Irivine Welsh: "The big picture of societal addiction is so vast that it’s almost a ridiculous indulgence to talk about street drugs"

The last time I met Irvine Welsh was way back in 2001 when he was on the razzle in Dublin’s La Stampa restaurant with Shane MacGowan and entourage. Earlier in the evening he’d had a contretemps with fellow cult author Bret Easton Ellis, which had almost resulted in them being frogmarched out of the Clarence Hotel. Drink definitely had been taken.

“That’s ringing a distant bell,” Irvine laughs as 24 eventful years later we renew acquaintances in London. “I spent almost five years living in Dublin and got to know Shane.”

Did he get to say ‘goodbye’ to him before he died?

“I did, actually,” the 66-year-old nods. “He was obviously quite ill and wheelchair-bound for a long part of it. I saw him just before he went into the chair and he was a bit shaky then. The outpouring of emotion for Shane when he passed was quite amazing. And that’s because he’s such an amazing character.”

Did living in Ireland have a lasting influence on Irvine’s writing?

“Yeah, definitely,” he nods. “I was obsessed with Ulysses, and then when I moved to Dublin, I got even more out of it just by walking around the city. I’d spent a lot of time down through the years visiting Dublin, but it wasn’t until I lived there that I got to take in the beat of it. To follow in the footsteps of all these great Irish writers was such a joy. The feeling you get in Dublin is that the past is never far away. The ghosts of the past seem to be very prevalent there.”

Welsh’s advice re: Ulysses being, “You can’t read it as a straight narrative. You have to trip on the language. When you free yourself from that burden, you pick up so much more about what it is.”

Another of Welsh’s favourite Irish scribes, Samuel Beckett, is namechecked in the first sentence of Men In Love, the long overdue sequel to his 1993 blockbuster Trainspotting debut, which finds Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie off the smack and, penises working properly again, filling the void with sex and romance.

Iggy, Lou Reed, Primal Scream, New Order, Blur and Underworld – all together now, “Lager-lager-lager-lager…” – have also been given the heave-ho and replaced by disco of the funkiest Bobby Womack/Chic/Earth, Wind & Fire variety.

There’s no having to wait for the eventual film/TV soundtrack with Mr. Welsh recording a companion Men In Love album with his Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra.

“The writing and the music operate together,” he reveals. “I’m always writing songs, messing around with my little keyboard and singing into a tape. I’ve been doing that forever. (Record producer) Steve Mac and I do a lot of techno together and had recently gotten into disco a bit – and then become obsessed with it. So we thought, ‘Let’s just do a disco album with the book.’ We needed old school big singers – they couldn’t be the insipid vocals you get in commercial music now – and got them!”

What makes Irvine dance like an idiot?

“I can’t resist singing and dancing. Any mild intoxicants, a 4/4 beat and a catchy rhythm and I’m off!”

Irvine is also one-third owner of the Jack Said What label, which has just released a cracker of an album, Spectrum Disorder – he describes it as “James Bond meets Massive Attack” – by Black Country psychedelic adventurer Pattern Perception.

“We’ve got a great catalogue. It’s been a passion project for me. It’d be nice to make money or break even, but our goal really is to give a platform to music and musicians that we love. It could be young artists who are just emerging or established ones from their ‘90s heyday or whatever who’ve fallen off the radar a bit. Get them back in harness again. We just want good shit, basically.”

Had Welsh always had a Trainspotting sequel in mind – and why particularly now?

“I’ve always been writing about these characters and just jump in whenever I feel there’s some theme that ties it together,” he resumes. “Trainspotting was about them on hard drugs. Dead Men’s Trousers was about them experimenting with DMT and getting back together in this strange reunion as older guys. Porno is them discovering internet pornography for the first time. This is them falling in love for the first time, which was a theme that had to be developed before I was actually motivated to write about it.”

Like Mark Renton does when we first encounter him in a seedy Amsterdam hotel, Welsh kicked his teenage heroin habit by going cold turkey – or, to use the preferred modern term, ‘abruptly discontinuing his drug use’ – on his own with no medical support.

“It’s the only way,” he insists. “You go through all that rehab stuff but cleanness and sobriety has to come from within. People are aways going to be obsessive compulsive, it’s the nature of the world we live in.

