His books have been his escape from the nine-to-five – and, over the past three decades, ours too. Tom Hodgkinson learns how Irvine Welsh beat the grind by using his prodigious mind

For “nineties” people like me, Irvine Welsh is a major figure, and for my money he’s the best novelist of the last 50 years. Trainspotting is Dickensian, it’s Joycean and it’s got that underground edge and energy too, something of Charles Bukowski and Kerouac. Welsh’s subsequent novels and plays have continued pushing boundaries, and his latest, The Long Knives, is a violent, gruesome cop drama that manages to be very funny and wise at the same time.

I’d come across Irvine a few times over the years: he used to turn up at the parties we held many years ago in the Tardis, a semi-legal venue in Clerkenwell. But I’d never really had a proper conversation with him so it was a great pleasure to sit down on a Zoom call earlier this year and quiz him about the genesis of Trainspotting, how he writes and why he likes a bit of micro-dosing.

Irvine Welsh My very first experience of ecstasy wasn’t a positive one. I’d been on heroin in the early eighties but had completely cleaned up my act and was very anti-drugs. I got taken along to Shoom, Danny Rampling’s club, and… did you ever see that scene in Basic Instinct when Michael Douglas goes to the club? I was the only straight person there, and I just thought: this music is crap, it’s repetitive, it’s got no lyrics, it’s boring. And then, about a year later, my friend Susan rammed an ecstasy down my throat at a club and I had an absolutely magical formative experience. By the time I came out of the club, I’d invented Acid House. I started practically living in the record stores. I got myself a set of Technics twin turntables and I was absolutely mad for it. I lived for it, for about four or five years. It was great.

Tom Hodgkinson How did Trainspotting get written?

IW I’d come back to Edinburgh from London. I wanted to do something creative. But nothing I’d done musically had taken off for me. So I sat down and started to write Trainspotting. It was 1989. And in Edinburgh at the time was [publisher] Kevin Williamson who I’d vaguely known before. We’d drunk in the same pubs and had an overlap in our social group. I got Kevin into raving. I forced some ecstasy down his neck! And he got really into the idea of doing a post-rave club, where people would go and chill out and listen to readings with a four-by-four beat in the background, just to come down after a heavy night. We started this “Invisible Insurrection” thing at the Unemployed Workers Centre. It was a crossover between House music and literature and it was semi-successful, a lot of people came, it was a good bit of fun. Duncan Maclean had been published by Secker & Warburg at the time. Robin Robertson was the publisher. Robin was looking for a Scottish novel. I said, “Well, I’ve got one here.” I lied that it was all finished. He said, “I want to look at it.” And that catalysed me to get the whole thing finished.

TH And you were working for the council at the time?

IW Yes. I’d come to Edinburgh to work at the council in housing and economic development. And it was a strange thing, but I got a couple of rapid promotions, and was in quite a good niche in the council. I was sent to Heriot-Watt University to do an MBA. Outwardly this was quite a successful career I was developing. But it was taking me further and further away from the creative and artistic life that I wanted. It was the last-chance saloon for me. I’d messed around in so many different bands and nothing had really happened. There was an element of desperation. I knew I was unsuitable for a proper job. I thought, “I can’t do this… Nobody could want to go in here, to this place, every single day. I just can’t.” So Trainspotting was my last pitch at retirement, you know? And fortunately I was able to retire at 31. It was a way of escaping from the horrors of the nine-to-five. And the nine-to-five had been a way of escaping from the horrors of drug addiction. But had opened the bigger horror of the nine-to-five!

TH It’s a philosophical book.

IW There are two things at work. First thing, the reason it was successful, everyone was taking drugs of different kinds but no one was acknowledging that was the way people were living. There was an idea people were still just going out for beers. So there was a shock of recognition of something that was right under your nose – that was a big thing initially. I think the reason it sustained in popularity across the generations is because it’s a book about the collapse of paid work. The industrial working classes were the first people who had to learn how to cope and adjust to that existential crisis of having nothing to do, no paid work. Now it’s a familiar theme among all kinds of professions: how do we monetise what we do, how do we live without paid work. We were so indoctrinated by industrial society into believing that we’re useless without paid work.

TH When the book was first published, it started slowly: I remember that if you saw someone reading Trainspotting or The Acid House on a bus, you would go and have a chat with them.

