by Dave Simpson
October 1986’s Bend Sinister was another Brix-era cracker which took The Fall into the Top 40, a foreign environment but one they’d subsequently occupy for years. Many of the album tracks became live staples, particularly ‘US. 80’s 90’s’, a rampaging assault in which Smith would often adopt a megaphone to bemoan his treatment at the hands of Boston immigration, who objected to him spending time in the toilet.
Gigs at the time were transformed. Venues were becoming bigger and fuller. I remember one show in the late 1980s (15 March 1988, to be precise) at Leeds University where I’d first seen them, but the venue was crammed to bursting, not peppered with large spaces as it had been in 1981. The Jesuit lads’ heads were still down, but Brix was stagefront, posing and pouting, with virtually every male head in the room gazing at her, even salivating, as they might do today at Kylie Minogue. Smith seemed to acknowledge she’d revitalised the band. When they played Leeds again, at the Polytechnic on 13 December 1988, the man didn’t seem to want to leave the stage, leading The Fall through a rare two sets of encores and a total of 15 songs.
When we talk, Brix has a heavy cold, which she’s treating by drinking lots of water, one of many tips she picked up in the heavily touring band. It seems I’m far from the first Fall fan to track her down via the shop. Apparently, they often wander in, pretending to be looking for something and then just stand there gawping, exactly like at those gigs.
‘Or bowing!’ she shrieks, through sniffs.
Brix’s life has been transformed since her days in The Fall, but it seems equally significant she still calls herself, at least partly, a Smith. ‘I’m very proud of what we did,’ she insists. ‘It’s a part of my life.’
Brix hasn’t changed much from her days in The Fall. As the articles in magazines like Vogue or newspapers such as the Independent testify with occasional but high-profile regularity, she’s still a platinum blonde, glamorous and very alternative American – the antithesis of The Fall. Which was no doubt the appeal, and vice versa.
She remembers how it felt to hear The Fall the first time. ‘I just thought it was fucking brilliant. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t get to the bottom of it at all. It wasn’t banal. It was so interesting, the way it was all put together and I’m sure he designed it like that.’ Even now, she still calls The Fall ‘super-powerful’ and says their records have ‘arteries of subtlety’ that can flow right to the core of the person listening. She argues that everyone will have a different idea about the lyrics’ meaning because, like a great painting, what people make of The Fall is actually a reflection of themselves. This is a fascinating idea, and I can’t help wondering if it applies not just to fans, but to the people who made the records.
Implausibly, it was just two weeks after hearing Slates that she ‘bumped into’ Smith after The Fall played at Chicago Metro. Her initial encounter with her future husband – who was carrying two beers and had powder trickling from his nose – suggests he wasn’t the usual character a middle-class Jewish girl would hurriedly take home to meet her mum. But, again in contrast to the public image, Brix says she found Smith ‘very sweet, considerate and friendly’. In fact, he wasn’t just charming, he was magnetic.
‘The way he looked at the world was from such a different perspective from the way normal people do … In that way he was a great poet. Because he wouldn’t see things the same way, he wouldn’t speak the same way. He was brilliant, so fucking smart I cannot tell you.’ The pair were married at a Bury registry office on 19 July 1983 with the now AWOL Burns very much in attendance as the witness. Musically, the vows were slower coming. It seems Smith was supposedly going to act as svengali and mastermind her own career. However, she explains the process by which she joined The Fall two months later.
‘He said, “I like the songs you write. Can we use them? And can you play on them?”’ The 21-year-old LA glamour puss found herself duly immersed in The Wonderful and Frightening World. She agrees that for Smith, The Fall is ‘24-7’, which makes it entirely logical that any wives or girlfriends don’t just join with the man, they join up with his work.
She suggests her impact on that work was just ‘to bring a little bit of light into the shadows’ and emphasises how keen she was not to overdo it. She describes a creative process that was collaborative but retained Smith’s position as Fall dictator. She would take the skeleton of a song to the singer; he would add the words and change the timing, ‘almost like a duet’.
