Irvine Welsh: 30 Years After Trainspotting We Are “Without Youth Culture"

We stayed awake. Awake until dawn. Watching the lights on our screens and listening to the sounds of the factories on the other side of the window. It's our torment. The incessant noise, the machines. The machines never stop. This is their place. Our drug use... We need it to escape.

At the heart of Trainspotting (1993), the first novel by acclaimed Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, we find a group of aimless young people, lost in a haze of uncertainty. Their lives are trapped in a limbo from which it seems impossible to escape. The recent industrialisation of Edinburgh has turned them into a first generation unable to find decent work, and technological advancement has offered them a kind of cyclical, self

destructive escapism. There was nothing else to do; people were dying from drugs and AIDS on the mean streets.

"In a lot of ways, the digital culture is very primitive. The drug-taking rituals, the dancing are very much almost like they're tribal. So it's a strange thing. The digitalisation – the technology – in some ways has enabled us to get in touch with previous cultures," the Scottish author answers, on the other end of the phone. Ironically, a conversation about the suffering caused by technology is happening thanks to the possibilities offered by that very technology.

He didn't used to be a writer; that was almost an accident. A music nut at heart, his first love was punk music, although he wasn't very good at playing it. He gave up the guitar after a couple of bands fired him. The same thing happened with the bass guitar a couple of years later. Clearly, he was not going to become a proper musician. That's when he found his true passions: raves – and storytelling.

Escapism 1: Electronic Music

Irvine Welsh spent his twenties trying to escape the situation he was living in. Listening to music at parties that were organised by people of his own generation. The music was focused on replicating the industrial sounds of the factories that no longer offered jobs. Replicating the noises of what they hated, to find refuge in them.

The caress of your abuser. It happened first in West Germany with the military technology underscoring Krautrock, then in Detroit with the pounding Techno resembling the soundtrack of automobile factories, and later spread to the poorest cities in the UK with illegal Acid House based, drug-infused parties.

He lived in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, though not its largest city: a town still neglected by its government. Anguish transformed into ironic escape.

"Of course, it's weird," he says now of the shifting tectonic plates of work and leisure. "What else could it be? It's a major transition to a world without paid work. This is what we're moving towards. We're moving towards the end of capitalism, the end of socialism, the end of patriarchy, the end of hierarchy, elites, division of labour", Welsh says, his voice reflecting a man who looks directly into the future, amazed.

For him, these parties became an ideal refuge from the labour crisis because, of their very nature, they refuse to acknowledge the hierarchical structure that so many Scots despise. Inside a rave, there is the possibility of meeting people from different backgrounds and experiences and engaging with them from, Irving Welsh says, "a position of equality – of social equality – which you didn't really do outside of the rave."

"Everything is defined by social class or gender or race," he says. "People are divided in that kind of way, but then you go into a rave and everybody is 'on one', and having fun. All that is gone. It's interesting. It's such a fascinating thing. You're just back to the essence of your humanity."

It is very different to a rock 'n' roll concert.

"Unlike a rock and roll concert," Irvine reflects, "you can have a rave that lasts for hours and hours if you want. It doesn't have the same structural control, it's not at the mercy of promoters, and the music doesn't belong to anyone in particular; it's a collective ownership."

He's correct. And he is too when he asserts that technology has given access to everyone to explore their creativity.

"I don't have musicianship skills," he elaborates, "but I'm quite a creative person. Before, I would have needed to have mastered some kind of basic fret-boarding with guitar, or keyboard skills, to make the kind of music that I can make now through programming. Also, thanks to technology everyone can get a relatively decent musical equipment quite cheap".

As happened in Jamaica with the creation of Sound Systems, in Mexico with the Sonidero culture, or in Puerto Rico with the Underground – later transformed into Reggaeton – the arrival of electronic instruments has generated musical movements on the outskirts. People who previously had no voice in culture escaped from any imposed irrelevance, developing their voices through self-expression, popular parties, and protest using these newly affordable instruments.

Escapism 2: Psychoactive Substances

The spreading tentacles of industrialisation. Musical instruments were not the only things that became cheaper and more readily available as a result. "You can get good drugs quite cheap," Irvine says.

He has admitted to living in addiction for several years, in part at least due to the parties and the surrounding lifestyle.

"Yeah, I did get inspiration from it", he says matter-of-factly, referring to the experiences that shaped Trainspotting. "But it's just one of these things that you're not really aware of at the time. You're conscious of the time, but everything you do feeds into your writing, there’s no question."

