Tony O’Neill interview

Introduction to Tony O’ Neill Interview by Malcolm Paul

As Jim Morrison once famously said;

“no one here gets out alive”

He also sang:

“Well, I’ve been down so Goddamn long

That it looks like up to me

Well, I’ve been down so very damn long

That it looks like up to me

Yeah, why don’t one you people

C’mon and set me free”

Well, there are plenty of reasons why Lancashire born author Tony O’ Neill shouldn’t have gotten out alive and got up from being “down so very damn long”.

But he did and the world of contemporary literature is all the better for it.

Next year will see the 20th anniversary of Tony’s debut novel ‘Digging the Vein’ (2006).

A raw, ultra sharp lens of semi-autobiographical writing taking us from after Tony’s exodus from Blackburn Lancashire via a music career to the USA, where as his career/life unravelled and Tony became a character on LA’s hard drugs scene, his heroin addiction kicked in and his future looked bleaker and shorter than a stroll through one of life’s best avoided minefields.

But pulling himself out of that hellhole and painfully migrating back to health and sanity, Tony proceeded to give us the readers a string of internationally acclaimed novels chronicling 21st Century life on the razor edge of dark noir with a velocity of prose owing more to Large Hadron Collider than the Ferrari plus, a bunch of plots to die for. (He could easily have done so.)

Described un-appreciatively as ‘Drug Lit ‘, ‘Brutalism’ or the product of ‘cult lit’, the unfocused miss the tough beauty, the serrated humour and the cast of doomed characters straight out of a John Walters/David Lynch film being serenaded by Tom Waits in his own one-man Tin Pan Alley at LA’s infamous Chateau Marmont 8221 W Sunset Blvd.

“Yeah, come along here, mister

C’mon and let the poor boy be”

Instead of ‘checking out of life’, Tony ‘checked in’ against the odds, and went on to give us great books from ‘Digging the Vein’ followed by ‘Down and Out on Murder Mile’, ‘Sick City’ and its sequel ‘Black Neon’.

From a French publication we got ‘La Vie Sauvage’. Along with other translations Tony became an international writing success now clean and sober and chronicling the lives of the down and out – chancers and dreamers propping up the bar – hanging out on the corner like the Bukowski/Fogle and Burroughs’ characters from the books we know so well.

Tony’s not done yet. He’s got a new novel on the way next year and he’s working on a screenplay now as well.

Poetry wise Tony’s  latest work- Forged Prescriptions’ is to me like prose poems in the same way that Rimbaud/Baudelaire or Burroughs are,and a worthy follow up to Tony’s first poetry collection ‘ Songs From a Shooting Gallery ‘ cementing Tony’s reputation as a street poet,as formidable as any of the Beat greats he says he admires,

From day one of my interview with Tony it was apparent he is a born storyteller, his emails back to my request for an online discussion were so good I just had to airlift them right there and then into the narrative just as they came, like Pyramid blocks they just fitted perfectly. The mark of the true storyteller.

I’ll take a back seat now and let Tony tell his tale.

I said, warden, warden, warden

Won’t you break your lock and key

I said, warden, warden, warden

Won’t you break your lock and key

Yeah, come along here, mister

C’mon and let the poor boy be

 

1. Q) Tony if you were to get up from where you are now, go to the window and look out – what would you see and what would your first thoughts be?
2. A) My backyard—a small, unkempt lawn with bald patches, rocks, many trees, a gnome called Gandalf, and a birdhouse I painted with Nico when she was 10 or so. It fell years ago and is slowly disintegrating back into the soil. Squirrels, chipmunks, and, because of the time of year, some young rabbits.

My first thought is that it took me years to get used to this. We moved when Nico was 10, so she’d have a chance to attend a decent middle and high school, after we were priced out of our old neighborhood of Astoria, Queens. I worried that being away from the familiarity of the city – concrete, cars, alarms, sirens—all of it—would fuck with whatever delicate equilibrium allows me to write.

And it did, for a while. The nights were too silent. I’d lie awake listening and even with the windows wide open all I’d hear were the crickets in the summer, and the occasional distant train whistle and ding-ding-dinging of the rail crossing. But I grew to appreciate it. I enjoyed being able to see the stars. And I much prefer chipmunks to NYC rats, even if they are destructive little bastards.

Does it feel like home? As much as anywhere does. We’re going to be moving soon—this was the longest we’ve stayed in one place. With Nico grown and living her own life, the time feels right to make a change… plus my parents are elderly, my mum’s health isn’t great, so I’d like to be closer to them for a while.  But I love the alive feeling of being on the move, figuring out a new place. It stops you from stagnating and gives you enough distance to properly appreciate your previous home.

I started writing about LA after I moved to London. I wrote about my time in London, when I was in NYC. I started writing about living in NYC when I was over the river in NJ. Does that mean there’ll be some New Jersey–set books? I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.

 

1. Q) When I first approached you for an interview I mentioned that I was aware of your admiration for the Beat Movement and the influence it had on your writing.

I think the second email that you sent to me contained an introduction to your relationship with the Beat generation and it would be a good place to start.

You mentioned William Burroughs, as well as addiction and how it was with the Beats and your own past life experience.

