As he joins Hot Press in the resident’s lounge of Galway’s Meyrick Hotel early on a wet Saturday morning, Irvine Welsh looks baggy-eyed and exhausted. It’s clearly not because the controversial writer has been smoking strange substances, snorting illegal powders or downing shots of strong liquor all night.
As those who know him will attest, Irvine has seriously turned down the volume on his hedonistic tendencies in recent years. Sure, following his sold-out Cúirt Festival reading in the Town Hall yesterday evening, he was holding court in the bar until quite late. But he’s well used to that routine. The fatigue is more because, having left his wife behind at their Chicago home a fortnight ago, he’s been peripatetically promoting two novels ever since.
“I’ve been everywhere,” the 56-year-old Scotsman sighs, speaking in a strong Edinburgh accent. “The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, the last book, has just come out in translation in Europe. So I had a week in Germany – in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich – which was great fun. Then I went over to Scotland for a week to do Edinburgh and Glasgow, promoting the new book. Tomorrow I’m off to Italy to promote the Italian version of Siamese Twins.”
And so it goes, for a thoroughly modern writer. But it’s a good complaint, having two novels on the go. The ‘new book’ is his tenth full length work of fiction, A Decent Ride. As its tongue in cheek title suggests, it features more than its fair share of rampant shagging. Then again, so does Siamese Twins. Does it become confusing talking about the two?
“It does a bit, you know,” he laughs. “You don’t know whether you’re talking about shagging taxi drivers in Edinburgh or shagging lesbians in Florida, so you can get a bit mixed-up. But it’s nice as well, because if you break things up, you’re in a different place, different culture, different language, talking about different things, so I think it’s good to have two things on the go at once.”
Since the publication of his explosive debut, Trainspotting, in 1993, Welsh has proved to be one of the most consistently prolific of contemporary scribes – successfully working in theatre, film and TV, as well as in literature. So much so that it’s no real surprise when he casually mentions that there’s already another new novel in the works. However, other than to reveal that it’s set in Scotland and California, and features a character from a previous book, he’s reluctant to discuss it. Yet. “It’s just getting edited now, so hopefully it’ll be out next year. I’m not gonna tell you the title for a bit, though, because it gives away what it’s about.”
Returning to familiar characters is a device he uses quite regularly. A Decent Ride features the sex-addicted, coke-dealing, taxi driver, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson. “Terry is in my previous novels Glue and Porno, and in a short story called ‘I Am Miami’ in the Reheated Cabbage collection,” he explains. “He keeps coming back because I find him such a fascinating character. He’s a total prisoner of his own obsessive-compulsive disorders, and his moral view is kind of formed by them, basically.
“He believes everybody has the same moral view as him. So he has this massive obsession with having as many sexual partners as he can, and that’s his whole life. Then something happens to him whereby he can’t lead that life anymore so he has to reorder his life... and it’s about him trying to make sense of that.”
Filthy, funny and extremely explicit, A Decent Ride is an unashamedly indecent read. As ever with this taboo-breaking author, it also includes some memorably cringe-inducing scenes of incest and necrophilia...
“Usually, afterwards, you’re reading it back and going ‘Fuck, my mother’s going to read this! What’s she going to say?’” he chuckles. “But it’s comedic, principally because I think you can get away with a lot in comedy that you can’t in drama. You do something in drama people always go, ‘He’s a sick bastard!’ Whereas if you’re doing a dark drama with comedic elements in it, you’re using comedy to get them to turn the page and not throw the book down in horror.”
In amongst all the sex, sweat and semen, there’s also a little about golf in the new novel (admittedly, with quite a few ‘hole’ and ‘swinging’ jokes). Is he a golfer?
“No, I hate golf because I was mentally kind of scarred by golf. My dad and uncle used to take me caddying when I was about five-years-old. I was like (child’s voice), ‘My legs are sore!’ and all this; ‘Just ten more holes, son, you’ll be fine!’ John Niven, the Scottish writer, is massively obsessed with golf, so I said, ‘You’ve got to assist me with these golf sections!’ So he was very helpful with that.”
Golf aside, he is a real sports fan. “I like tennis, boxing, any kind of one-on-one sports like that that are mainly psychological as well. They’re such brilliantly intense sports to watch, you’re kind of watching a drama. If you’re watching a tennis match, you’re watching people psychologically unravel sometimes, it’s just compulsive stuff. Maybe that happens in golf, too, but I’ve never found that.”
Equally a fan of social media, Welsh often commentates on football, tennis and boxing matches live on Twitter (his @IrvineWelsh account currently has almost 180,000 followers). “Yeah, I do like it,” he nods. “I mean, it kind of suits me – 140 characters – and the thing that I really like about it is that it’s tremendously serious and completely frivolous as well. You can just go from one to the other, and it’s great for research! It’s like if you see some weird troll saying something weird to you – like ‘Fuck you, you cunt!’ or whatever – you can go into their feed and see this whole fucking life!
“You see who they’re following, what they’re doing, and their whole profile kind of emerges, their whole life just comes out,” he continues. “You think, ‘Fuck me, if I was researching I’d have to spend an hour with that cunt in a bar, buy him a drink and all!’ Now you can just look at their Twitter, so it’s great from a writer’s point of view. I think the whole social media thing is great, it’s fantastic... but I think it’s inherently psychotic as well. I think it’s going to drive us fucking crazy.”
Talk turns to his increasingly lucrative parallel career in Hollywood. Outside of his fiction, there are various other prospective films and TV shows on the boil. One
such project is a possible sequel to the Trainspotting movie, based on his follow-up novel, Porno. It’ll only happen if the script is good enough. “Nobody needs the money, and we don’t want to trash the legacy,” he says. “The actors are 20 years older now, so we’d have to do something different.”
At this stage, money is no longer a serious consideration. “I’ve given a lot of money to charities,” he shrugs. “I’ve spent a lot of money on friends and relatives, and all that, but I’ve got everything I need, really. When you’ve got everything you need, and you’ve got enough for a rainy day, it doesn’t really come into it. There’s no question about it, when you first get big cheques for something it’s really exciting, but then you just say, ‘What am I going to do with this?’ So yeah, money isn’t ever why I do things.”
So does Irvine Welsh have a retirement plan?
“Yeah, I can see a time will come when I can’t be bothered publishing anything because I don’t want to go out and promote and all that stuff,” he admits. “Right now, I’m enjoying it, I don’t mind it, but I can see there will come a time when I just think, ‘Not this again!’ But I’ll always keep writing. I probably have to keep writing, but the publishing part is a different thing.”