Brix Smith Start on her time in The Fall, "crazy genius men" and why she considered sleeping with Mickey Mouse

Today Smith Start is drug-free, wearing an Acne matte-sequinned top and a frankly Californian level of candour. The Acne top was a gift (from Melanie Rickey and Mary Portas as it happens). The candour she was born with.

We are sitting in her agent’s house in north London. One of Smith Start’s pet pugs is snoring on the sofa. The musician, TV fashion personality, former girlfriend of the aforementioned Kennedy and before that wife of The Fall’s Mark E Smith is talking about the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the swans and the ugly ducklings and the Mickey Mice that have made up her five decades and counting on this planet. (And no, for the record, she didn’t actually sleep with Mickey.)

She has written a book about it all, which is why we’re here today. The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise, it’s called. The title’s upward trajectory is significant. Smith Start has lived through marital breakdown, rock ’n’ roll excess, appearing opposite Gok Wan on Channel 4’s Gok’s Fashion Fix and much worse. And she has survived it all. Now here she is looking well with a book to promote and a sense of acceptance about her past.

There are a couple of Brix Smiths (as was) that you, dear reader, might possibly be familiar with. For fashion types it may be that you know her as the designer-label lover fighting (and usually losing) fashion battles against Gok Wan’s High Street chic. But to us older, former indie kids she will always be remembered for adding a pop sheen and a touch of American glamour to the late John Peel’s favourite band back in the mid-1980s.

Both turn up in The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise. But the book is also full of other Brixes. There’s the horse-loving little girl frightened of her angry father. The wronged wife, the friend to the stars (everyone from Gary Lineker to Courtney Love and dancer Michael Clarke to club legend and walking art exhibit Leigh Bowery; Charles and Di even get a passing mention), the shop owner, the woman with eating disorders. All Brixian life is on display here; the flaws, the failures, the fights. The woman sitting in front of me is the sum of all of them. Including the teenager who was the victim of a brutal sex attack, the memory of which she had repressed for many, many years until she started writing the book. She had to tell her husband Philip Start and her parents that it had happened before the book was published. Those must have been difficult conversations. That chapter is difficult to read, I tell her. Lord knows what it must have been like to write.

Did she have any reservations about putting the events down on paper? “I don’t want to be the poster woman who got raped up the ass, right? But millions of women and men are raped. I am not alone and everybody has a right to deal with it in their own way. There is nothing good about it but what is good about it is I’m here now and I’m safe and I’m strong and I feel whole. I dealt with it in my own way, I accepted it and I let it go.”

When Chrissie Hynde revealed that she had been raped in her memoir last year she was criticised for blaming herself for putting herself in the position where it could have happened, I remind her. “Some people say you manifest it somehow. I don’t believe that. I was very, very trusting. He was a psycho. I can guarantee you now that his life is far worse than mine.”

This is the thing about the book and about its writer. She – it – is astonishingly candid. “I thought if I was truly honest and vulnerable in the book the vulnerability would resonate with everybody,” Smith Start says today. “Because there’s no point standing up going, ‘Everything’s a f****** bowl of roses.’ We’re all the same, we’ve all been through shit and life is about that. But it’s about how you process it and how you rise from it.”

People have already asked what her ex-husband Mark E Smith thinks about it. Her portrait of him, after all, is of a man staying up all night drinking scotch and snorting speed, a dictatorial control freak who (possibly serially) betrays her.

“I cannot control what he thinks or what he does. I can’t control anything else in the world except my own feelings. So I better not worry about that.”

Well, indeed. But issues of control are one of the book’s main themes. And that goes back to childhood.

Before there was Brix there was Laura. Laura lived in Los Angeles, an only child living with her mother. Mum was a model turned TV researcher who took her daughter into watch Sonny and Cher rehearse their TV show. Dad was a child psychologist with a side order of eccentricity – in later years he decided he was Scottish and started speaking with a Scottish accent even though he was in reality, his daughter points out, a “Beverly Hills Jew”.