This was after I sent you a copy of the interview I did with the American Beat poet/author Mark Terrilll, who now lives in Hamburg.

(This was an interview that was published in Simon Warner’s ‘Rock Music and The Beat Generation’ – later carried in the ‘International Times’).

Mark Terrill co-wrote with Francis Poole a novel titled ‘Ultrazone’ that is a dystopian take on the time William Burroughs and the other Beats had lived in Tangier and were resident in the Hotel Muniria.

(The Villa Muniria is a hotel in Tangier, Morocco. It was the place where the American author William S. Burroughs wrote his famous novel Naked Lunch.)

Mark himself had lived in Tangier and studied creative writing with fellow American Paul Bowles between 1980 and 1983, so he knows the city well.

‘Ultrazone’ has been described by no less an artistic giant than the American film Director Jan Jarmusch: “’Ultrazone’ is captivating on several levels, and it’s entertaining as hell “.

The book was reissued in April 2025.

Tony, you got back to me with this delightful email.

1. A)“Apologies for the slow reply, but I’ve been itching to get back to you—I read the interview with Mark Terrill that you sent and loved it. Very excited you’re interested in doing something on my work. Going to check out part 2, but I’ve always been fascinated by the mystique of Tangier because of Burroughs and Bowles, both of whom loom large in my imagination.

As for the Beats: absolutely, they were a huge influence on me long before I ever seriously considered writing myself. Burroughs remains the writer I’d call my favorite if forced to choose. Through him, I discovered the work of Huncke (incredible), Alex Trocchi (another favorite), and Gregory Corso (who, along with Bukowski, Ginsberg, Fante, and Giorno, represents the pinnacle of modern American poetry for me).

When I first came to NYC, I wound up working for John Giorno, and my ‘office’ was the fabled Bunker at 222 Bowery—Burroughs’ old pad. What a trip that was! When the gig ended, John gave me a copy of Guns and Ammo magazine that Bill had cut up for a collage. It still had an address sticker on the cover: W. S. BURROUGHS / 222 BOWERY / NEW YORK CITY, NY. Talk about a prized possession! I’ve stored it safely and plan to frame it one of these days; it’s my Turin Shroud. I’ll never afford one of Burroughs’ actual artworks, but it’s cool to have the negative image of one. I often wonder what was in those missing squares and rectangles, and where they ended up.

To be honest, I’ve always been fascinated by the jazz era, particularly the doomed beauties like Chet Baker and Billie Holiday. That grew into an obsession with mid-century New York—Lenny Bruce, the drug scene depicted in Burroughs’ Junky, etc. I joke that I’d already been initiated into the mystique of heroin via my love for Burroughs, Huncke, Lou Reed, and Trocchi and the rest. I was drawn to the aesthetics of the lifestyle, the romance of it. I find the younger generation of addicts—weaned on their parents’ medicine cabinets, with no grasp of the historic romance between opiates and music, literature, and art—almost completely unfathomable. Treating heroin as just another way to get fucked up feels reductive.”

1. Q) I want to come to the subject of your addiction a bit further along if you don’t mind, addiction in general and its place in countercultures/subcultures like Beats, Hippies, Punks, Rave- Grunge, etc.

Though you are relatively young, your life and work seems to have straddled a few genres in your time, both in writing and music.

Are you aware you have many branches on the genealogical tree of musical/counterculture genres?

1. A) It’s something I was probably dimly aware of in the beginning, but I’ve grown more aware of over time. The old cliché is that you become more rigid and conservative with age, but for me, I was far more rigid and unyielding as a young man. Whatever music I was listening to back then became my entire musical world, and I instinctively believed that listening to music outside of that narrow genre was a betrayal, somehow. When Britpop happened, and for the first time I was experiencing an honest-to-god cultural moment in real time (I was too young to properly appreciate Madchester and Acid House), I reflexively believed that all American music was automatically uncool. But as I’ve aged, my tastes have broadened, and one of life’s great joys has been going back and discovering the things I was oblivious to at the time. Now that kind of narrow, tribal thinking is completely alien to me. I suppose when you’re a teenager, you just want to belong to something, no matter what it is. 

The same goes for literature. I initially had little interest in books that were outside the very narrow scope of my heroes, but as writing became my full-time pursuit, I naturally began exploring what I’d missed. I’m not kidding—I first read The Great Gatsby in my mid-30s and was completely floored by the quality of the prose. That might make some people think I’m a Neanderthal or something. Like, No shit, Sherlock. But in my early 20s, books like The Great Gatsby, which were seemingly universally accepted by the literary establishment to be “great” or “important” or whatever, repelled me.  It was the same kind of reflexive brattishness that made me delight in slagging off The Beatles once upon a time.  I did it because they were so universally loved that accepting the general consensus felt somehow… lazy.  These days, I don’t worry about that stuff.  I mean, there’s no denying that those first two Plastic Ono Band albums (the John Lennon one and the Yoko Ono one) are two of the greatest albums of all time, and the Yoko album in particular is so brilliant and ahead of its time.

