Tony O'Neill: How I found hope and redemption on Hackney's Murder Mile

Going back to the place you grew up in after a long absence is strange at the best of times. It's hard to slot back in with the people and places you used to know when so much about you has changed but they seem to have remained the same. The old saying is true: you can't go home again.

For Tony O'Neill, the problem is acute. When he goes back to his hometown of Blackburn, Lancashire, it is, he says in a mangled northern English and West Coast American accent, "a disconcerting experience".

"I bump into people and they remember me as a kid and I don't feel like that person any more. And the question of what have you been up to is a little more difficult for me. It's like... well..."

Contained in that hesitation are experiences most couldn't imagine, let alone live through: a decade in which he had a bizarre existence in the shadow-worlds of Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Hackney's "Murder Mile". It was a time in which he got married three times, was variously addicted to heroin, crack-cocaine and methadone, and, as one friend told him, "looked like something you'd find in a gutter".

It all started when he was 18 and answered an advert in the back of Melody Maker. To his immense surprise he got a job as Marc Almond's touring keyboard player. "I think that a part of the way my life turned out the way it did was that my early years were just so sleepy and so quiet," he says. "Going to London was like going to the moon after growing up in Blackburn."

Soon afterwards, he joined the briefly fashionable girl band Kenickie "at the ass-end of the Britpop thing, when it seemed like everybody was young and everybody knew each other. You'd read about people in Melody Maker or the NME and then you'd go out and they'd be there."

And, if London was exciting, when the band went on tour to Los Angeles the experience was mind-blowing. "I just had no frame of reference for that. I felt like I'd walked on to a movie set. Palm trees! And people I'd seen in films! And it was so liberating to land in a city where nobody knew who I was. But also, so very easy to get lost in that, which is exactly what I did. I got so suckered into the dark side of things that only a year after landing I was one of those crazy people I noticed on the streets when I first arrived."

Initially, O'Neill claims he was just doing "what most 18- and 19-year-olds do and partying day and night". But soon, he started to take things to unusual extremes. One night, on a crystal-meth-fuelled whim, he took a girl he met at a party to Las Vegas and "in a moment of madness" married her. And then he left Kenickie to start up a new life in America. Soon afterwards, Kenickie split up and for a while it looked as if he had made the right decision. But, within months, the marriage collapsed in "an explosive and horrible way" and O'Neill was left wondering why he'd ever left the UK.

One of the results of his imploded first marriage was that O'Neill found himself alone, in the wrong part of town, nurturing an increasingly out-of-control drug habit. He'd been introduced to heroin by friends. The first time, he says, he was very wary of the drug, having grown up in Britain in the 1980s, when it was the subject of numerous anti-drugs adverts. "But there was also something quite exciting about that. And I just wanted to try it once. I had a feeling that if I didn't, I'd regret it for the rest of my life and always wonder what it was like."

But Tony discovered that he "really, really loved" heroin and soon lost interest in everything else. "I stopped focusing on anything beyond maintaining a constant supply of quality heroin."

He briefly found work in The Brian Jonestown Massacre, a band fronted by the messianic cult figure Anton Newcombe. The gig was a quick road to yet more excess. Now he was using more heroin than ever while working for a man who spent most of his time dressed in Jesus robes and where nights out involved cruising down Sunset Boulevard waving Civil War-era firearms.

From there, his decline accelerated. To feed his habit he took on all sorts of odd jobs – with a heavy emphasis on odd. He even once appeared in a medically-themed porn film, with the title of Snatch Adams, but such work could never fund his voracious need for heroin and he was reduced to pleading for money.

"I'd even call up my parents with ridiculous stories like, 'I need a tooth extracted, you've got to wire me $300 because I'm in pain.' In the back of their heads, they knew the money was going towards drugs. They knew I wasn't getting my teeth extracted; teeth were falling out of my head at that point and I didn't even care."

Eventually, he came back to the UK. He moved to London with a heroin-addicted second wife whom he had picked up "somewhere along the way", in what he now says was "as much as a suicide pact as a marriage". He found stability of a sort on the methadone programme, but his existence remained unenviable. He'd ended up living in a part of Hackney that, thanks to alarmingly escalating gun crime, had earned itself the moniker Murder Mile.

It is this escape from LA and subsequent desperate existence in east London that forms the basis of his new autobiographical novel Down and Out On Murder Mile. O'Neill's long hard journey makes for an engrossing read, the painful experiences of the early pages offset by a surprisingly happy ending. While in London O'Neill met the woman who is now the mother of his child and – to his great surprise – fell in love and weaned himself away from opiates.

Now, 32, happily married – "to my real wife, my wife forever" – and living in New York, he refuses to express regrets. "There's no point looking back and trying to fight those things," he says now. "Each one of those terrible incidents were a part of the journey that brought me to where I am."

And, of course, the fact that he has written the book is some compensation for those years of addiction. "A lot of very grim stuff had to happen to me before I finally realised what I wanted to say. Of course it would have been nicer to have discovered that voice in a different way – in a less damaging way. But I'm here, I'm alive, I've found my voice and I do something I love to do. To regret any of it would just be crazy. I don't know who that Tony would be."

Taking me lower: O'Neill's guide to drugs

Heroin

"A lot of people I took heroin with died very lonely deaths," says O'Neill. "Nobody mourned them. Some I don't even know if they died. One day they just stopped answering their phones, they vanished."

Cocaine

"Once you get as far into coke use as I did [up to 20 injections a day at the height of it] it's pretty difficult to get back to normal use. For me, cocaine is an anti-creative drug. For most artists, rampant cocaine use is the death of their careers – see Oasis's Be Here Now for example."

Methamphetamine

"Any drug made from ingredients bought in a hardware store has to be pretty rough on the body. People – myself included – do some pretty silly stuff on it too. Typical meth conversation: 'What shall we do now?'/'I dunno.'/'Wanna rob a crack dealer?'/'Yeah! You got a gun?'/'Hell yeah!'"

Alcohol

"Alcohol is the perfect argument for an end to drug prohibition. In terms of physical effects and dependence it is one of the harshest drugs. Yet it is legal, and society has not crumbled (although walking around Newcastle on a Friday night might give the staunchest anti-prohibitionist pause for thought)."

Methadone

Not a fun drug. It has its place in treating addicts but only when prescribed in liberal doses. No addict should be forced to reduce their dose and most addicts fail on the methadone programme because of the puritan set-up at most clinics. SJ

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