'The Cheapest Therapy I've Ever Had' - Tony O'Neill on Digging The Vein

Tony O’Neill might be the closest thing we have in Britain to a Bukwoski or John Fante, an author who writes authentically and unsparingly about the world of drug addicts, pimps and petty criminals. O’Neill started out as the keyboard player for Kenickie, Marc Almond and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, before winding up living a peripatetic junkie lifestyle in LA. His first novel, Digging the Vein is a semi-fictionalised account of his addiction, notable for the sparse, unromantic language, bitter humour and his refusal to wallow in self-pity. The description of his short period with The Brian Jonestown Massacre in particular is astonishing, in every sense. Published in 2006, the novel has become a cult classic, and is now available as a re-vamped e-book, with an introduction by James Frey, photo essay, soundtrack playlist and more.

O'Neill was hailed alongside writers like Ben Myers, Heidi James and Adelle Stripe as one of the founders of the Brutalist movement, and his books have been praised by the likes of Sebastian Horsely and Tom McCarthy. Since Digging the Vein, he has published two more novels in the UK, Down and Out On The Murder Mile (2008), a follow-up of sorts to his debut, and Sick City (2010), the story of two junkies searching for a legendary lost Manson Family sex tape. Last year, he released two short stories through publisher of the moment Galley Beggar, which both inhabit the same mileu as his debut, combining tales of opiated despair with anecdotes from backstage at Top of the Pops. His fourth novel, Black Neon, is due later this year. 

Here, Mr O'Neill looks back at his debut, talking music, drugs and Brutalism.

How does it feel to look back on your debut novel after nearly a decade?

Mixed feelings. Reading it back after all these years there were many times I had the overwhelming urge to reach back into time and throttle myself for being such an insufferable little prick. Other times I wanted to give myself a hug. But the really nice thing was being able to insert some material that had for one reason and another not made it into the print editions. They were little fixes and changes – the odd new paragraph here and there – but I felt they really added a lot to the book.

Was it difficult to adapt to writing, after being in bands for so long? Or was a more solitary lifestyle something you were looking for?

By the time I sat down to write Digging the Vein I was pretty much done with the music industry. The last tour I did I was so physically beaten down… I was gobbling handfuls of Dexedrine tablets and swigging from a mouthwash bottle full of methadone just to get out of bed and function. I mean, it was a long way from the glory days of Top of the Pops. I’d just had so much of the ‘other’ side of the industry – sleazy managers, rotten contracts, all of that… there was no fun in it any more. The truth is when I started writing Digging the Vein there was no real intention there to write a book. It was just something to keep my mind occupied while I was detoxing from heroin and methadone. It was the cheapest – and the most successful – therapy I’ve ever had.

The prose in Digging the Vein is brutal and unsparing - was there a cathartic/theraputic element to writing the novel?

Sure. As I alluded to in the previous answer, it really helped me through a rough time. I’d weaned myself down – first I stopped smoking crack and doing heroin on top of my 80mg / daily dose of methadone. Then I weaned myself down to zero. When I stopped altogether I knew at that point I was going to be a father in a matter of months and it was really do or die. It wasn’t just my body – I think my entire psyche went into shock after relying on so many chemicals just to function for so many years. It’s no exaggeration to say that I wrote that book with a wastepaper basket next to the laptop to vomit into. The writing of it… it’s a pretty hazy memory, almost like a dream. 

The whole first year after quitting – my brain was just so foggy and screwed up. It’s a miracle I finished it, really. I mean it was written upside down, back to front… I think Ghost Town was the first chapter, and then I went from there. Then I didn’t know how to start it, until I discovered some old diaries I’d kept from when I first moved to LA… so I adapted them into the opening chapters. As the author I see a pretty radical switch in style and tone, but maybe that’s just because I know the material so well. But there’s a point in the book where the drugs change – the first third was written on crystal meth, and the rest while detoxing from heroin. The chapter that marks the transition is called – ironically enough – Genesis.

In some ways, Digging The Vein was quite out of time, harking back to the likes of John Fante and Burroughs, but you were often linked in the press to authors like Ben Myers, Adelle Stripe, Heidi James and Lee Rourke. Did you feel like part of a scene then?

Honestly, no. It wasn’t until I was visiting home and I got to meet Ben and Adelle in person, and then later on in New York when I met Lee that any of that felt three-dimensional to me. The problem was purely geographic. I was off in the states, and it seemed like all those writers were in the UK. It felt like typical shitty luck on my part– a literary scene starts happening in the UK, and I start being associated with it… but I’m stuck on the other side of the fucking Atlantic. That said, I felt way closer to writers like Adelle, Ben, Lee, and the rest of the UK-Offbeat writers in terms of style and intent than I did with the US writers who sometimes got lumped in with that whole scene. I remember at the time feeling a bit left out, like back in England all of these writers were probably hanging out and having a fine old time while I was over here working cash-in-hand painting fences for a living and trying to finish a second novel. In terms of the writing, Dan Fante always felt like the closest person to me in terms of style and intent. I really admired a lot of the writers associated with the whole Offbeat thing, but a lot of them seemed way more… I don’t know, academic, I suppose.  