I get obsessive, I suppose. After Bukowski, Fante, Burroughs, Stahl, Welsh, Hubert Selby Jr., I began tracing that particular literary lineage back further, to Miller, Knut Hamsun, and beyond.  My literary education has been scattershot because I was essentially learning in a vacuum, without a cool older brother to point me in the right direction. It was all about catching a name-drop from a musician or writer I admired and chasing it down, not always easy when you’re growing up in Blackburn, Lancashire, in the pre-Internet era.

I grew up in a house without much music. My folks are Irish and were completely divorced from British pop culture: the only music I heard my mother listen to was Irish showband stuff—Big Tom and the Mainliners, Ray Conniff, Margo. My dad liked country, so via him I heard Charlie Pride, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Hank Williams. But when it came to contemporary music, I was on my own.

Same with books. The only book I remember being in my childhood home before I started buying them, was the manual for our old Morris Minor. Nobody read for pleasure!   My parents viewed my burgeoning obsession for books with kind of bemused curiosity—Oh, there he is with his nose stuck in a book again! That said, when I asked for a bookshelf in my bedroom, they got me one.

 

1. Q) Do you think it’s something you’ve cultivated?

What came first, Tony O’Neill and Beat/Subculture Lit or the attraction to a Beat Lifestyle and the mental choice you might have made?

‘They write about the way I want to live my life – fast and on the edge?’

1. A) No… I’d say if you asked the younger me, the thought that I would eventually become a heroin addict, experience homelessness, wind up in rehab, and all the rest, would have horrified me.

I read Burroughs at 15-or-so, and back then it was like peeking into a totally alien culture: fascinating but repellent, not something I’d ever imagine wanting to experience for myself. During my time in London playing with Marc Almond and Kenickie, I’d seen it around but had never been curious.  I mean, it’s no secret that toward the end of the Britpop era, heroin was all over the scene.  It always felt like it was in a totally different category from other drugs, heroin seemed uniquely dangerous and dark.

It was only after a series of life events that I found myself receptive to the idea of trying heroin. There was that first, short marriage that ended badly. Like, midnight car chase through the streets of Hollywood, and burning the manuscript I’d been working on-level bad. Finding myself stranded in LA, far from everyone I knew, no band, no place to go, feeling like my career had imploded and somehow I was all washed up before I’d even turned 21. It was in that moment, when I felt like I was teetering on the precipice of something awful, that an ex-bandmate casually offered me some, and I figured that I had nothing to lose. Once you do it that first time and the taboo is broken… then the next time is a breeze.

But the point is this: it was only once I found myself entirely in heroin’s grip that I went back to books like Naked Lunch, and Junky, and realized I was reading them through new eyes. Because I’d always viewed my relationship with heroin from something of an aesthetic perspective, I would seek out other writers who had attempted to capture the experience of opiate addiction.  I developed a fierce appreciation for the rare ones who got it right, because frankly, most didn’t. It might seem strange, but it wasn’t until I was finally getting clean that it occurred to me that I should write about my own experiences.  In many ways, Digging the Vein was the easiest book I’ve written. It just poured out of me, because it had been unwittingly gestating for years.

1. Q) Can you tell us a bit about how you got started writing and something about your early years growing up in Blackburn Lancashire?
2. A) As I said, my folks were Irish, and growing up as first-generation Irish in the UK during the Troubles was… complicated. The culture couldn’t decide whether we were thick, drunk Paddies in suits with wellies and flat caps, or some dangerous fifth column who were waiting for Gerry Adams’ secret signal to start planting bombs. You wouldn’t believe how often people, upon learning I was Irish, would demand, “What do you think of that?” after some IRA atrocity or other—as if this teenage kid in Blackburn had insider knowledge of Republican paramilitary strategy.

Blackburn never felt like home, not really.  I always felt like an outsider, and as I got older, that feeling curdled into resentment.  But once a year, we’d go back to Ireland to visit family, and I‘d spend weeks on my uncle’s farm in Donegal.  And rather than feeling like I was finally “at home” I was just as much of an outside over there!  I remember once, some young girl coming over to play with my cousins and I.  Upon hearing my accent she pulled a face at me and said, “You fucking English are always coming over here causing trouble!”

By the time I was a teenager,  I was completely consumed by a desire to get as far away from Blackburn as possible. For a teenager back then, there was nothing to do but get into trouble—get pissed, try to sleep with girls, take shitty drugs, the usual teenage nonsense. But I did have one secret weapon – I was a pretty decent musician. Suddenly, Britpop happened and all of these bands who looked and spoke like me and my delinquent friends were appearing on Top of the Pops!  All of a sudden, I knew what I had to do.  Getting into my first band aged 16 probably saved me from becoming just another fucked-up, bored kid rotting away in a northern town. My friends and I still did all the usual stupid teenage shit, but we were also creating something and we had dreams of getting out.  There were plenty of drugs, mostly weed, speed, mushrooms and the like, but music was always our primary concern.  There weren’t many escape routes for working-class kids in the north, especially those who hated school and had no appetite for signing up for four years of higher education.  Even when we were playing in shitty pubs to a handful of disinterested punters, the band always felt like it was a life-and-death concern.  That was something that we all shared.

 

1. Q) It’s the 1980s and at 10-years-old, you are by your own account “a voracious reader”. What were you reading at 10? And then at 15 you are writing your first novel! What was that book about?
2. A) When I was fifteen, my dad came home from work one day with this enormous typewriter that someone had given him. It was semi-electric—you still had to feed the paper in manually, correct mistakes by hand, all that. It wound up in my room, and being a big reader I decided to try my hand at writing something.

