TRAINSPOTTING author Irvine Welsh is a big fan of Tony O’Neill, saying of his latest book: ‘I fell in love with every page.’

The appreciation is mutual, for Tony, 35, who grew up by Queen’s Park Hospital, in Blackburn, discovered Welsh as a teenager and their novels attract the same audience.

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“Reading was considered uncool when I was a teenager. It’s something I did in secret,” says Tony in his quirky Blackburn-meets-New York accent.

“When I was 15 or 16 suddenly everybody had a copy of Trainspotting before the movie came out. These guys would never have been seen dead reading before.

“In the way that JK Rowling turned kids on to reading, Irvine Welsh appealed to a particular type of guy who liked to get drunk and fight and he turned them on to reading.

“I went to see him read in 2007 and when he’d finished I chucked a copy of my first book - Digging The Vein - on stage. I didn’t hear from him and figured he’d binned it on the way to the airport.

“Then a year and a half ago he emailed me and said he was moving house and had found my book in a box and loved it. So I sent him the new one and he wrote that lovely blurb about it. He’s been really supportive.”

Black Neon is Tony’s fourth novel. It’s a dark and fascinating tale filled with drug-fuelled madness featuring lesbian pharmacist robbers and Hollywood scriptwriter addicts. It’s easy to see why Irvine Welsh is a fan.

Tony draws on his own experience of heroin use for his writing, which started when he went from studying music at Accrington and Rossendale College at 18 to playing with bands in LA.

“I was a keyboard and piano player. I was going to go to uni to study music theory and I landed a gig playing keyboards for Marc Almond. I answered an ad at the back of the Melody Maker.

“My first day at uni was the day I had my audition in London and I decided to take a gamble. My parents, bless ‘em, went along with me. I went to the audition, got it and it altered the course of my life.”

He went on to play with Kenickie, who ‘had a moment’, and that’s how he ended up in LA.

“We had a completely mad tour and we were hanging out with people like Courtney Love. I offered to buy her a drink and she slapped me across the face and said ‘are you trying to pick me up?’ and I really wasn’t. I was terrified of her.”

He also played with the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Kelli Ali. His first book, published in 2006, drew from his experiences of that time.

“I had some dark times out there with drugs. It was very big out in LA at the time. It was when I got back to London after things had gone adrift in LA and I met my wife Vanessa, and we were having our baby, that I got clean and started writing my first book about my memories.

“It was almost like a therapeutic exercise getting it all out of my system. It didn’t sell millions, but everyone who read it came back to me and it found me a readership. The next book (Down and Out on Murder Mile) came out with Harper Collins straight away.”

Tony’s mum and dad, Rose and Frank, met on the buses. Rose was a conductor and Frank a driver. Mum now works in an old people’s home and dad is retired.

“Nobody in my family did anything in the creative arts and they were always very supportive. If it had been their choice it’s not a path they would have chosen for me.

“I understand this more now as a parent. Every parent wants their child to be secure and to have an idea where their future is headed and I never knew from one day to the next. My life back then was exhilarating, but it was teetering on the edge of a complete crash and burn. I haven’t touched drugs for 10 years since my child was born. I had to make a decision about what way my life was going to go. I couldn’t be fully creative and write until I’d got my head together and got healthy. My parents didn’t expect it of me. I was the good kid at school who got As. And I was never in trouble. You need a solid reason for leaving drugs behind. My family were supportive, even when I was giving them hell, but they never turned their back on me. They probably had every reason to when I was at my worst, but they never did. It was like starting a different life and I had to re-invent myself in lots of ways. I had to give up music because I was sick of it. A lot of the lifestyle was part of it and I felt I had to stay away from that.”

Tony’s wife Vanessa works in fashion for Ralph Lauren in New York and they have an 11-year-old daughter Nico. Vanessa trained in the UK and would eventually like to move back. In fact, they both would.

“It’s very hard for me going back after I visit my parents. I miss good music being on the radio, the culture, the food, the way the evenings draw in in the autumn. I get very nostalgic.

“My English friends think I’m mad. When you’re 18 you always want to get out, but when you’ve been away you begin to realise how special it is where you grew up.

“I see Blackburn changing a lot. There’s a great little bar called Barzooka that I’ve been to a couple of times. I think there’s a younger more diverse crowd in Blackburn than when I was a kid.

“My memories of going out on a Friday night in the ‘90s in Blackburn are of streets packed out and people fighting and throwing up and going mental.

“Where the college is, there used to be a record store I used to go to every Saturday and I’d chat to the guy about what vinyl had come out and what he recommended. He knew every bit of vinyl he had in there. I miss the chase of looking through records and you’d find something and it was like a lump of gold.

“I used to feel very naughty reading books. I remember reading Naked Lunch by William Burroughs when I was 16 and I had to order it from a shop near the old cinema and the lady gave me such a look. I felt like I’d asked for a copy of Razzle.”

Tony attended the Catholic comprehensive Our Lady and St George’s in Shadsworth and remembers getting in trouble with deputy head Father O’Carroll for reading the Communist Manifesto.

“He gave me a lecture about what the communists did to the priests in Spain. It’s not that I was a communist. I was just interested in reading it. Once for GCSE we had a test and I got my story back with an A- and the note, ‘This is really good but is everything all right at home?’ I’d written this really dark story about a post-apocalyptic world where you had to survive by eating corpses. There was a part of me that always wanted to antagonise the teachers a little bit. I guess that hasn’t really changed. “ Black Neon is published by Bluemoose, £8.99.