“UUURRGGHHHH!!!” Squatting, straining and scrunching up his face, and with veins pulsing on his glistening bald head, Irvine Welsh is defecating live on the stage of the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire. Thankfully, despite the groan-inducing sound effects, his trousers are fully up.

It’s a balmy Tuesday evening in late April, the final night of the DLR ‘Library Voices Series’, and the 53-year-old Scottish author is reading an extract from his latest novel, Skagboys, in which a group of bored carpenters engage in a Monday morning “shiteing” competition – crapping on newspapers and comparing the lengths, looks and textures of their stools. It’s a fairly typical Welsh scenario, and he reads it with great gusto, obviously enjoying the delighted disgust of the audience.
Although renowned as an excellent reader/performer of his work, he’s in particularly good form tonight, really going for it. Now based in the US, this event is the last scheduled date of what’s been a gruelling UK and Ireland publicity tour. Demanding as they may have been, all those readings, interviews and bookshop signings have paid off handsomely.
Featuring younger, less damaged incarnations of such memorable characters as Spud, Sickboy, Renton and Begbie, Skagboys is a prequel to his 1993 debut Trainspotting (he’s already written a sequel in 2002’s Porno) and, just a few hours ago, he received the news that it’s gone straight in at No. 1 in the UK
bestsellers’ list.
It’s not the first time one of his books has gone to No. 1 with a bullet (Ecstasy and Filth share the same distinction), but he’s still delighted. Having celebrated with Guinness and margaritas, he’s more exuberantly giddy than drunk. We shared a taxi in from Dublin city centre earlier, along with his American wife Beth Quinn and novelist friend Emer Martin, and throughout the journey, he intermittently broke into a chant of, “Fuck you, John Grisham! Fuck you, James Patterson! Welshy wins again!!”
In my introduction to the reading, I made the point that although Welsh has been dubbed “the poet laureate of the chemical generation,” it would be equally apt to describe him as “the punk laureate of the literary generation.” In terms of its pure
impact, Trainspotting was the equivalent of Never Mind The Bollocks...
When I mentioned his good news, there was spontaneous applause. When the author himself came out onstage, the first thing he said was, “Hi there! I don’t know if Olaf mentioned that I’ve just gone straight in at No. 1 in the UK bestseller lists. Just in case that kind of slipped his mind, I thought I’d just throw that in there.”
After his ten-minute reading, we cut the shit and get down to the interview...

OLAF TYARANSEN: It’s been almost 20 years since Trainspotting was first published, and it’s now sold well over a million copies in English alone. Did you have any idea at the time that it was going to be so successful?
IRVINE WELSH: No, not really. I did have some sort of vague notion that 20 years down the line I’d still be... (jumps from seat, punches air victoriously, and shouts at audience) NUMBER ONE IN THE FUCKIN’ BESTSELLER LISTS! WHOA!! FUCK OFF, GRISHAM!! (audience cheers and whistles). Nah, seriously, when you write something like that, you think your mates are gonna read it and nobody else will. You think that maybe there’ll be a thousand copies sold locally, and that’ll be cool and everybody will like you. And then suddenly it’s 10,000, and everybody’s going, “Brilliant, the guy’s done well for himself. Well done, pal!” Then you get to 100,000 and it’s... “cunt!” (audience laughs). They’re going, “he’s fucking sold us out, that bastard!” It’s the same book obviously. There’s nothing you can really do about how it hits the commercial base and all that. It’s a weird thing. Something like that kind of starts out as an in-joke. You want your pals to read it, and get it, and enjoy it. Then suddenly you realise that everybody else is as well, and you think, “Well, I don’t know why that should be.” You meet people in Moscow or Rio and they’re saying, “We have a Begbie,” or, “We have a Spud,” or whatever. People just identify with the characters.
How do you translate a book like Trainspotting
into Russian?
