The Spark In The Dark

Dangling from a noose in a Vietnamese hotel room in a final attempt to silence his demons, Alex decided to stop fighting the voices and start writing them down instead. He aborted his suicide attempt by kicking his legs until the noose broke and started writing later that day from his Hanoi hospital bed.

Alex Rea

– biography

By the time Alex was fourteen he was angry. So angry he wanted to burn down the whole world. When he realised that wasn’t going to happen, he decided to burn down himself instead.

Subjected to a daily ritual of abuse at an authoritarian military school, he left at home and school at sixteen with a chip on his shoulder that would one day work its way into his heart and almost kill him.

“When I started a band I had no thought of management, promotion or going on tour. It wasn’t a career choice it was a way to scream ‘fuck you’ at the world. Then came the drugs, lots of drugs. First the psychedelics that opened my mind, then the heroin that narrowed my world down to a hollow-point needle for a decade.”

Self-immolation seemed inevitable until Alex became one of the first people to take ibogaine, an African psychoactive alkaloid pioneered as a treatment for heroin addiction. Inch by bloody inch he reclaimed himself from addiction, battling his demons with insane workouts.

Alex spent the following years caring for his father, who had developed dementia. Inspired by his father, a former boxer turned Fleet Street reporter, Alex went to university, where he was awarded a BA in film and media while training to be a wrestler at the Frontier Wrestling Alliance in London.

After his father died, Alex moved to Edinburgh in Scotland, where he worked as a bouncer while studying for a Masters degree in film. While working the door, he was stabbed twice and was drawn into the shady side of the night-time industry.

Deciding to pursue his ambition of working in the film industry, he moved to Los Angeles in 2010, where he found work as a wrestler easier to come by. Wrestling for almost a decade along the west coast and Mexico as Max Ammo, he won multiple titles with tag-team partner Jimi Mayhem, including the MPW Tag Team Championship and, infamously, the UEW Tag Team title in a cage match that saw two participants hospitalised.

He returned to music in 2016, composing the award-winning score for movie Stronger Than Bullets.

After a decade in the USA, these days Alex lives with his wife and two children in Armenia, Colombia. He never stopped writing, completing numerous screenplays, short films and, most recently, his autobiography, The Angriest Man Alive. Alex is currently working on his next book – Last Punk Standing.