Amidst a music-memoir landscape clotted with ego and pettiness, Brix Smith Start’s The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise stands out as exceptionally warm hearted, even when it gets a little ugly. Which it must, simply by virtue of the band (and the man) Smith Start committed herself to. She was one of the guitarists (and occasional vocalists) for the iconic, prolific post-punk group the Fall during their best-known period throughout the 1980s, returning in the mid-’90s for two albums. Exactly how much of a songwriting role she played during her Fall tenure was previously unclear, due to her ex-husband (and oft-tyrannical bandleader) Mark E. Smith’s slapdash liner-note attribution. And this is one of many areas where Smith Start’s recent book, one of the year’s most illuminating rock memoirs, provides some long-needed clarity.
Starting with her gilded (yet hardly idyllic) L.A. childhood, Smith Start writes with unvarnished candor, interspersing autobiography with sequences of stream-of-consciousness that provide a peek into her anxieties and dreams. She’s got a knack for a pithy turn of phrase—describing latter-day Mark E., the toll on his body evident not just from age but from amphetamines and alcohol, as “a tiny wizened apple puppet”—and enough vulnerability to make her extraordinary life relatable without tipping over into indulgent self-pity.
When we speak via Skype a few months ago, it’s evening in the UK. Smith Start’s beloved pugs, Gladys and Pixie, are excitable in the background, and she’s disarmingly friendly. I ask her how the book came to be, and she says it’s been in the works for a very long time: “Oh, my god. Well, when I was in the Fall, I knew. I kept tour diaries. I wasn't really that vigilant about them, but I kept them—dates and gigs, what happened. You know, girly diaries. 'Cause I knew that what I was going through was kind of extraordinary, being a woman in that position and in that band, and I thought, ‘You know, this is going to make a good story, at some point.’”
The first chapters are extremely visceral, full of sense-memories of a long-gone Los Angeles and the complicated family that raised her there. While Smith Start found recollecting even the difficult moments in her childhood to be an absorbing and generally pleasurable experience, truly reckoning with her scars opened up the raw wounds beneath. “I thought I had put things behind me and moved forward,” she says, “but deep down in the layers of me, there was still residual hurt and emotion… It was a little bit shocking because I had convinced myself I was over it and everything was good. To really write the details, you have to go to that place, and it was not pleasant. While I was writing those parts, I did have to have some counseling.”
One of the parts in question was Smith Start’s rape at the hands of someone she considered a casual friend during her late teen years, something she’d never admitted to anyone before. To address it in print, she also had to tell her mother and husband for the first time. She writes about it with a brisk, factual clarity immediately familiar to those who’ve been through similar experiences. The whole thing takes up little more than two pages, with no heavy narrative arc, no moralizing, and no closure—it simply happens. In the moment, she decided to compartmentalize and move on.
“I didn't realize how much I hadn't dealt with it,” she says, “until I got to the point [later in the book] where I was writing that I had been slightly dependent [as a recreational user] on Rohypnol, the date rape drug. I had loved that drug, because it made me feel completely free, with no guilt or weirdness about sex… And now I understand why I liked that drug at that point—I was self-medicating. But it took me writing the book to pull that into focus. The one thing that I learned that makes things not so scary is that these bad memories come up; you identify them, you accept them, and you make peace with them, and as soon as you do that, they disintegrate and you have the ability to move on.”
Her story isn’t all bleak, of course. There’s the magic of buying her first guitar in college and starting a band, Banda Dratsing, with her best friend (two Banda Dratsing songs would survive almost nearly wholesale as Fall classics, “God-Box” and “Hotel Bloedel”). There’s her chance collision with Mark E.—literally, they ran into each other face first at the bar next door to the venue of a 1983 Fall show in Chicago she’d just seen—followed by their whirlwind romance and instantaneous creative connection. By the end of that year, the first Fall album featuring her songwriting contributions, Perverted by Language, had been released. Smith Start eased the anxiety of her first tour with a group that wasn’t so thrilled to have their singer’s new wife suddenly on board as co-bandleader by forging friendships that would turn out to last a lifetime.
