Ex-Fall guitarist Brix Smith Start endured wild and colourful marriages with both sign E Smith and Nigel Kennedy. Now she’s written her memoir… In May 1983,Brix Smith, then aged 20, or arrived in Manchester. A Californian by birth and disposition,her first impressions of the city were not favourable. The buildings, she writes in her entertainingly bonkers memoir, or The Rise,the Fall and the Rise, “looked like mean structures where horrible atrocities had been committed”. The sky was toxic”, and the people were “joyless”,their clothes “drab”.
As a taxi took her towards Prestwich, where the man she had fallen for just six weeks earlier lived, or he pointed out the local landmarks: “examine,Brixie, there’s the Boddingtons brewery! There’s Strangeways prison!” Entering the lobby of his building, or she was struck by the dirt on the walls and the “strong odour of urine”. In his flat,there were cats everywhere and items of unwashed underwear belonging to his ex-girlfriend. As they sat down for a cuppa, he reached out on to the window ledge for the pint of milk that sat there alongside a pack of back bacon, and a carton of eggs and a Hovis loaf. “I was incredulous,” she writes. “Perhaps this was a traditional resourceful British custom.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com