It’s kind of weird. I remember we were in Russia, and there’s two guys who translate all my books into Russian. I’d never met them before and we went out for a few drinks. They’re big mates because basically there’s not a big translation community in Russia (smiles). So we were in St. Petersburg in this bar and they’re going (adopts Russian accent), “This is my best friend, he is a great man, a wonderful translator.” And then one of them went to the toilet and it was, (conspiratorially) “He’s ruining your books! Get me to translate the next one!” The guy comes back and it’s all, “Ah, my friend!” The other guy goes outside for a fag and it’s all, “He is great translator – but no good for your stuff! Me – the next book! Me!” (laughs) So it’s a strange kind of thing. These two guys are still my translators, as far as I know. But the problem is, if you don’t speak the language, you never really know.
What’s your biggest foreign language market?
My books sell more in Italy than they do anywhere else, and I had all these weird extrapolations and conjectures about this. You know: it’s obviously because there’s a thing Italians have about UK culture – they love mods and scooters and stuff like that. And the UK loves Italian foods and fashion and football. But I realised it was just because I had a fucking good translator. And because he’s a better writer than me, all the books are these flowery classics in Italy (laughs). So every time I get a phone call from Italy, it’s always, “Earphone” – that’s what they call me in Italy, ‘Earphone’ – “Earphone, you muzz come to Eet-aly and have a wonderful time and we will take you to the bezz restaurants wiz the finest wine.” In France, it’s like, (French accent) “We ‘ave this punk rock place, eat eez very punk rock, you will love eet there!” So you do get looked after differently in different places.
The main Trainspotting characters have appeared in some of your other books and short stories. You’re obviously fond of them, but was it difficult revisiting them again for Skagboys?
A lot of it was written beforehand, stories about them and that, as my way of getting into [writing] Trainspotting. So some of it is old stuff that’s been recycled. A lot of it is new, and a lot of it is inspired by the older stuff. But it’s great to revisit them again. It’s like meeting old pals, basically. You’ve had these characters in your head for so long. They’re mostly composites, in some ways, of people that you know, so there’s an immediacy about them. If you write really strong characters, I think you just need to get them around and the stories write themselves.
Is it true that the first draft of Skagboys was 1,500 pages long?
Yeah, it went on and on and on. I always write much more than I can use, and then just try to boil it down. So yeah, it was probably about that. But this is big enough as it is (picks up copy of the book). This is way too big for a novel. I’m actually surprised that it went straight in at No. 1 in the bestsellers list! (laughs).
How difficult was it to stay in an ‘80s headspace when you were writing, in terms of music and movie references, Thatcher politics, brand names, and all of that kind of stuff?
I never left the ‘80s in my own head so that helps (laughs). It’s weird because, honestly, I don’t think anything has changed that much since the ‘80s. I think the ‘80s kind of set the template right across the western world for how we are now. I think everything that’s fucked us up since then – for example, all those bankers’ bonuses and that whole culture of individualism and sense of entitlement – came from the ‘80s basically. That was its genesis. So what we’re doing now is playing out the dynamic that was founded in the ‘80s. The whole idea of having a state and a government was actually to protect individuals and society from all these really rich bastards fucking you over. And now the really rich bastards fucking you over are the government – or are kind of indivisible from that. So to me, whether it’s Thatcher or Blair or Cameron is pretty much irrelevant. It’s just that the whole thing has played out that way in the UK.
You’re currently living between homes in Chicago and Miami. Did you write the book in the US or did you return to the UK to work on it?
Kind of both. A lot of it was done over here when I was living in Dublin. Some of it was done in the UK and some over there. I’m quite itinerant by nature so I’m writing on the run the whole time.
So you write a lot on the road?
Yeah, I do. That’s what laptops are for! I can’t really understand people who say, “I can’t write unless all the stars align in a certain way.” I just get on with it.
There’s always something of a shock factor to your books. You’ve just read about the ‘shiteing’ competition in Skagboys, and I can assure everybody that there’s far worse to come (audience groans collectively). But do you ever shock yourself?