You get the impression from the book that as a child Laura was something of a daddy’s girl. “When I was really little I kind of was,” Smith Start says when I suggest as much. “I had to make myself invisible later on as his life became more troubled and he became more unhappy in his circumstances.”

Her father, it’s fair to say, had issues. “He was terrifyingly angry. I just walked on egg shells. It’s scary when you are a little kid or a young teenager because you can’t stand up to your parents and he was a horrific bully. I was scared to be myself around him because every time I did I’d get in terrible trouble.”

His anger wasn’t just aimed at her. “He was angry full stop, so, yeah, my mum got it. He seethed. She would shake with fear at him. It was awful and he did that to his next wife and his next wife and he did it to the animals and he did it to me … I don’t know what he did to his patients.”

She is quick to point out that her stepfather was cut from very different cloth. “I got a great stepdad. I had a great male role model in my life. And, yes, my mother worked all the time. She probably thinks she neglected me as a child. But she was an amazing role model too. I was so lucky.”

But your father is your father. For a long time, even after she’d grown up and moved away, she kept trying to fix her relationship with him. “I kept going back again and again: ‘I’m going to be the adult person. I’m going to forgive him.’ And I’d put myself forward and make the initial phone call and go and visit him. And there came a point where he’d just let me down time and time again and I was like, ‘Draw a line in the sand. It’s too hurtful. He probably doesn’t want to be that way but it’s actually nothing to do with me.’ And once I realised it wasn’t me he didn’t love – it was himself – I was good.”

There possibly speaks someone who’s done more than a little therapy in her time. That said, she recognises that she pursued her father through many of the men she subsequently took up with. She had a penchant for “crazy, genius men” she admits.

“Yeah. That’s very normal. You repeat patterns. You always date the same kind of person. People repeat patterns because it’s comforting. But also they try to fix the things that are broken. If you have a relationship with a parent that is fractured in some way and you don’t know how to fix it – you can’t fix the other person. You can never fix anybody but yourself – you repeat it and repeat it and repeat until you get it.”

It’s fair to say that she didn’t get it for a long time. She was at the end of her teens when she met Mark E Smith when The Fall played Chicago. In the book she says she was “love-struck”, even though at first sight he looked scary. Within a matter of weeks, at the age of 20 (“just”) she uprooted herself and moved to Manchester.

“I had no idea of what I was coming into. I had never seen a picture of Manchester. There was no internet. I just didn’t care.”

The city she found was grim and depressing. “It looked grey. There were red brick Victorian buildings all over and it really did look like there were psychic stains of horribleness in the buildings. People were incredibly drab and not colourful in the way that they dressed. They were dour, bent down. You know when you see a sunflower and its head is a bit down and it’s sad? The people were like that. They weren’t California people standing up and embracing the sun.”

Looking back that was what she brought to The Fall, a shaft of sunlight that partially lit up the dank, roiling rumble of the band. They even began having hits, albeit minor ones. In the book and in person she is still clearly in love with the music the band made and with the creativity of her ex-husband. But he could be controlling, combative. They would argue and fall out. The drugs didn’t help. She also thinks he wasn’t happy when she got a record deal for her own band The Adult Net.

It was when The Fall were working with the Scottish dancer Michael Clarke on the I Am Curious, Orange ballet project that she began to suspect that her husband was cheating on her. “All the way through Curious Orange I had various strong suspicions. By the time I got to Sadler’s Wells we weren’t speaking. I was sobbing every night before going on stage. But I would say to myself, ‘You’re a professional. The show must go on. Get out there and smile.’ I was smiling and dying inside.”

She also wasn’t eating. She was depressed. And then he left her. It emerged Smith had been having an affair with the daughter of a friend. “It was Christmas when he left me. This girl had given him a pair of socks and she had given me an emerald brooch. The minute I opened that I was like ‘guilt present’.” How did she respond when she finally had it confirmed? “I was FURIOUS.” When she speaks the word you can hear that it’s in capital letters.

