From a privileged if fractious Hollywood Brat background to wife of Mark E Smith, muse to his Manchester band, The Fall, and trophy marriage to classical violinist, Nigel Kennedy – it has been a long, surreal and often grim trip for Laura Elisse Salenger. Naming herself after The Clash song, Guns of Brixton, in 1983 Laura left her closeted California life, and travelled to Manchester with her "soul mate", Smith. The joy of being in love with one of punk rock's most acerbic frontrunners soon gave way to feelings of a queasy nature ("Nobody smiled," she writes of her first glimpses of Manchester. "Everybody looked so poor. All their clothes were drab. Where was the colour?"). Written assuredly and matter-of-factly – albeit with several lapses into faux philosophising – the book rings true enough.
