Gig preview: Brix and The Extricated at Long Division festival, Wakefield

“It represented different things in different times of my life,” says the 53-year-old guitarist, singer and latter day fashion guru who’s perhaps best known for her time in the long-running post-punk group The Fall and to whose lead singer, Mark E Smith, she was married for six years.

“As a small child in the beginning it was a place to escape my parents’ troubled marriage and my extremely dysfunctional life. My Dad [a child psychologist] would just drop me at my grandparents, he didn’t really engage with me, he’d go off and do his doctor things or dating things or whatever, my Mom [a TV executive at CBS] worked all the time so my grandparents would take me to Disneyland and I loved it there.

“Basically I think it is one of the greatest art installations in the world in terms of it takes you out of your own reality and puts you in a different reality. It can make you forget about your troubles if you look at it the right way.”

While she appreciates “loads of people hate Disney”, she says: “When I look at it I don’t see the bad stuff, I just see the art of it and the way that it’s emotional puppeteering and the way that it can control the masses, it can control people’s emotions whether to make them scared or happy, they use effects, they use music, they use ambient noise, put you into structures where you believe you’ve gone back in time, it’s the suspension of disbelief and for me as a child it was a complete safe haven and I forgot about my problems when I was there.”

Later in her life, it “became a source of inspiration” for her music. “A lot of people who are big Fall fans don’t realise that there’s so many Disney-like ambient sounds from walking around there sampled onto all their favourite records.” She says she learned a lot about layering and juxtaposing sounds from Walt Disney’s theme park, which was close to where she grew up in Los Angeles.

Mickey Mouse became a symbol for her too, “like some kind of post-modern god, a big brand symbol like Coca-Cola, but safe somehow and funny, you could trust him”.

By the end of the book readers can see the journey she goes through with Disney. “On one day it changes from the happiest place in the world to the worst place, but I still crave going there,” she says, “because I craved to be taken out of any painful reality. At times where I’m depressed in my life or having some kind of trouble I go to Disneyland as a safe place, it’s my Switzerland.”

Around the age of 15, the girl born Laura Salenger became nicknamed Brixton by her friends at private school after her Anglophile music tastes – in particular the Clash song Guns of Brixton. Five years later she met and fell in love with Mark E Smith at a Fall concert in Chicago. A few months later she travelled to England with him and they were married.

Now living in a tiny flat in Manchester, where Smith would ‘refrigerate’ pints of milk on the kitchen window ledge and wash clothes in the bath, the harsh reality of the North West in 1983 was a world away from privilege she’d known in the States or the romantic image of England that she had in her mind from watching Mary Poppins or Peter Pan.

“Manchester in the early 1980s was not the Manchester of today,” she says. “Then it was not so hot, but now it’s OK, and part of my heart is Mancunian, they’ve really looked after me over the years and almost taken me in as one of their own and for that I am grateful, but on the day of my arrival I did not expect what I saw.”

Smith had gone through one of his habitual phases of firing members of The Fall, so Brix joined as a guitarist. (He liked her self-taught style, he said, because she sounded “like Lou Reed”.) Two of the tracks she’d written while she was in a band in the US became Fall songs, with Smith’s clever and enigmatic lyrical input. So began a creative partnership that was to last six years and incorporate The Fall’s most melodic and commercial albums including Perverted By Language and This Nation’s Saving Grace.