‘In some ways it is a dictatorship because he has a very strong vision, but he is willing to embrace ideas and put things together,’ she says, considering herself a ‘soft melodic part’ who ‘made The Fall more palatable’.
She certainly did that, but perhaps it had to happen, because the game was changing. Formerly ‘alternative’ acts from The Cure to New Order were playing big venues and appearing on Top of the Pops, while the older strictly independent culture was on the wane. The Smiths were one of the first bands to not just court the music press but also take up residency in the pop charts. Smith, the venerable site manager, was surely canny enough to realise The Fall had to adapt or die, and Brix was effectively a company streamliner. If The Fall had been a limited company, Brix would have made the share price rocket.
She remembers the culture shock of entering the Fall organisation, in particular the crumbling flat at Rectory Lane in which Smith was living at the time, where the ‘refrigerator’ was an outside window ledge. When she visited the shop around the corner – suicide blonde and wearing kohl eyeliner – the residents of Prestwich would gawp at her as intently as Fall fans do now in Start.
‘It was very provincial,’ she says. ‘Every time I went in they’d say, “’Ello luv, are you having a nice holiday?” I’d say, “No, actually, I live in a house around the corner.”’ She remembers appalling struggles to obtain smoked salmon and avocados, and struggling to understand the fascination with fish and chips. The Smiths had a BMW even though Smith can’t drive, and they didn’t use the local swimming pool because Smith has a phobia of water. However, she says in those days they did have holidays – including one at the Hotel des Bains where they filmed Death in Venice. ‘It was very glamorous,’ she says contentedly, which doesn’t sound very Fall.
It wasn’t just Brix who was adapting to a different culture. Once she was ensconced, The Fall started looking different too. Out went the image of a bunch of blokes queuing up to clock off at the local mincemeat factory: in came leather coats, trendy shirts. Even, God forbid, mascara.
‘I used to dress Mark, a little bit,’ suggests Brix carefully, perhaps explaining how she unconsciously sowed the seeds of her new career in fashion in The Fall.
She insists she would never have used eyeliner or – ‘For God’s sake!’ – proper make-up. But an ‘element of mascara’ gave Smith’s already naturally big eyes a ‘dramatic look’. Thus, Fall audiences who’d grown accustomed to a man with a beer drinker’s pallor were now confronted by a creature whose eyeballs were ‘popping from the stage’. Not that the process of remodelling the defiantly anti-fashion Smith was seamless.
‘He had these absolutely ghastly shirts with Spirograph all over them. So, so scary! We had to get him into something more appealing, less nerdy.’ She took him to buy an Armani suit which cost £700. ‘It was the most money he’d ever spent but he wore that suit. He probably still has it.’ Smith also refused to wear trainers but instead preferred ‘hard’ shoes. I remember the ‘corrective shoes’ he complained of in Manchester.
Curiously enough, the shop where Smith bought his first suit was Woodhouse, the Manchester branch of a menswear chain founded by Brix’s current husband. But Brix says these sorts of odd coincidences crop up a lot in The Wonderful and Frightening World. One of Start’s principles is an old Smith adage: ‘The best companies advertise the least.’
Very recently, she was swimming in the Caribbean and suddenly started to panic. The current was very strong, and she heard Smith’s ‘pearls of wisdom’ in her head –
‘Never turn your back on the sea.’ Out of the blue, we’re discussing whether Smith is actually psychic. She thinks he is, and points initially to the track ‘Terry Waite Sez’ (on 1986’s Bend Sinister), for which she wrote the music. Four months after the song was released, the Church of England’s Special Envoy was kidnapped in Lebanon, and Brix reveals his family got in touch to see if there was a psychic connection to where he was being held.
She cites the song ‘Powder Keg’, which came out shortly before the Manchester IRA bombing. Then there’s 1992’s spiky ‘Free Range’, in which Smith talks of ‘trouble’ about to sweep Europe, just months before war and ethnic cleansing erupted in Bosnia-Herzegovina. When I first interviewed Mark Smith in 1997, New Labour had just come to power and everything seemed very cuddly and optimistic. However, contrary to almost everyone in the nation at the time, he insisted the Blair government would be ‘the Fourth Reich’ – the most authoritarian nanny state we’ve had for years. He was right.