Oh yeah. That’s why you write basically. You write to get a reaction from yourself. If I read something that’s quite shocking, I go, “Oh, you fucking dirty bastard! I’m never reading that guy again.” And then I start typing away and then I look at the pages I’ve written and go (pulls disgusted face) “Oh, fucking hell! My ma’s gonna see this!” So you want to get a reaction from yourself. If you don’t get a reaction from yourself, you’re not gonna get a reaction from anybody else.
Do you ever say to yourself, “Oh fuck, I’ve gone too far this time”?
Oh yeah, yeah (audience laughs). That’s usually the point where you just go to the pub. Or the toilet.
You’ve often been accused of glamorising drugs. What’s your response to that?
I think every drug has got a narrative to it. Anything you write about drugs, if it’s being honest and sincere, it’s got to combine two elements. It’s got to have a kind of celebratory element, and it’s got to be a cautionary tale as well. Drugs to me are like a microcosm of life, basically. The whole point of drugs is they’re about celebration and festivity. You’ve got human life, you’ve got celebration of that human life, you’ve got a festival for that celebration, you’ve got intoxication at that festival, and you’ve got drugs that enable that intoxication. So that’s the whole dialogue of human life. But it’s also got to be a cautionary tale as well, because what you also have is people that aren’t really in a position to celebrate. And because they’re not in a position to celebrate, they’re using drugs for different reasons – they’re using drugs to hide because things aren’t going well. You’ve got whole communities, for generations, that are using drugs to hide. They’re medicated against any kind of resistance or any kind of self-improvement or any kind of life-change, just to maintain the status quo. The horrible thing is in this kind of consumer capitalist world, we just consume more of everything – whether it’s drugs or shoes or jackets or coats or drink or boots. We just have to consume. It’s like we’ve created this zoo for ourselves. We’re like these polar bears walking around in this horrible narrow concrete enclosure that we’ve built for ourselves. It’s not working, but nobody in power has got the balls or is interested enough to change it. And everybody else has been too beaten down to say, “This whole gig isn’t working out for us.”
There’s a suggestion in Skagboys that working-class areas in the UK were deliberately flooded with cheap heroin in the ‘80s in order to keep the
masses down.
I’ve always said that I don’t believe in conspiracy theories because I think consumer-capitalism is a conspiracy in itself. Why bother sitting in rooms and conspiring when you’ve got this whole idea of the market that will do that for you? If people are depressed, they’re gonna take anti-depressants, basically, because to try and change a world is such a long, laborious, arduous thing. If you’re successful, history has shown that it doesn’t always work out the way you intended anyway – you could wind up making it worse. So no wonder in those circumstances that people are gonna go for some kind of medication thing. Society is set up to provide what people want, the market is set up to provide not what they need, but what they want. What they want maybe might be a short-term thing. What they want might be killing them. But that’s what they want.
Your work has always been very divisive and controversial. I know you thrive on it, but have you ever been upset by any press attack or public denouncement?
Only upset if there isn’t any! You want a reaction, basically. If you write a book or if you do a film or a screenplay, the first thing is you want cool people to like it. But that’s only half the job. You also want wankers to hate it (audience laughs and cheers). One thing that really gets on my nerves, though, is when you get the wankers writing reviews going, “Oh, I hate this Irvine Welsh book, it’s not as good as Trainspotting.” These wankers fucking hated Trainspotting! I was there at the start and I remember reading all that stuff. It’s like that’s the mark of a wanker, when they say that, “He lucked out with Trainspotting, but all his other stuff has been shit.” Because they hated Trainspotting at the start, but they don’t have the balls to admit it because it was suddenly seen as this big hip artefact that you can’t slag off. So that annoys me. Everything else is cool. As much praise or as much vitriol is fine. But what you don’t want is no reaction at all. That’s the worst thing you can have.