This effort was partly inspired by a girl I was hoping to impress. Imagine being so clueless that I thought I might get somewhere with a teenage girl by saying, “I wrote a book—wanna see?”  Christ!  Because I had zero life experience, outside of what I’d read in books, I wound up churning out a pastiche of everything I was reading at the time: mostly pulp horror by the likes of Stephen King and British authors like Shaun Hutson, Guy N. Smith, and James Herbert.

I remember finishing it—120 pages!—and feeling so proud of myself… until I began reading it back. I don’t recall a single detail except the sheer horror of realizing how terrible it was. I threw it out immediately and never showed anyone.  I decided that writing a book was infinitely harder than it looked, and something that was clearly not for the likes of me.

 

1. Q) Could you possibly have discovered the Beats at such an early age?

Your books have momentum – like a road trip.

You have reappearing characters and you use sequels on at least two occasions: ‘Digging The Vein‘ and ‘Down and Out in Murder Mile’, as well as ‘Sick City’ and ‘Black Neon’.

Is that a Beat influence?

1. A) I think that particular tic is probably something I subconsciously picked up from Irvine Welsh. I can’t overstate the impact Trainspotting had on everyone in my peer group when it came out in the ’90s. Overnight, it seemed everybody had a copy – that edition with the silver cover, showing the kids wearing skull masks. It’s hard to imagine any novel having that kind of cultural impact now, but back then—even before the film came out—that book seemed to change everything, practically overnight.

Growing up, I’d mostly kept my book obsession to myself because there was this pervasive in my school (among the boys, at least) that any interests that were remotely intellectual were suspect and would probably result in you getting a kicking.  I mean, it’s hardly surprising that I fucking hated school and couldn’t wait to leave. After I left school, I  joined my first band and took a music course at a nearby college.  It was during that period that Irvine Welsh blew up. You’d see the same feral teenagers, who just one year earlier told you that books were “for poofs and birds” suddenly devouring Irvine’s books.  I can’t think of another contemporary writer who pulled off the trick of appealing to more traditional literary audiences and the kinds of people who previously had zero interest in literature. He was viewed more like a cool musician than an author.

I was a huge fan, of course.  I’d always loved the way characters from previous books would re-appear in others. Years later, Irvine and I got to know each other, after he’d read Digging the Vein, and he reached out to tell me how much he liked it.  He remains one of my favorite writers and is a genuinely great guy—incredibly kind, generous with his time and advice, and fantastic company. He’s actually writing the introduction for a 20th anniversary edition of Digging the Vein that is coming out sometime next year. When I’ve asked him about this stuff he’s told me that when he’s working on something new he’ll realize that a character falls into a particular archetype – “Oh this guy is a Begbie-type” or whatever – and he felt it made more sense to simply bring them back, versus starting from scratch with someone new. Kind of an “if it ain’t broke” approach.

With my LA-set books, it made sense that certain characters would orbit the same locations. I even experimented with slipping real people from my autobiographical works into the fiction, just to see if anyone would notice. I like the idea of my LA books existing in the same mythic version of the city… basically the Los Angeles I remember from the late ’90s.

 

1. Q) They often read like one road trip to hell and back. Is that how you see it? I imagine you being very ‘fuelled up’ on this journey. Is that a fair comment?
2. A) Not really. These days I’m sober, and I never actually wrote any of my books while under the influence. I can’t get fucked-up and write—for me, it’s one or the other. Take smack, and the urge to write just dissipates because suddenly everything’s fine with the world. Yet what fuels my writing is this underlying fear of death, of being obliterated.

I see my books like… little cave paintings, maybe. I’ve found paperbacks in used bookstores by one-and-done writers who sank without a trace—read their work and spent a few hours in their company, whether they’re alive or dead. I suppose I hoped that by writing these books, maybe one day someone would stumble across one of mine and wonder, Who was this poor dead bastard? And if they stuck around long enough to read it, I’d get to live again, just for a little while.

When you get right down to it, I’d imagine that the fear of obliteration is what drives most art.

 

1. Q) Did you have a soundtrack playing in your head? I’m thinking car radio – sleazy motel and dingy bar.The Beats would have had Jazz.

(There’s a whole webpage devoted to what Sal and Dean are listening to while driving across America – mostly great Jazz.)

1. A) Definitely. Maybe it’s because I was a musician before I became a writer, but I absolutely still think about my writing in musical terms. I write while listening to music, and will put together playlists of particular songs or albums that have some quality that I’m aiming for in whatever I’m working on.

I think that jazz is particularly suited to writing.  Some of my go-to artists are Miles Davis (especially his sinister ’70s work like Live-Evil), Cecil Taylor, and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Chet Baker’s more meditative late European recordings. Sometimes, when I read specific passages back, it’s as if I can still hear the music that was playing while I was writing.  The “Alvarado and 6th Blues” section in Digging the Veins is one example of a particularly ‘musical’ section, rooted in the songs of Tom Waits during his Heart Attack and Vine era.