For me, it’s all about just transferring your obsessive compulsive behaviours into something that isn’t going to harm you. Basically, it’s going to do you good. Mine goes into sport. It goes into boxing and high-intensity interval training. It used to be marathons and all that but my knees are too fucked for that now. So, I’ve got back into boxing which I used to do when I was younger. I’m compulsive about that because it’s better for me than taking drugs. I’m compulsive obsessive about my writing and music too.”

Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting.

Sick Boy – or Simon David Williamson as he now insists on being called – derives part of his income by going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and manipulating vulnerable women he meets there into working for his Greek pimp pal, Andreas.

It’s easy money until he commits the textbook error of falling in love with Amanda, a trust fund girl whose ferocious lovemaking gives our antihero a bigger high than heroin ever did.

“He’s a terrible guy in so many ways but believes he’s really virtuous. Most terrible people do believe that in order to act in a terrible way. So, he believes that he’s virtuous and doing all this nonsense for the greater good. He also believes that he’s a lover but, as has Renton, he’s been cursed by the merchant seaman at the start, Eddie, and his theory on the differences between a lover and a shagger.”

The narrative gist of this being that “when a shagger falls in love, it’s game over.”

Is going to NA to pick up women something Welsh would have done in his youth?

“Probably, yes!” he admits.

Irvine wants Men In Love “to be its own thing for a while” before turning it into a film or TV series. There is something, though, that you might be feasting your eyes on soon…

“We’re doing The Blade Artist with Bobby (Robert Carlisle) and are just about to go around and see what kind of interest there is in that. We’ve got a very good producer and director and are ready to unleash that on the world. Hopefully we’ll start shooting next year.”

While hidden away at the back of the book, Irvine’s publishers insisted on an author’s note which says that, “As a novel set in the 1980s, many of the characters in Men In Love, as in society in general, express themselves in ways that we now consider offensive and discriminatory. As a work of fiction, Men In Love aims to replicate the speech patterns commonly used by many people in this era. This is certainly not an endorsement (or even a condemnation) of such behaviours; merely an attempt to authentically replicate them through the voices of the characters in the Men In Love story.”

There’s also a “Contains nudity, very strong language, violent & sexual nature and heavy drug/needle use” trigger warning attached to the Trainspotting Live theatre show, which premiered last year.

“That’ll be on at the Edinburgh Festival,” he says proudly. “We’re going to do a bigger, more ambitious kind of West End musical, but I think the Trainspotting Live show is the best way to see Trainspotting in its grunge-y glory. Probably more than the book and the film even. It is the quintessential experience in my mind.”

Asked whether Trainspotting would get published now, Irvine shoots back “No!”

While most of Welsh’s key characters are men, it’s almost exclusively women he goes to for advice.

“If a mad life-changing thing’s happening to you – a divorce, a bereavement or losing employment – and you go to a male pal, the first thing they’ll say is, ‘Come to the pub, let’s get pished!’ or ‘I’ll put a line out for you on the cistern in the toilet’,” he explains. “You might need a bit of a blowout or escapism but these things aren’t really going to do you any good in the long run. They’re only going to compound any problems you have.

“Whereas your woman pals will sit down with you – you might have a bottle of wine or something like that – and go through everything. They’ll also give you hard data about yourself: ‘This happened because you’re an arsehole in this way and that way. How are you going to change, what are you going to do? When you behave like that this is how other people perceive it.’ Guys tend to give you an easy ride but you don’t need an easy ride in life. Sometimes you need to have difficult confrontations.”

Welsh credits the late-‘80s acid house scene with triggering his dormant writing gene. Can he remember the first rave he went to?

“My first proper one was Danny Rampling’s club Shoom in London,” Irvine reminisces. “I was the only person there who wasn’t on ecstasy. Because of my experience of hard drugs and drug abuse, I was anti-drugs at that time. I was a bit like Michael Douglas in that Basic Instinct scene where he walks into a club and looks like a complete fish out of water.

“A year later, my pal Suzanne dragged me to a rave in Edinburgh where I took ecstasy for the first time and it was like a gamechanger for me. After resisting it, I was suddenly a duck to water.”

