When Brix Smith Start picked up a guitar for the first time in fifteen years, it was an understandably emotional experience. Smith Start, after all, is a survivor of not just one, but two stints as guitarist with legendary punk-sired outsiders, The Fall. She was also married for six years to the band's mercurial vocalist and leader throughout almost forty years, thirty-odd albums and countless ex members, Mark E Smith. Persuaded in part to take up music again by her current husband, Philip Start, once she plugged in there was no turning back.

“This fully formed song dropped out,” Smith Start says. “My voice was different, kind of vulnerable and charismatic at the same time. I didn't know where any of this was coming from, and began weeping.”

Around the same time, Smith Start was sent a copy of The Big Midweek, Steve Hanley's tragi-comic memoir of his seventeen years as bass player in The Fall. After attending the book's launch, Smith Start, Hanley and Hanley's drummer brother Paul, who first played with The Fall aged fifteen, formed Brix and The Extricated, who arrive in in Glasgow next week with a set of songs old and new.

“We're all songwriters,” Smith Start points out, “and the first rule was that we only do stuff that we wrote for The Fall. We're doing different interpretations of our own work, and we have the right to do that, because they're not only great songs. They're part of our lives.”

While this rule allowed for a welter of material, including singles Cruiser's Creek and L.A., for Smith Start it also made for a slight problem.

“Nobody wanted to sing Mark's lyrics and stand in his shadow,” she says, sounding like a fan girl as much as Smith's ex wife. “I have to tell you, I was absolutely terrified to do it. First of all, his words are incredible, but so is his delivery and his attitude. He's so iconic, so to try and follow that is pretty scary, but then, with those songs, because I was married to Mark, I understand where some of the inspiration came from, because I was part of it too.”

The artist formerly known as Laura Elisse Salenger grew up in Los Angeles and Chicago before studying theatre and literature in Vermont. It was while playing bass and singing in her first group, Banda Dratsing, that Laura became Brix after Salenger was inspired by The Clash song, Guns of Brixton.

Having met Smith in 1982, she subsequently married him and became The Fall's second guitarist, joining not long after current BBC 6Music DJ Marc Riley left following a punch-up with Smith in Australia. The newly monickered Brix Smith gave The Fall both a glamour and a commercial sheen that paid dividends. For a while she even sorted out her new hubby's wardrobe, as scruffy jumpers were exchanged for shiny shirts in major label backed videos in support of chart-skimming singles, including covers of Victoria, by The Kinks, and psych-garage classics, Mr Pharmacist and There's A Ghost in My House.

After fronting her own band, The Adult Net, in tandem with The Fall, Smith Start went on to tour with The Bangles, covered Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man with her later partner, classical violinist Nigel Kennedy, and auditioned for Courtney Love's band, Hole, playing with them for just one day.

All of this and more will soon be laid bare in Smith Start's forthcoming memoir, The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise. The book is being overseen by the same team who worked on ex Slits guitarist Viv Albertine's book, Clothes, Music, Boys, and looks set to be published by Faber and Faber in 2016.

“I kept my mouth shut for fifteen years,” Smith Start says, “but this is the complete truth. I've no anger about things anymore. It's just about the choices I made in life, and the hardships I faced which no-one has any idea about. There's stuff in there about Mark as well, which, because I was married to him, no f***** knows.”

Given Smith Start's background in theatre, it's fitting that two of her pivotal moments in The Fall saw her go beyond music. Hey! Luciani! was a musical play penned by Smith about the short-lived reign of Pope John Paul I, and was performed at the Riverside Studios in 1986 by the band and a cast that included choreographer and dancer Michael Clark and performance artist Leigh Bowery. While the play bemused reviewers, Smith himself described it as “a cross between Shakespeare and The Prisoner”.

“He's a mastermind,” Smith Start says of her ex-husband. “He's omnipotent in every way. No-one had a clue what was going on in the play, but it was f****** brilliant. Mark used to do all these songs through a megaphone which we wanted to stick up his ass, but he was like the silent movie director, Mack Sennett.

“You have to remember that Mark is not a trained musician, and that's what makes him so brilliant, because there are no limitations on what he can or cannot do. So when he picks up a three-string violin on the song Hotel Bloedel, it has a real effect on things. It is like theatre, and that's possibly why he wanted me in the band, to break things up onstage and maybe give things a different dynamic.”

Smith Start also appeared with The Fall at the 1988 Edinburgh International Festival in I Am Kurious Oranj, providing the live soundtrack to Michael Clark's outrageous ballet loosely based around the 300th anniversary of William of Orange's accession to the English throne. Performed at the King's Theatre, one of its many eye-popping highlights was Smith Start's arrival onstage sat astride a giant hamburger.

“Leigh Bowery used to take great delight in spinning me round on it as fast as he could,” she says, “and I thought I'd either fall off or puke.”

More recently Smith Start has appeared on TV alongside fashion guru Gok Wan, and took part in BBC4's documentary, Girl in a Band. While expressing a desire to combine music and fashion for further TV ventures, it is Brix and The Extricated that matters right now.

“This band is very special and we're all loving it,” she says. “It's a joyful thing, and I think it has everything. I see it conquering the world.”

All of which begs the question of what Mark E Smith might think of Brix and The Extricated.

“I don't know how he feels about it,” is Smith Start's short answer, “but I hear through the grapevine he's not pleased. I'm not in touch with Mark and haven't been for years, and I don't know how to get in touch with him, but I've heard rumours of him calling venues we've been playing and trying to get the gigs cancelled.

“Whether that's true or not I don't know, but we are not The Fall. We are The Extricated, though everything we do obviously brings attention to The Fall, and that's no bad thing. At the end of the day, this is for the love of our music, which is the only reason for doing anything, so why would he be mad?

Smith Start pauses, perhaps remembering the old days that might go some way to answering that question.

“Mark may have issues,” she says, “but he really shouldn't.”

Then, looking forward, she speculates on what might be, but probably never will.

“Imagine if we played on the same bill,” she says.

Brix and The Extricated play Broadcast, Glasgow, November 19.

www.broadcastglasgow.com