In addition to your fiction, you’ve also written a number of film scripts and stage plays...
Yeah, actually we’ve got a new stage version of Trainspotting, kind of like the US version, coming out in Chicago at the Wit Theatre. This really good guy called Tom Mullen has done it, and it’s now set in Kansas City, Missouri, rather than Edinburgh. It’s an American version with American characters. It all translates – apart from Begbie.
What’s the problem with Begbie?
Americans don’t know how to fucking swear. It’s amazing. Also, I’ve realised that in Ireland, Scotland and England, we specialise in gobby psychopaths. Whereas in America, it’s always quiet psychopaths. So the American Begbie’s got no lines at all!
What else are you working on at the moment?
Because I’m living in America, I’m doing a lot of stuff over there. I’m working with HBO, doing a series for them. Well, we’re doing a pilot and hopefully it’ll become a series if it works out. I’m also working with Iggy Pop, which is great fun, doing what they call in America a ‘sizzler’ – which is like a teaser for a TV thing. I’m hoping that a TV company gets into it and picks up on it.
What’s the HBO series about?
It’s actually got an Irish connection. I don’t know if you remember a Travellers film called Knuckle, which was about these families, the Quinns and the Joyces, who were battling against each other. HBO got the rights and they wanted somebody to do an American version of it. I think they asked me because I lived in Ireland at the time. But I realised that American Travellers are really boring compared to the Travellers over here. Because it’s such a big place, they just go away (audience laughs). They can’t be bothered. Here, they get put into places by the council, Travellers’ sites and all that. They don’t have that in America, they just fuck off. Also, it’s weird, they don’t swear, they don’t drink, they don’t dress up at weddings, and they don’t have bare knuckle fights. All the things that make Travellers interesting, they don’t do. So we have to make it kind of not about Travellers, but about basically people living in the hills, in the Appalachians, what they call the Scots-Irish. It’s the one place there’s a Scottish diaspora in America. It’s the one place that people actually like you because of your accent. They kind of semi-understand you
as well.
Well, ‘hillbillies’ are named after William
of Orange...
Yeah, it’s weird because you have a few drinks in a bar somewhere like West Virginia, and people sound exactly the same as they do in a scheme in Scotland. It’s like... (speaks quickly and unintelligibly). You know it’s almost exactly the same, just a slightly different register.
You’ve a couple of movies coming out this year
as well.
Yeah. Ecstasy is coming out in the UK. It’s basically a mad kind of clubby movie. I don’t know if you remember Ecstasy, but it’s the first story in the book (‘Lorraine Goes To Livingston’). It’s basically a romance. It’s basically about young people having relationships and having sex. It’s like Sex And The City, but for young people. When I say ‘young people’, I mean people under 40. So it’s Sex And The City for the under-40s, but there’s drugs, basically. The other movie coming out is called The Magnificent Eleven, which is going to Cannes in May. It’s like a remake of The Magnificent Seven, and it stars the last surviving member of The Magnificent Seven, Robert Vaughn. It’s like a kind of modern western, EastEnders gangster, Indian restaurant kind of comedy football caper. So it’s everything that everybody likes, but in this
mixed genre thing. Box-office wise, it’ll either be the next Full Monty or a total disaster. There’ll be no middle ground.
What about Filth?
Yeah, Filth is coming out. There’s a third one. I’ve been told by [film production company] Lionsgate not to say anything about this because I keep going on about how brilliant it’s gonna be. So I’m not gonna say anything more about it except that... James MacAvoy in this film is just absolutely fucking beyond belief. But that’s all I’m gonna say.
I see that you’re on Twitter now.
Yeah, why did I go on Twitter? (laughs and pauses...) I went on Twitter just because I think, as a writer, you’re always looking for distractions. If you do something like Facebook or Twitter, you can pretend to yourself that you’re actually writing – even though it’s the reverse of that. It’s just another distraction. It’s like a benign version of going to the pub. You can also do it when you’re walking down the road. And I get bored walking down the road. If I’m going to the convenience store, I get a bit fed-up, you know? So I just tweet.
