Tony O'Neill

Cherie Currie

Cherie Currie, with her signature Bowie haircut and fishnet stockings, was the groundbreaking lead singer of '70s teenage all-girl rock band the Runaways. At the tender age of fifteen, she joined a group of talented girls—Joan Jett and Lita Ford on guitar, Jackie Fox on bass, and Sandy West on drums—who could play rock like no one else. Arriving on the Los Angeles music scene in 1975, they catapulted from playing small clubs to selling out major stadiums, headlining shows with opening acts like the Ramones, Van Halen, Cheap Trick, and Blondie. Currie lit up the stage with the provocative teen-rebellion songs "Cherry Bomb," "Queens of Noise," and "Born to Be Bad," riding a wave of hit songs and platinum albums, all while touring around the world. On the face of it, Currie's is a riveting story of girl empowerment and fame. But it is also an intensely personal account of her struggles with drugs, sexual abuse, and violence. She and her bandmates, runaways all, were thrown into a decadent, high-pressure music scene where on the road, unsupervised for months at a time, they had to grow up fast and experience things that no teenage girls should. Neon Angel exposes the side of the music industry fans never get to see, and chronicles the group's rise to fame and their ultimate demise. Shocking and inspiring, funny and touching, Neon Angel stunningly re-creates a bygone era of rock and roll, all the while providing an inside look at growing up hard under the relentless glare of the public eye, and chronicling one tough woman's fight to reclaim her life.

A Memoir of a Runaway

Neon Angel

a novel

Sick city

At the tender age of fifteen, groundbreaking lead singer Cherie Currie joined a group of talented girls—Joan Jett and Lita Ford on guitar, Jackie Fox on bass, and Sandy West on drums—who could rock like no one else. Arriving on the Los Angeles music scene in 1975, The Runaways catapulted from playing small clubs to selling out major stadiums—headlining shows with opening acts like the Ramones, Van Halen, Cheap Trick, and Blondie while riding a wave of hit songs and platinum albums, and touring the world. A shocking, funny, and touching re-creation of a bygone era of rock and roll that chronicles the Runaways' rise to fame and ultimate demise, Neon Angel is also an intensely personal account of Currie's struggles with drugs, sexual abuse, and violence in a decadent, high-pressure music scene—a world of uncontrolled excess where she and her unsupervised bandmates had to grow up fast and experience things that no teenage girls should.

“Sick City is fun, twisted and brutal….O’Neill could be our generation’s Jim Thompson.” — James Frey, author of Bright Shiny Morning “Tony O’Neill works his L.A. people the way Dutch Leonard had his hand down the pants of every degenerate in his great Detroit novels.” — Barry Gifford, author of Wild at Heart From Tony O’Neill, the author of Down and Out on Murder Mile and coauthor of the Neon Angel and the New York Times bestselling Hero of the Underground, comes Sick City—a wild adventure of two junkies, Hollywood, and the Sharon Tate sex tape. Readers of Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty) and Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) will take great delight in Sick City, “a disturbingly twisted ride through Hollywood’s underbelly with a degenerate cast of colorfully interwoven characters” (Slash).

A Novel

Sick City

Jason Peter

A former NFL player traces his journey from professional athlete to drug addict after injuries ended his career, describing the range of physical, psychological, and legal dilemmas that affected his perception of reality and nearly ended his life.

A Memoir

Hero of the Underground

Tony O'Neill has for thirty years been one of the most famous faces in the biggest soccer crew in England. Tarred by the police as the ringleader of Manchester United's massive hooligan following, he is a true legend of the terraces. This is his story, the first inside account ever written about the notorious Red Army.

Leading Britain's Biggest Hooligan Firm

Red Army General

BLACK NEON soll das nächste Projekt des legendären Filmemachers Jacques Selzer heissen - zumindest den Gerüchten nach, die schon seit Jahren in Hollywood kursieren, denn Selzer selbst treibt sich seit dem Erfolg seines letzten skandalösen Streifens hauptsächlich auf exzessiven Partys in Europa herum. Als er endlich in Hollywood eintrifft, um BLACK NEON zu realisieren, engagiert er Randall und Jeffrey, die altbekannten und seit SICK CITY legendären Antihelden der amerikanischen Popliteratur, um mit ihrer Hilfe in die Welt der Dealer, Süchtigen, Nutten und schäbigen Motels einzutauchen. Ein Trip, den er nicht mehr vergessen wird.