 

1. Q) In ‘Digging the Vein’ you mention postponing getting on with your ‘book’ and choosing to head off into the night and indulge in hedonistic pursuits.

Was this often the case?

Then, it begs the question how did you manage to ever get any writing done?

1. A) The book in question was essentially a slice-of-life experiment, documenting those first hedonistic months in LA. I’d stumble home after a two- or three-day bender, still wired on speed, and pour everything onto the page in a manic rush. Being an outsider suddenly thrust into this wildly hedonistic scene—where nobody had a straight job and everyone was doing crystal meth, ecstasy, cocaine—felt so outrageous and alien that I felt compelled to document it.

Everything happened exactly as described in Digging the Vein. My then-wife read the manuscript I’d been working on, which was basically a diaristic account of the last few months of my life in LA. She immediately recognized it as autobiographical, and was less than thrilled about the passages depicting the sexual relationship I was in with another woman. We’d already been living separate lives for months—passing like ships in the night when she left for work as I was coming home—so it couldn’t have been a complete shock. In retaliation, she showed up at some party I was at and, with perfect dramatic flair, left the burning manuscript on the doorstep and then rang the doorbell.  I abandoned the project after that, and when I got strung out on heroin, I pawned the laptop I’d been using.

Fast forward to 2002. I was halfway through the first draft of Digging the Vein, which began with my heroin use. It felt like the final two-thirds of a book, still missing its beginning. Then, out of the blue, an old LA friend emailed to remind me he had rescued a bunch of the unburnt pages of that old manuscript. He dug them up and sent them to me. Those pages became the basis for the first 7 or 8 chapters of Digging the Vein. That friend was Randal—RP in the book. He died a year later. He’d gone to Cambodia to kick his crack habit, cleaned up, met a girl, and planned to settle there. He sounded happier than ever. Then I heard about the fatal motorcycle crash.

Randal and I had been particularly close, which is why I named a lead character in Sick City after him. Believe it or not, his full name really was Randal P. Earnest—it sounded almost fictional. Most of my LA circle were older—late 20s to early 30s—while I was barely 19. I wouldn’t say Randal exactly looked out for me, but we shared this incredibly intense friendship forged in the white heat of heavy drug use. His death knocked the wind out of me, but it also felt like confirmation that I’d made the right choice by getting out when I did. I’d been pushing my luck as it was.

 

1. Q) When I asked the  author Niall Griffiths if he felt free to talk about how people conflate his life of excess with the characters in his books and their desperate self destructive out-of-control lives and whether he saw the connection?

He gave this answer to my question: Was it a life of excess? Novels,‘Forward’ and poems in ‘Red Roar’ would suggest so?

1. A) It was, yes. Dissatisfaction, the outdoor rave scene, dismay, the burning needs concomitant with being working class and creative in a world that seemed to want to disallow that combination. I won’t go into this too much here, because I prefer to prism it through fiction, but it’s nice that, after particularly intense bingeing, I would reappear in the world not only with a sense of loss and green gunge on the end of my dick and flecks of blood on the toilet paper, but also the blueprint for a novel.
2. Q) I know we discussed this before but wondered if you wanted to comment on what Niall says in his answer.

I think it’s quite telling when Niall says “I prefer to prism it through fiction.”

Is that something that you found yourself doing after writing a semi autobiographical first work ‘Digging The Vein‘?

1. A) Well, I can certainly relate to Niall’s line about living in a world that “seemed to want to disallow” the notion of being both working-class and creative. The idea that I would pursue a life in the arts was almost unthinkable, both at home (Dad was a bus driver, Mum worked in a nursing home), mostly because there was no one to model myself against. Even when I had tangible early success as a musician—appearing on Top of the Pops with Kenickie, for example—it wasn’t as if my parents would’ve been calling around the extended family telling them to tune in! It was almost like a slightly embarrassing secret, something I think they both hoped I’d grow out of one day. I know that if I’d stayed in Blackburn and gotten a job in a bank, or a secondary school, or some office somewhere, that would’ve been a source of much more pride to them than hearing I’d signed a record deal or had a book translated, or whatever. I don’t resent them for it—it was just completely outside their frame of reference, and I think that’s a pretty common experience for working-class artists of all stripes.

As far as preferring to prism things through fiction goes, the reason I’ve presented plainly autobiographical books like Digging the Vein, Down and Out on Murder Mile, and my upcoming novel, The Straight Twenty-Eight, as novels rather than memoirs is twofold. The first is purely artistic: real life is messy and chaotic; it rarely follows a neat narrative arc. So some degree of fictionalizing is necessary, even if it’s just tweaking the timeline for better flow or creating composite characters to cut down on minor players, turning real life into something readable. Once you start doing that, you enter a gray area of what constitutes “truth” and “fiction.”

1. Q) Could you expand more on that for the reader?
2. A) As a writer, I don’t want to be constrained by strict adherence to the truth-as-it-happened. To write something I’d be proud of, I needed the freedom to tweak events even if, in broad strokes, everything in the book did happen. Would anyone care enough to complain? Who knows… but James Frey probably thought the same thing before he became public enemy number one when it was revealed he’d fabricated parts of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. That all blew up in early 2006, right around the time Digging the Vein was being published.
3. Q) Are we talking about literary influences here?