“I literally had visions of taking that girl by the scalp … This was my fantasy. I would lie in bed and I would imagine hiring a flat bed truck in Manchester, tying a rope around her head and pulling her through the streets while screaming on a bullhorn: ‘This woman f***** my husband.’”

That’s understandable although it might be noted her revenge fantasies were not aimed at her adulterous husband. What I find difficult to understand Brix, I say, is why you then stayed on in The Fall even after you and Mark had separated?

“I had lost my husband, my house. I wanted to leave Manchester. I wanted to go to London. I wanted to start fresh. But I didn’t want to lose The Fall. Because it was so important defining who I was.

“He wanted to f*** this girl and have me stay in the band. And I thought, ‘As a musician, couldn’t I do this? Couldn’t I shut down that part of me and let him do what he had to do?’ But I was raw and hurting. It was very, very difficult. So I stayed in the band a little while.

“I was anorexic as well. I was so destroyed by the break-up of my marriage that I really couldn’t eat. I kept thinking, ‘The skinnier I get the more beautiful I’ll be and he’ll be sorry.’ Everything was vengeful.”

Eventually a booking agent she was dating talked sense into her. This had to stop. The Fall were meant to travel to Germany for a TV show. Without warning Smith Start simply didn’t turn up for the flight. The end.

Or so you would think. And yet a few years later she rejoined the band. “I thought I was going back as a songwriter, a musician, not the wife. I wouldn’t have the attachment so it would be easier. In fact it was the opposite. It was hell on earth. It was really, really ugly.” Her second spell in the band ended in Motherwell when she ran at her ex-husband swinging her guitar like a club and screaming, “I will smash your head in like a pumpkin.”

After her first time in the band and the failure of her relationship with Nigel Kennedy she returned to America, broke and in need of a job. Besides acting, she started waitressing. “It was the making of me. If I did have any diva-ness or arrogance or anything, it was ripped from me.”

When her friend Susanna Hoffs, of Bangles fame, asked her to join her on a solo tour Hoffs had to buy her a bass guitar. Eventually she returned to the UK, The Fall and then small-screen fame opposite Gok Wan. “I played a character, you know. I played a kind of rich bitch shopper where money was no object. I was acting. A lot of people don’t realise. They think I am that person. It’s so not me. They’ll say, ‘Oh my God, I wore this especially because I knew you were coming,’ like I’m going to judge them. I’m not going to do that.”

Judgmental is not something you’d call her. She has settled down now with retailer Philip Start. She was going out with the poet Murray Lachlan Young when they met, another of the “crazy genius” types. “I wasn’t looking for another man,” she says. Lachlan Young “was so gorgeous and super-talented and divine in every way. But we did have a wild lifestyle. We were very much a rock ’n’ roll couple. We burned the candle at both ends. We partied hard. We would probably have killed each other …”

Really? “Not in terms of anger,” she says. “But excess maybe. I think he once said we were like Sid and Nancy. I don’t think we were quite like that. Sid and Nancy Lite.”

Start, though, met her, didn’t ask for her number, tracked her down, started courting her, told her he was a grown man and he wanted commitment. She made the “healthy” choice and chose Start. “Here is a creative businessman who’s a family man, who’s a dad, who’s a grown-up. But he was sexy as well. He was really sexy.”

They’ve been together for some 20 years, and even ran a business together. These days, then, Brix Smith Start is a grown up. She’s lived through this and that and is still here. She admits an eating disorder is for life. But even so she’s made her peace with the past, she’s had therapy and she is making music again. It still says Laura on her passport but the woman in front of me calls herself Brix. And Brix is a survivor.

I’d say Mickey Mouse has probably missed his chance.

The Rise, the Fall and the Rise by Brix Smith Start is published by Faber & Faber on May 5, priced £14.99.