’s stuff about her volatile realised I had nothing to do with the way Underneath, somebody had cheekily partnership with Smith, whom she he was towards me, I completely forgave added “to get the same job security as a describes as the Mancunian Castro, and myself and forgave him and I was free.” member of the Fall”. 16 BIG ISSUE NORTH 18 - 24 JULY BIN1141_16,17,18,19 (brix).indd 16 14/07/2016 19:27.