Yes, the main reason was that I was writing in response to my literary heroes, all of whom framed their most plainly autobiographical works as fiction. Bukowski’s Post Office, Dan Fante’s Bruno Dante books (Chump Change, Spitting off Tall Buildings, Mooch, 86’d), Burroughs’ Junky, Queer, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Henry Miller’s Black Spring, Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, William Burroughs Jr.’s Speed, Kentucky Ham, Clarence Cooper Jr.’s The Farm, Anna Kavan’s Julia and the Bazooka, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes—these were the kinds of books I aspired to. I had zero interest in writing a memoir, and more importantly, who the fuck would want to publish my memoirs? The lone exception to the whole “memoir versus novel” thing was Jerry Stahl, whose Permanent Midnight is one of the best modern accounts of heroin addiction… mostly because it read like a novel. Years later, I got to know Jerry, and sure enough, he’d tried to publish it as a novel for much the same reasons… he just lost the fight with his publisher.

1. Q) Are there any other obstacles to writing a book about addictive drug experiences?
2. A) There are stylistic constraints that come with drug memoirs. For a start, they’re usually called “recovery memoirs” because the biggest rule is that they have to be written from the perspective of the older, wiser, and—most importantly—sober author, looking back in faux-horror while giving voyeuristic readers the vicarious thrill of their degradation. Because of this, even the best examples of the genre tend to drag in the final third… because nobody wants to read about your happy, well-adjusted life afterward.
3. Q) Was writing ‘Digging the Vein’ a difficult book to write? If so, why?
4. A) When I started Digging the Vein, I was in the process of quitting heroin, but it was still an open question whether I’d stay clean. More to the point, I had no intention of stopping my use of all other drugs. Even though I knew I had to quit, I didn’t exactly regret my experiences with heroin… if someone had told me smack was going to be legalized the following week, I’d most likely have been first in line for my government-mandated shot.

Yes, heroin addiction had brought me to some dark places, moments of profound despair and psychic pain. But there were aspects of the lifestyle I knew I’d miss, beyond the actual high. I missed the camaraderie among junkies, something I’d never experienced before or since. Most people who’ve never been addicts assume all junkies are devious cutthroats who’d—to quote Burroughs—“steal the morphine suppository out of their dying grandmother’s ass…” and sure, there were plenty like that. But mostly, the addicts I knew looked out for each other and would—whenever possible—try to help a fellow junkie in need.

1. Q) How do you think society views the addict and how does this make you feel both as an individual and as a writer?
2. A) Addicts are the last minority society has agreed it’s okay to openly despise and discriminate against. The idea that addiction is a disease and addicts deserve pity, not scorn, hadn’t taken root when I was in active addiction. In LA, even needle exchanges were controversial and had to operate in a legal gray area. Sometimes, the LAPD would park outside the old Hollywood needle exchange, wait for people to walk out, then swoop in to bust them for “drug paraphernalia”—something that happened more toward the end of the month when quotas loomed. If you were with someone who overdosed and called an ambulance, the hospital was legally obligated to inform the police. I knew a few people who OD’d only to wake up handcuffed to an ER bed. Cops routinely beat addicts if they couldn’t arrest them. It was illegal to prescribe opiates to wean addicts off heroin, meaning the few doctors willing to help had to run semi-legal operations. I remember one doctor taking me out of his office into an underground car park because he kept his meds in a lockbox in his trunk. He ran a cash business—if the state found out he was weaning addicts using anything but methadone, he could go to jail. So addicts, out of necessity, banded together because we lived in such an unremittingly hostile world. When I came to London, it was better, but still not great, and I found the same kind of “Blitz spirit” among my addict friends.

As an aside, this finally started changing in the early 2000s. Why? Because of the painkiller epidemic in the US, which snowballed soon after I quit. Suddenly, it was white kids in Middle America getting strung out, not just inner-city Black and Hispanic kids, musicians, artists, and other “suspect types.” Overnight, there was a movement to treat addicts with sympathy… I’ll let you decide whether the two things are connected.

1. Q) What was the perceived outcome in regard to getting ‘Digging the Vein’published and how did you feel about its eventual publication?
2. A) No publisher would’ve wanted a memoir from someone newly clean, openly unrepentant about their drug use, and unwilling to end the book with some mealy-mouthed mea culpa. So from the get-go, writing Digging the Vein as a novel felt like the only realistic option.
3. Q) Your poetry is razor sharp and cuts to the bone and then takes a blow torch to the wound.

Few poets this side of Coleridge/Wantling can get addiction right.

I think in both ‘Songs from a Shooting Gallery’ and ‘Forged Prescriptions’ you achieve the very difficult task of doing so superbly.

1. A) Thank you.It took me a long time to get comfortable with the idea of publishing my poetry. As it was something usually written in the heat of the moment, it represents a naked snapshot – a moment in time – that sometimes felt exposing in a way that my other writing doesn’t.
2. Q) Did you read many of the Beat poets? You mentioned Corso.

Did they influence you as much as the prose writers?

Do you need a bigger canvas/page to work on?