Your Twitter profile describes you as “solvent by circumstance, jaikey by disposition.” Now that you’re a well-travelled man of means, is it difficult to retain that insight into working-class lives beset by poverty, drugs and violence?
Nah, not really. We had a do in Edinburgh at the launch of the book. Everything was going swimmingly, and all my old buddies and old football pals and all those kind of people were there. Suddenly I turned around and this guy’s gushing blood out of his eye. Somebody said, “Your mate Scott’s just glassed this guy!” I had to do the Alex Ferguson: “I didn’t see anything... I’ll have to look back on CCTV and see what actually happened there” (laughs). I wasn’t even that interested. But I guess what I’m saying is my pals are still my pals. My two best pals that I’ve known since I was six years old are still my two best pals, basically. So there’s not a lot I can do in terms of bullshitting these guys because they’ve seen you grow up, they’ve seen you do everything.
You mentioned Iggy Pop. You resurrected his career with Trainspotting [mentioning him in the book and featuring him on the movie soundtrack]. Does he feel that way about it?
Well... he should do! (audience laughs). I don’t know if he does, like. I was out with him a few weeks ago, we were in Coconut Grove [in Miami] just sitting around having a drink and a chat and all that. It’s the kind of thing that you get so inspired by these guys. And if you can give something back as well, it’s brilliant. So I think there’s almost a kind of symbiosis in that kind of thing. The guy that’s doing Filth – Jon Baird – is a great director and he’s really been into my stuff so he’s kind of doing good things for me by doing that. So these things are always symbiotic. It always works out. If someone’s into your stuff, they’ll
give you something. But you’ve got so much from them anyway.
Going back to Skagboys. Is that it now or are you planning to return to these characters again?
I sort of hope not, but you could still want to. I hate all that kind of stuff – 100 Harry Potters and 100 detective novels with the same protagonist – these things bore the shit out of me. Nobody can want to write that fucking crap. It’s not as if the characters are that deep and interesting generally in all these stories. I hate all the genre stuff where you have the same characters and you have the plotline – to me, it’s just like Coronation Street on fucking paper. Sometimes though when you write characters that never bore your own psyche, they can just kind of gatecrash back in. And maybe down the road they will do. In some ways it’s kind of a failure to me that I’ve written Skagboys and I’ve written Porno, because I wanted to have new stories and new characters. But the thing is you have characters that evolved in your mind, they’ve all come back, and you’ve got to tell their story. To try and make them into something else, or pretend that they’re somebody else, doesn’t really work.
What advice would you give to young writers starting out? You know, to all those aspiring John Grishams out there...
I’d say do a law degree. Get a practice in the southern states, like. And avoid schemies! (laughs). Nah, I think the most important thing to do in writing is just to keep going. It’s to realise that the first few drafts that you write of anything aren’t for anybody’s eyes but your own. They’re for you. Like, if you write a screenplay, you wouldn’t expect that there’d be a film suddenly right in front of you that you could see. Similarly, if you’re writing a novel, the first draft of that novel isn’t going to look anything like a novel at all. It’s gonna look like a mess and a plan of different stuff and all that. And then people get intimidated by that fact. They think it should look like a book. It’s nothing like a book until the fifth, sixth or seventh draft. You just have to keep at it. It’s like sculpture. You just chip away at it, you make it into what you want the book to be. So don’t expect too much from the first few drafts. It’s a process. It’s not an end in itself. Too many people think it’s like the way you get taught in school – write this sentence correct, write this paragraph correct. It’s tough to write this perfect sentence, write this perfect paragraph, write this perfect chapter, write this perfect novel. It really doesn’t work like that.

Skagboys by Irvine Welsh is published by Jonathan Cape.