Brix appeared in the video for 1983’s ‘Kicker Conspiracy’, which I think is the greatest football single of all time, in which Smith laments the ‘punishment’ of skill and predicted how the beautiful game would be taken away from its working-class roots into gentrification. It came out a decade before the formation of the Premier League and Roy Keane’s later famous grumble about fans in executive boxes with prawn sandwiches.
Brix remembers another darker incident of Smith’s shamanism. In the mid 1980s they were in London and a particular journalist incurred ‘God”s almighty wrath by ‘disrespecting’ The Mighty Fall. Smith was so furious he informed the journo, ‘I fucking curse you. You’ve got the Curse of The Fall.’ Two days later this journalist was in a phone booth when it was run into and crushed by a car. She still sounds wary – ‘Nothing ever happened to me. Thank God’ – and I sense a distinctly nervous tremor.
After all, since beginning on this journey I’ve noticed a car has recently appeared in the village bearing the registration number ‘MES’.
Fortunately, I remember Smith can’t drive.
Brix relates ‘countless’ examples of Smith’s supposed gifts, remarking on his referencing Baghdad (on ‘Guest Informant’) a year before the first Gulf War.
We decide to change the subject, and she brightens as she remembers how life around The Fall was more Wonderful than Frightening, at least in the early years. On tour, especially with Salford contemporaries New Order, they’d indulge in japes such as partly sawing through chair legs which would then collapse when unfortunate victims took a seat. A favourite prank of Smith’s was apparently to fill cups with urine, with which his thirsty, hardworking musicians would gratefully and unwittingly refresh themselves as they came offstage.
Many of the daftest pranks involved Karl Burns. One night, when The Fall were staying in London’s Columbia – a hotel frequented by wilder rock bands in which I’ve also attempted to get to sleep, to no avail – the drummer took exception to the arrival of a band called The Fabulous Thunderbirds. As the band chomped on – what else? – fish and chips, Burns bombarded them with fireworks, making such a racket he alerted the attentions of the Bomb Squad. ‘We got in so much trouble,’ grins Brix. ‘We were nearly banned from the hotel. But they deserved it. They were dicks.’ Shortly afterwards, the hotel’s water supply had been turned off and Smith left taps on in all the toilets. When the water was reconnected, it flooded through the ceilings. That time they were banned. When they were finally allowed back in, they were almost banned again for excessive partying (a statement was later released suggesting that being allowed into the Columbia again had been ‘a cause for celebration’).
Brix reveals other, more bizarre Smith tomfoolery at the time: how he developed an ‘absolute hatred’ for chubby-cheeked, bookish English singer Lloyd Cole and began a Peel session with the words, ‘Lloyd Cole’s face and head is made out of cow pat’.
Another unlikely recipient of Smith’s peculiar loathing was entertainer Tracey Ullman. Brix reveals, sniggering, he ‘despised [Ullman] so much that he wanted to put subliminal messages in the videos: “Hang Tracey Ullman!”’
Perhaps as Ben Pritchard found release through football, these practical jokes were Smith’s own method of countering stress. Brix attests that marriage did not dilute Smith’s creative tendencies and, if anything, he became even more demanding. By the mid 1980s, the schoolboy who once bullied Kay Carroll’s brother was starting to draw up a ‘torment list’ of people he would pick on. There was no obvious reason for being on the torment list.
‘He once fired [sound man] Rex Sergeant for eating a salad!’ Brix roars, adding that the latest Fall execution took place in front of over 1,000 people at the Edinburgh Festival.
I remember what Marc Riley said about a ‘spanner in the works’.
‘When anything would get too good or too big or too smooth he’d fuck it up on purpose,’ she says. ‘He’d sack somebody. He’d have a huge gig, and no drummer! It was a fucking nightmare. He would do that and it would shake us up all the time.’