1. A) For the longest time, I didn’t read much poetry—probably because in school, I’d been exposed to the kind of poems that used flowery language and never seemed to say what they meant. All those interminable English Lit classes where the teacher explained how the butterfly in the poem actually represented freedom, and the unfinished plate of mashed potatoes was a reference to the Irish famine, or whatever. It just always felt bloodless, needlessly intellectual, and almost archaic.

Q)And how did that all change?

It was only later, when I discovered poets like Corso, Ginsberg, and Bukowski, that I saw another side to poetry and finally understood its value: the deceptively difficult exercise of saying something big with total economy. This is what really sparked my interest in the form.

These naturally became the poets who influenced my own style. I wrote poems for fun, but never considered publishing them until Burning Shore proposed a collection. The other factor was that I’d found myself getting lumped in with the “internet writer” phenomenon—something 3am Magazine called “The Off-Beat Generation,” and led to the Guardian article that gave us a small degree of notoriety in the UK, “Surfing the Literary Wave,” by Sam Jordison. However, looking back on it, this ‘movement’ included such a stylistically diverse array of writers that it became practically meaningless.

1. Q) So initially you didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of online publishing, but something changed all that for you personally? What was it?

A)Poetry was particularly suited to this new breed of online author because it was short. Suddenly, there was lots of fucking awful poetry being published, and honestly, a big motivation for me to start putting my own work out there was in response to all of that. I think most writers find themselves publishing in opposition to something at some point—whether it’s the prevailing trends, a despised literary movement, or whatever. For me, it was the proliferation of absolutely awful poetry during the early years of the “internet literature” boom… a sense that somebody had to publish something that meant something, that had real emotional resonance, and wasn’t in thrall to the obscure, self-referential poetry I’d hated so much in the past.

1. Q) How do you feel about lyrics as poetry?
2. A) Personally, I feel that great lyrics are as valid a form of poetry as any other. I’d put the best lyrics of, say, Lou Reed, Scott Walker, Morrissey, or Tom Waits up against the traditional “big guns” of poetry—Larkin, Cummings, Betjeman, etc, any day of the week.

I suppose these days, poetry is a bit like jazz—a niche concern, mostly appreciated by other practitioners rather than the wider public.

1. Q) How do you find ways to look after yourself nowadays? Stay clean and sober?

You have mentioned Zen in previous interviews. Is this how you cope?

1. A) When I relapsed after ten years clean, it really shook me up. It didn’t last long, less than a year, but it happened at a time when I considered heroin addiction something remote—part of my distant past. All of a sudden, I was back in the grim routine of waking up sick, scoring on the street… but this time as an older man, a father, with everything to lose. It was emotionally devastating, and nearly destroyed my marriage. The experience sent shockwaves through every aspect of my life, one of the biggest being that, for the first time, after getting clean I started experiencing writer’s block. Not that I stopped writing, but everything I wrote seemed awful to me. I started at least three books, got midway through each, then began obsessively going back and editing and re-editing until they turned to mush and I had to abandon them. Years passed, my depression worsened, and my sense of self began slipping away. To compensate, I drank more and more until I reached a point where I hadn’t published anything in nearly a decade and was downing a bottle of vodka a day. My marriage was once again falling apart, this time because I was completely depressed and I’d become a ghost of myself. I knew something had to change.

It started with quitting booze. Surprisingly, I found that easy to do—which might sound strange, given I’d just admitted to drinking a bottle of vodka daily. But honestly, I never much enjoyed the sensation of being drunk. I did it simply because it was the only reliable way I knew to alter how I felt: a toxic cocktail of self-hatred, disappointment, and bitterness. Even stumbling around, slurring like some booze-addled zombie, was preferable to feeling like that. The writing took longer to come back, but I knew instinctively that I had to address the underlying malaise that had led me to this place. As I’d been raised Irish Catholic, I’d grown into a reflexive skeptic of anything resembling organized religion—yet I felt, intuitively, that there was a hole in me that a different person might have filled with some kind of spiritual belief. I began trying to find a non-supernatural way of plugging it, albeit one that didn’t involve drugs or booze.

1. Q) This is really interesting Tony, could you expand a bit for myself and the readers?

I was aware of Buddhism, of course, but knew little about it. When I worked out of the Bunker, John Giorno—a devout Tibetan Buddhist—hosted weekly services at 222 Bowery. I never attended, but there was a makeshift altar at one end of the main room, and I often found myself staring at the statues and paintings, fascinated by the iconography. Giorno seemed one of the happiest, most well-adjusted people I’d ever met—a rarity among artists, most of whom seem to have a streak of sadness, or insanity. John smoked weed like a fiend, constantly made art, wrote poetry, performed live, and always had this fucking grin on his face, that made him resemble a mischievous little boy. So when I found myself facing up to this dark night of the soul—without even booze as a shield—I began wondering if Giorno’s happiness was tied to his Buddhist practice.