There was a moment when he realised that no one was writing about the scene he was busy living. Few journalists bothered to observe the parties he loved so much, or to describe the feeling in the place, an experience that was almost religious. Over time, the book born from a collection of short stories about his experiences at raves began to take shape. The initial topic was expanded into a story about addiction. The goal was to give some sense to the life he – and those close to him – had been living.

The lifestyle is not just about drugs. It's about addiction to people, to the search for romance, sex, fast food, television, gambling – and Trainspotting, as it's called in Britain, an activity which involves counting and identifying the trains that pass through a station.

An important aspect of the book is captured in its title. On one level, it is a story about all those little, truly insignificant, things with which we fill our lives to make them a little less boring. Addictions exist not only for instant pleasure; they exist because of a vacuum of meaning and purpose. The more automated our tasks are, the lower hte boredom threshold. They are forms of escapism.

We all face a series of choices, which can differ from city to city or continent to continent. In his telling of it, Irvine's generation chose escapism after escapism. You can be stuck in that graveyard shift until you decide to do the most complicated thing and "choose to live." This is what Trainspotting protagonist, Mark Renton, did at the end of Irvine's story.

Trainspotting (1993) © Forum Auctions

He still remembers the first rave he attended. It was in a farm in Petersfield, a town located in Hampshire. It was the perfect escape. "We had a call come off the M35 in a convoy of cars, and it was a very exciting moment. It was such a great day, such a great night story. We just danced and partied through the night. It was absolutely amazing."

He has no apologies to make for his use of drugs.

• When did he realise that this would be such an important moment in his life and for his work? "I think as soon as I took an ecstasy and went into the pure UFO – I realised that this is where I needed to be."

• Does he think trying drugs is something everyone should do at least once in their lives? "Yeah, I think everybody should try every drug once”.

• Why does he think it's important for people to experiment with drugs? "I think it's just a natural thing, really. It's like celebration is a big part of our human experience. Ceremonials, every culture in the world has made intoxication a main part of their ceremonials. We are used to thinking that you change your behaviour and grow through doing something or ingesting a drug".

• Do you think drugs should be legal? "Yeah, I mean, I think all drug laws and drug legislation is not to stop people from taking drugs. It's to scare people who don't take drugs."

Although drugs have caused many problems in his life, Irvine regrets none of it. Experimenting, no matter what the consequences, ultimately becomes a life decision. That was he route he chose.

Escapism 3: Social Media

Nowadays, Irvine Welsh frequently wakes up feeling both distressed and nostalgic.

"We were fortunate," he reflects now, "that for all the highs and lows of what we had, we always had a culture. And new generations don't have that anymore. It's more of a media culture. It’s not a living street culture, for (want of) a better term."

Pills and parties have been overshadowed, industrialisation has been replaced by digitisation, and the new addiction is no longer about experiences but the lack of them. In bed, with a phone in hand, likes come and go, but adventures are becoming scarcer. Or that's how it looks.

"The reason I got back into doing dance music was because there's so much great dance music made by younger people," he explains. "But they've never actually been to a dance club."

Welsh has been sharing his own acid-house EPs over the past two years.

"Music's being made in the bedroom," he says, "on all these different software packages by very talented musicians who kind of want to be Brian Eno or Andrew Weatherall. But Brian Eno and Andrew Weatherall both went out and they did things. They read books and they had adventures."

The way he sees it, we are living in a moment that is "without youth culture." Technology no longer allows us to create an escape that re-connects us with the world. Now, as Renton learns in the pages of Trainspotting 2, previously titled Porno, technology only serves to connect us with technology.

The saddest thing, for Irvine Welsh, is that today there are not as many writers worth reading. Being a writer is about experiencing, traveling, breathing, and putting what you have experienced into print.

"I'm afraid," he says, "that people are not allowing themselves to venture out these days. I think you have to make sure of having living experience and also a mixture of being able to... "

He pauses.

"The opposite of that is the guy who travels around and has all these adventures and sits in a barstool and tells everybody about the brilliant book that they're going to write. But somehow they never actually do", says Welsh.

"The difficult thing about being a writer is that you have to do two things that are very different. I think you have to like going out and having fun. But you also have to be able to stay in – and you have to enjoy your own company as well. So the two aren't always the same. You almost have to be two different people."

Here's the rub. Trainspotting continues to resonate with teenagers thirty years after its publication because it is the last great work to reach the mainstream, in which the dangers of being trapped in an endless series of escapisms are portrayed both directly and brutally.

There is a message here: that getting lost in youth is normal, but losing your youth is regrettable.