While Smith’s tactics caused havoc, Brix concedes he was right. ‘The group would regroup and rethink, but we’d usually come back better, because we were forced to do it.’
However, other undercurrents were creeping into play. Smith’s artistic whims tend to reflect his state of mind and the further upping of ‘creative tension’ seems to coincide with marital trouble.
It had all been something of a whirlwind – from meeting in Chicago to Rectory Lane and later a new house in the avenue lined with trees, to mainstream Radio One airplay and The Chart Show – but something wasn’t right. Brix says while she ‘never fought with Mark’, there was ‘stress and aggro’. Like Dave Tucker and Marc Riley, she too suspected Smith was singing about her in songs. Although her ex-husband denies it, she insists 1988’s ‘Bad News Girl’ – a torrent at a ‘tiresome’ lover – refers to her.
Brix says conflict began when the British media started to pick up on her more visual appeal. Apparently, Smith resented her appearing on magazine covers instead of him: ‘I think he felt threatened. He certainly didn’t like it and maybe he got a bit competitive. I think that kind of thing made him feel emasculated in some way, even though he had encouraged me. I told him not to worry although at the same time I was pushing for success.’
That doesn’t sound very Fall, but Brix confirms she believed The Fall were such a great band they should conquer the world. ‘I thought it was the coolest band ever and we needed to get it across to as many people as possible,’ she argues. ‘I had a capitalistic view but out of the goodness of my heart because the band were fab. But he didn’t like it and he’d go after other girls and it got a little bit sad for me.’
Accordingly, cracks grew wider when Brix got a solo deal for her band, The Adult Net. Then suddenly everything ‘blew up’, exacerbated by Smith’s increasing use of alcohol.
She claims he was ‘never, ever sober. He was irrational and scary and almost impossible to work with. When you’re young you can metabolise it and keep [the lifestyle] under control, but it got out of hand. Maybe inside he was really, really unhappy. I don’t know, but there was no way to stop it. I tried but he was deteriorating. It wasn’t a life I wanted to lead because it was destroying me.’
She could see how everything they’d worked for was starting to fall apart. As she puts it, ‘the ship was sinking’. She knew Smith had always been averse to music industry conventions but couldn’t see why he wouldn’t give an inch or two, and at least schmooze a little.
‘He was fucking up everything,’ she says, referring to cancelled gigs and interviews. ‘It was embarrassing, and I didn’t want to be a part of it because I didn’t want to be tarred with the same brush.’ Perhaps Smith needed some strong management, but she says he can’t relinquish power.
‘No manager ever stays. He tortures them and bullies them. What he really needs is someone who understands The Fall and who doesn’t want to change anything, just get it out there.’ Bu
t it was not to be.
‘It got to the point where I was sick of fighting with him,’ she sighs, now quite emotional. ‘You know, “Don’t do that, do this interview …” Everything broke apart. I had my own career so I decided to go with it.’
In 1989, as Smith hooked up with Saffron Prior (a secretary at The Fall’s Cog Sinister office and a face around the Prestwich/Fall set for some years), Brix divorced from both Mark E Smith and The Fall. She hooked up with punk-haired classical violinist Nigel Kennedy just as he was hitting commercial pay dirt with The Four Seasons, and once again enjoyed the media whirl. Shortly after, Smith appeared to hex the relationship with Extricate’s ‘Sing! Harpy’, a track which seems to be about the musician and features mischievously discordant violin. The relationship fell apart and Brix disappeared back to America, at one point working as a waitress.
Another, perhaps the best, track on Extricate, ‘Bill Is Dead’, sees Smith in the unusual role of emotional singer, still dripping sarcasm but now using his words to cast a melancholy eye over his life. May 1989 had brought another blow, the death of his father from a heart attack aged 59, a man he’d perhaps never really got to know. Sarcastically describing the period as the greatest time of his life, Smith could not have been more honest.
He’d lost his father, his wife and the most successful Fall musician of them all in the space of a few months. But The Fall’s doomed romantic heroine was not written out of the script. Brix would return for another episode. The ship wasn’t sinking, it was just changing course once again. There would be more highs and more lows.