That Rampling rave is but one of many musical epiphanies dating back to the early ‘70s when Irvine became a habitual gig-goer. What are some of the others?

“Bowie in ’73 on the Ziggy Stardust tour was massive in my life. Roxy Music the same year. Mott The Hoople at Leith Town Hall. I saw Bob Dylan at Blakbushe Aerodrome. Oasis at Knebworth. Those things stay with you for life.”

Is Irvine completely abstemious nowadays or does he still have a little bit of what he fancies?

“I love going to pubs and raves with my mates and taking drugs but it’s diminishing returns when you get to a certain age,” he reflects. “You have to be very judicious about that sort of thing if you’re going to keep doing it.

“It’s been almost 40 years since I touched heroin. It’s a stranger to me now in many ways and I can’t imagine any circumstances in which I’d go back to it, but if I’m at a festival and there’s good shit flying around I’ll get involved. Not to a crazy extent but at some kind of level.”

Is there less stigma attached to heroin addiction now than there was in the ‘80s when Welsh was using?

Trainspotting LIve

“Yeah, I think there is but it’s a different ball game,” he proffers. “I don’t think you can see addiction in terms of just street drugs. Everything now is set up for addiction. The mobile phone I’m talking to you on is set up for addiction. It’s designed to give us these dopamine hits.

“The tech people in Silicon Valley won’t let their kids anywhere near mobile phones because they know that it’s just brain rot. Phoning up Deliveroo is getting us morbidly obese and addicted to sugar, salts and all that. Get us wanking to online pornography. Young guys who can’t fucking get it up without Viagra because their sexuality has been destroyed just by looking at images. They can’t relate to a real person.

“You’ve got online gaming stripping away people’s income for dopamine hits. You can strip away all their assets and no one even sees what’s going on with it. Even a language app like Duolingo is set up like an online game to keep you addicted to it. How much language you’re actually learning is another thing.

“Everything is set up in that way and facilitated by the smartphone, facilitated by the internet which is no longer an information highway,” he continues. “It’s a control system of corporations and governments. That’s the environment we live in. You’ve the massive problem with prescription drugs, and the way the NHS and health services in general have been medicalised and taken over by big pharma. Doctors are just basically pharmacists prescribing medicines that big pharma is giving them and have horrible side-effects.

“So, talking about street drugs is basically farting against thunder. The big picture of societal addiction is so vast that it’s almost a ridiculous indulgence to talk about street drugs.”

Talking as we have been of technology, has he asked ChatGPT to write a story à la Irvine Welsh?

“Just fuck off with that pish, it’s all a load of nonsense. You get AI to write a story in some style, but who’s it for? Who’s your actual readership? If you create a song that’s purely AI with an AI singer and all that, how do you promote it? Do you put a robot on stage? Do you just do a video? There’s a kickback against all that sort of stuff. People want connection, they want experience, they want to be with each other, they want to go out and have fun. Seventeen million people in Britain applied for Oasis tickets, which is almost the whole adult population. That’s phenomenal and unprecedented.”

A song I’ve been playing obsessively since rediscovering it in the Clarkian attic is ‘The Big Man And The Scream Team Meet The Barmy Army Uptown’, the Scotland Euro ’96 footie anthem that Welsh recorded with Primal Scream and Adrian Sherwood’s On U Sound System.

“Andrew Innes just said to me, ‘Rant into this DAT tape’ which is basically what I did,” he chuckles. “When you look back even beyond Screamadelica to Sonic Flower Groove, that’s some fucking catalogue of versatile music. It straddles rock ‘n’ roll, acid house, everything. Primal Scream have reinvented themselves every album, which is quite the achievement. They’re an amazing bunch of people.”

As our chinwag draws to a close, I ask Irvine, who’s been three times married but has no kids, what the most important thing in his life is?

“To be in a loving relationship,” he concludes. “To have a comfortable home and be able to travel, those are fabulous things too. Also, obviously, being able to express yourself. Whether it’s writing or music, any kind of art connects you with other people, which is the greatest gift you can have.”

• Men In Love is published by Jonathan Cape. The companion Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra album is out now.