That’s why it really made me laugh whenever some place like the Guardian would write about us, and you’d get these halfwits in the comments section sneering and saying our stuff was all shock value. I mean, my intention has never been to shock. Honestly, if my stuff shocks you then in says more about how sheltered you are than it does about how much of a degenerate I am. You look at stuff like Lee Rourke’s writing, or Heidi’s writing and you see something simpatico to what a writer like Tom McCarthy is doing. Kind of… intellectual terrorism, I guess. 

The Brutalism thing got completely misunderstood. People heard the name and made assumptions without ever reading the work. The way I remember it, the name brutalism came because that was the style of architecture we all grew up surrounded by. If you are a certain age, and from a certain income group, then you were surrounded by brutalism as an aesthetic. But people heard the name, thought “brutal” and assumed it was a non-stop barrage of sex and violence. Basically, they saw what they wanted to see. If you had to bunch the Brutalists in with any movement I’d say they had more in common with the kitchen sink realists than anyone else…

A lot of your fiction seems to refer back to anecdotes from your life, particularly musicians you've come across - have you ever had any comeback from people you've fictionalized in your books?

Yeah, once or twice. The poem To All My Dead, Drunk, and Missing Uncles earned me a heated email from a family member, which actually lead to us reconnecting, so it was a good thing in the long run…. And let’s just say a certain female character from my second novel did threaten to “have me killed” if I ever wrote about her again. I did write about her again, and I’m still here. So sigh of relief there.

Elvis or Beatles?

Depends on what era we’re talking. I used to be a Beatle-phobic when I was younger. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve let go of a lot of that tribal bollocks I used to hold on to with music. I like young, pretty rockabilly Elvis (although I’ll take Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis over Elvis any day), and I like drug-fucked Beatles – Revolver through Abbey Road. But I’d take the Kinks over either of them. 

Which modern writers do you most enjoy reading?

Dan Fante, Irvine Welsh, Jerry Stahl, Ben Myers, Barry Gifford… you don’t have to be a drunken skaghead to be a favourite writer of mine…. but it helps.

How do you like to write? At home, or out? Do you have any music you listen to, or something to get you in the mood?

Normally I write at home. I thrive on routine. I write from 9am to 2pm, Monday through Friday. I get dressed to write, just like I’m going to the office. You can’t take yourself seriously if you’re sitting there in your pyjamas, can you? I mean who can create something when they’re dozing around in a pair of sweatpants? I don’t listen to music when I’m writing, I can’t. That said, the mood of particular song or album will definitely influence how a story comes out. Down and Out on Murder Mile was heavily influences by Lou Reed’s Berlin. Sick City was heavily influenced by early Tom Waits. Digging the Vein was The Ramones and Johnny Thunders. Black Neon… shit, probably some freaked out free jazz album from the 60’s. 

I have as more musical influences than literary when it comes to my writing. I try not to use drugs when I’m writing. Editing, sure. And I’ve had solid ideas for books when under the influence, but I write better when I’m straight. I mean shit, I can knock out 30 pages a day if I’m on methamphetamine, but I end up binning half of it as unusable waffle. If I try to write after I smoke a joint an hour later I’m still obsessing over the first sentence. Drugs are more suited to the editing process, I find.

What are you working on next?

Black Neon – the follow-up to Sick City was a difficult book to write, easily the most difficult novel I’ve ever worked on. It shows in the book – it’s a dark story, twisted, you know? It comes out in November on Bluemoose but the writing of it, and the aftermath – well, there was a bunch of shit, I was in a car accident, I was depressed and a few things went down that really took it out of me physically… 2013 started off ready badly for me, but in the last month or so things are turning around. 

The upshot of all that chaos is that right now I’m in a really creative place, very driven, and I have two books on the go at the moment. The first is an autobiographical novel, a loose follow-up to Digging the Vein and Down and Out on Murder Mile … it’s set in Blackburn, right after I got clean and I was back at my parents’ house with a newborn, working in an off-license. At the moment it’s called Straight Time The other is a weird crime thriller set in Juarez, with a working title of The New Face in Hell. We’ll see where they go; sometimes these things can suddenly dry up and go dormant for months at a time.

I’m also working on a graphic novel with a Swiss artist, but it’s very early days yet so I can’t say more than that. Luckily for me the reception for my work in Europe has been really positive, and opportunities for work over there keep appearing. Hell, if I could I’d move back to Europe in a heartbeat. Every time I’m in Paris I kick myself for not living there.

You can get the Digging The Vein ebook from iTunes, Kindle Store and Barnes and Noble, or on a range of formats from smashwords. If you already have a physical edition, then tweet a photo of yourself with it to @ViconEditions and they'll send you a copy.