Roman

Black Neon

Manchester United's Red Army was the most notorious hooligan mob British football has ever seen. Thousands strong, this huge tribe of disaffected youths laid siege to town centrees and soccer grounds across the country and became a byword for violent disorder. Tony O'Neill was there from the beginning and became its most prominent face. Barely in his teens when he set out from the largest council estate in Europe to follow the Red Devils, his ferocity in street combat and his force of personality soon made him a leader. Running trips in his infamous War Wagon, he became so renowned that he was invited to a sit-down meeting with the Government to discuss the hooligan problem. After serving a jail term, O'Neill emerged to lead the 'casuals' of the 1980s against an even tougher generation of opponents: West Ham's ICF, the Chelsea Headhunters, the Leeds Service Crew and the scally armies of Merseyside. Police intelligence files labelled him a 'prime mover' and he became the target of a huge undercover investigation. Red Army General is the most authoritative account ever written of the wild years when terrace terror reached its peak. "BRITAIN'S No.1 FOOTBALL THUG" Daily Mirror "BRITAIN'S WORST SOCCER YOB" The Sun

Lupita and Genesis have just wasted a drug dealer and hit the open road with a suitcase full of dirty money and crystal meth. Little do they know that their road trip will set them on a collision course with a side of American life even darker and weirder than their own.

I wasn't afraid of death. How could I be? I lived under death's shadow every day. When you swallow eighty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined in dollar amounts, but in the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure. Yet at the end of every binge, every night of lining up six, seven, eight crack pipes and hitting them one after the other bam! bam! bam! every night of smoking and snorting bag after bag of heroin . . . after all of that, when you still wake up to see the same dirty sky over you as the night before, you start to think that instead of dying, maybe your punishment is to live---to be stuck in this purgatory of self-abuse and misery for an eternity. Sometimes you start to think that death would come as a blessed relief. Toward the end, I found myself contemplating death again. Only this time I wasn't going to leave it to chance. I was going to buy a gun, load the thing, place the barrel in my mouth, and blow my fucking brains out. I sat on my parents' sofa as I pondered this. All I needed was a gun. And then all-- of my problems-- would be solved.

Hero of the Underground is the riveting New York Times bestseller. I wasn't afraid of death. How could I be? I lived under death's shadow every day. When you swallow sixty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined by dollar amounts but by the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure. . . . I found myself contemplating death again. Only this time I wasn't going to leave it to chance. I was going to buy a gun, load the thing, place the barrel in my mouth, and blow my fucking brains out. And all-- of my problems-- would be-- solved. "Had Hunter Thompson been a football player instead of a fan, this is the book he'd have written. Flat-out, mash-your-face-in-the-dirt amazing." --Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight

On a relentless Los Angeles summer day, a man walks barefoot over broken glass and melting tarmac to meet his connection, praying his line of credit will be extended to one more balloon of heroin. He's alone, penniless, wrecked by violent withdrawals, and last night he robbed a crack dealer before abandoning his apartment. Welcome to Hollywood, and welcome to Digging the Vein. Tony O'Neill's debut is based on his own experiences as an addict and side-man to acts as diverse as the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Kenickie, and Marc Almond. Through the eyes of his anonymous narrator, see what few tourists ever will: the needle exchanges, methadone clinics, short let motels, and scoring spots beneath the wings of the City of Los Angeles.

Digging the Vein

After exhausting their resources in the slums of Los Angeles, a junkie and his wife settle in London's "murder mile," the city's most violent and criminally corrupt section. Persevering past failed treatments, persistent temptation, urban ennui, and his wife's ruinous death wish, the nameless narrator fights to reclaim his life. In prose that could peel paint from a car, Tony O'Neill re-creates the painfully comic, often tragic days of a recovering heroin addict.

Down and Out on Murder Mile

Manchester Uniteds Hooligans

The Men In Black

Based on his own experiences as an addict and sidesman to diverse music acts, Tony O'Neill's 'Digging the Vein' explores LA's drug sub-culture - a slice of life that few tourists will ever get to see.

Tony O'Neill

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