There are plenty of other revelations for Fall fans eager for insight into how the confounding band, with its ever-rotating cast of members, actually operated. A story that’s been largely untold is that of Smith Start’s mid-’90s return, not as Mark E.’s wife but as his ex. After an attempt at a solo career with her band the Adult Net and the end of her relationship with violinist Nigel Kennedy, Smith Start moved back to L.A. from England, somewhat adrift. Living in her old friend Susanna Hoffs’ garage, she continued to write and play music, touring with the Bangles and trying out for Hole. This last move looked likely until she returned home from a medical procedure to find a message on her machine not from Courtney Love but from Mark E., whom she hadn’t spoken to in four years. Just as the Fall was coming off a commercial high point, Smith wanted her back in the band. “I thought this would be a freeing and empowering thing for me,” she says, “and we could redefine our relationship [as exes], but it did not work that way. It was just so miserable.”
The Fall she returned to was a shockingly deteriorated mess. Uncomfortable performance and personal dynamics related to Mark E.’s addictions and inability to cede control carried over to the songwriting and recording process. “When I listen to the recorded version [of ‘Feeling Numb,’ off 1995’s Cerebral Caustic], my blood boils,” she says. “I knew it was a great pop song, and if the Fall did the right thing by it, it'd get rid of its poppiness and become something really fabulous. I delivered it to [Mark E.] like a golden ticket, and basically when I listen to it now, all I hear is the fact that he threw away the vocal. He had been in the pub all day; he came in and laid down the vocal in two seconds. It was slurred, indistinct, not punchy. If you listen to his vocals, for instance, on Slates [from 1981], the vocals are vitriolic, punchy, spitty.”
The center of the band clearly couldn’t hold, and it finally fell apart at a show in Cheltenham in October 1996. Mark E.’s drunken rudeness towards a sound engineer caused Smith Start to snap in the engineer’s defense, and the gloves came off for both parties. It was heartbreaking, though not a terribly difficult decision, for her to walk away again.
Since then, Smith Start has found a more supportive collaborator in husband Philip Start, with the couple owning a small chain of high-end boutiques together. And writing her memoir hasn’t only helped her heal personally—it’s brought her back together with Steve and Paul Hanley, the brothers who anchored the Fall’s propulsive rhythm section during their glory days. She’d stopped playing music for some time due to pain in her arm that may have been psychosomatic, but she found that writing opened up a creative channel that caused that strange pain to ebb. Other former Fall members Simon Rogers and Steve Trafford (plus guitarist Jason Brown) started playing with them too, eventually morphing into a band they dubbed Brix and the Extricated.
“I was terrified,” she says of their first show in 2014. “Nobody wants to sing Mark's lyrics. I thought that I was going to put my head in the lion's mouth, and all Fall fans everywhere were absolutely going to rip me apart. But we practiced, and all of a sudden I realized that the songs we were doing were songs that we wrote—Mark and I were in the room together. I understood the inspiration of where it had come from, for him… and I had my own interpretation of how to do it.”
Following positive response from fans and a wider 2015 tour, the Extricated solidified into a “real band,” with a debut LP of originals coming next year. “I never dreamed in my life that I would have a guitar and stand on stage at 50—no one wants to see that,” she says. “But the weird thing is, when [we started playing together], it wasn't like I had a choice. I was compelled to do it. Then I realized, actually, my age is my strength. It's a wonderful thing to stand up as a role model for women, to show that you are cool and sexy and viable no matter what.”
A theme that threads through The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise is instinct. It was Smith Start’s gut urge that brought her to playing music, to meeting Mark E., to joining the Fall—and it carries her through still. “When I go out there [onstage], I'm laser-point focused,” she says. “I don't go out there hoping it's going to be OK—I go out there to kick ass so hard and just stake my claim. As if our lives depended on it. And they do.”