1. Q) How did you start your spiritual transformation through Zen? Did it include reading and if so, which books?
2. A) I started reading. Most of it was interesting but not life-changing—until I picked up Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. That book hit differently. The Zen concept of “beginner’s mind” resonated with what I’d always instinctively believed about my writing—something I’d seemingly forgotten the more books I’d published. I realized my obsessive rewriting, which had stifled every attempt to create something new, stemmed from the unspoken fear that my writing wasn’t good enough. I suppose some part of me had always felt that I’d been lucky, that perhaps the earlier books had been flukes and I didn’t have another in me. Yet in the beginning, when I wrote without any consideration of eventual publication or finding an audience, I’d been at my happiest and most prolific. If I was going to finish another book, I felt I had to get back to that place and the entire zen concept of ‘beginners mind’ seemed to be speaking directly to that. Reading that book led directly to me finishing a novel, The Straight Twenty-Eight, and sparked a deeper curiosity about Zen.
3. Q) Did you practice Zen at home or did you find a place to go?
4. A) I found a local Zen center and decided to visit. They were welcoming—no cult vibes—so I began attending weekly services. I was interested in Zen because it didn’t preclude a belief in anything supernatural, just the acceptance that there were certain concrete practices that could lead to a cessation of the malaise at the heart of the human condition. Just showing up on Sundays for their 8–10:30 AM sessions, sitting in silence on a mat for a few hours, somehow led to my life improving incrementally. The structure, the silence, the practice of sitting with my thoughts without crawling out of my skin—it was more profound and useful than any talk therapy I’d tried.

Q)I did want to ask you,do you often write poetry? Like every day?

1. A) Most days, I always keep a notebook on me and tend to fill them with poems these days. I enjoy writing poetry for reasons other than potential publication. I find that writing poetry is a fantastic exercise because it forces me to approach writing in a completely different way. When you’re used to writing prose, having to strip your writing back while somehow retaining the impact can be a challenge. I like the economy of poetry, and I think it’s a valuable practice for any prose writer, even if they never intend to publish any of it. That said, Mineshaft Magazine has taken some of my new poems, which has led to the offer of a regular column there, which I’m very excited about. The last issue had Robert Crumb and Billy Childish – good company to find myself among!
2. Q) I always ask the people I interview, these questions:

Do you think Counterculture still exists and do we need Countercultures anymore?

1. A) I think by definition, there’s always a counter to what’s happening in the wider culture at any given time. Culture and counter-culture shifts and moves—sometimes becoming unrecognizable within a single generation—but it’s always there. As for where my writing fits in… these days I find the only way I can write is by avoiding those questions entirely. Just returning to the simple practice of sitting down to write every day, purely for the pleasure of it—without worrying where it might end up, who will read it, or what they’ll think… That was something I took for granted early on, and losing it led to a long, difficult struggle to reclaim it. Part of that recovery meant accepting I have no control over how my work is received or where it fits in the larger cultural or literary landscape. I write and, if I’m lucky, someone somewhere might want to publish and read it.

If anything, I allow myself modest pride in having kept going in this precarious world for nearly two decades—I’m beating the odds by any measure. Beyond that… I can’t and won’t think about it.

1. Q) What are you working on at the moment,if I may enquire?
2. A) Recently, I’ve been working on screenplays—I adapted Thorn Kief Thornbury’s brilliant novel What We Do Is Secret for the screen (retitled Teenage Wildlife, it’s currently in production). During my decade of inaction, Bret Easton Ellis publicly endorsed my novel Sick City, which sparked interest from Hollywood, which has been… interesting. Hollywood makes the publishing game look stable by comparison—it’s incredibly fickle, built on lies and broken promises, but with a hell of a lot more money up for grabs. I learned quickly to expect nothing beyond upfront payment for anything I write for the movies or television. Once I deliver a script, I have to mentally shelve it; becoming emotionally invested in whether a worthy screenplay will ever get made would turn me into a basket case.

I’m also working on a book about my music industry experiences, but that’s something I’ve been chipping away at for years. My next novel is an idea that began as a Hollywood project—an idea for a TV project that I soon realized would work better as a novel. Without revealing too much, it’s something of a departure, but it retains some of the key themes from my previous work. I don’t like to discuss unfinished books, especially ones this early in the process, but I can say that from a writing standpoint it’s going to be a challenge, but I feel ready to tackle something ‘big’ like this.

1. Q) And the novels?

The Straight Twenty-Eight—my first novel since quitting drinking and returning to writing—finishes the loose trilogy begun with Digging the Vein and continued in Down and Out on Murder Mile. Based on my 28 days in California rehab at age 20, it’s probably the funniest thing I’ve ever written. Mineshaft Magazine recently published an excerpt; the novel is set to be released in the UK and France next year.  Then there’s the 20th-anniversary edition of Digging the Vein, with Irvine Welsh’s introduction, which is a hell of a coup for me.””

 

1. Q) Tony Is there anything in particular you would like to say to bring the interview to a close?

I wrote something years ago that I suppose I didn’t understand at the time, but which I came across recently and suddenly had resonance.  A line in a story, which goes: “I am a writer, that is, I sit down every single day and I write. Nothing more, or less, than that.” It’s funny that something I seemed to have unconsciously grasped early on would become the thing that nearly finished me as a writer, several books in. But there it was – it’s not especially poetic or clever, but when I read it I thought: There it is. That’s the heart of it. I wrote it out in longhand and pinned it above my desk to remind myself. Because, when you get down to it, it’s all any writer can do… isn’t it?

Thank you very much Tony for taking time to answer my questions. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

 

 

Malcolm Paul