IW The Acid House, because of the title, was the one that people bought initially. It came out six months after Trainspotting but it was the one that took off sales-wise. Then Trainspotting just kept building and building and building. It became the default book for people in prison. The working classes of Scotland embraced it. The London cognoscenti embraced it. The old post-punk people got involved in it. And the ravers picked up on it. It became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. And then the next phase of it was when the stage-play came out. That made it national. And then obviously when the film came out in 1996 that made it an international phenomenon.

TH It’s a very literary book. It’s all about language and humour. What was feeding into your mind when you were writing it?

IW The best review I ever had of Trainspotting – it’s the only one I remember – I think it was the Portsmouth local paper – said, “James Joyce’s Ulysses meets Viz comic and together they go on a romp through hell.” There was all this nonsense about the Scottish working classes in the Guardian, but the Portsmouth paper nailed it.

TH It does have a Bloomish character.

IW I read Ulysses every decade. I didn’t understand it at first and I hate a book that I can’t understand. So I thought, “I’m not going to read it as a story, I’m going to try and trip on the language.” And every decade that I’ve read it, it’s been a different book. It’s been the gift that keeps on giving for me. The thing I liked about it was that it took you around Dublin in perpetual motion, and I wanted to do the same for Edinburgh. There’s a trail that they weave. They go up through Leith, cut through the town. The town’s a horrible place to be, if you’re going through junk withdrawal. You feel a stranger in a strange land, you feel incredibly exposed. I wanted to get that feeling of being hemmed in, of being constantly unsafe, on the move, and preferring the cover of darkness to having to engage with real people who are going to work or going to the shops.

TH You are very peripatetic. You have lived in Edinburgh, London, Chicago, Henley, Miami, Amsterdam, and you have a second career as a DJ. When do you get the time to sit down and write?

IW I don’t have a set process. I try to mix up the way I work. But the constant thing I’ve identified is that the first draft is very much driven by the subconscious… So I like a lot of noise and chaos and distraction. I usually have quite loud music on when I’m writing, or I’m out on public transport, sitting on the tube, just going round on the Circle Line, battering out stuff. Because I want to be distracted from myself, I don’t want to be aware of what I’m actually doing, and then…

TH Hang on, you sit on the Circle Line, with a laptop?

IW Yes. You can go round and round and round. Just about every physical description [in my books] comes either from someone on the Circle Line or someone in a café. Or, if I’m sitting at home, then I’ve got the decks out and I’m jumping into the music and jumping back into the writing, and then jumping back into the music again – anything to forget that I’m doing what I’m doing. That’s the first part. Then I’ve got to actually make it into a book. And that’s when I really need quiet, so it’s the complete reverse, the conscious takes over from the subconscious. You’ve got a soup, you don’t know who the characters are or what the themes are, and you’ve got to pick these out of the mess you’ve written, and put it into some kind of order. Then I go somewhere like Henley or a cottage in Coldingham, in the Borders, and I just sit there quietly, and engage with this mess, this mad lump of clay, and try and push it into some kind of shape.

TH How many hours a day would you be working in this second stage?

IW I don’t know but I’m quite disciplined when I get going. I get pretty myopic and that’s when friends say: “Just leave him, he’ll come back into the real world and stop playing with his imaginary friends.” So you have to try to pull yourself out of that imaginary world and give yourself some kind of life. I learned a lot from actors about how to do that. They’re great at de-roling. I remember when James McAvoy played Bruce Robertson in Filth. He was so intense, so crazily intense. We’d be shooting and then go back to the hotel. He’d say, “I’ll be down in half an hour.” I’d think, “There’s no way – we won’t see him for the rest of the night.” But we did and he’d be back to being James McAvoy again, a cheerful easy-going guy instead of an uptight monster. And I said, “How do you do that?” and he told me about de-roling techniques. And I thought, “I’d wish I’d known about this back when I was writing it.” I was so intense, I was very hard to live with.

TH And what are the techniques?

IW You identify three ways in which you might be like the character. Then you identify three ways in which you’re different from the character. And just by going through that process you give yourself permission to be yourself again.

TH Now what about your own intake of substances? You do Dry January, and Dry February, and Dry March. But you might take something else instead of alcohol.

IW Yeah, I usually micro-dose on mushrooms or acid to give myself a little lift before I go out. Because you don’t want to be around people who are drinking when you’re not drinking. It’s a tough shift that, for about an hour. But if you have a micro-dose of mushrooms or acid you can giggle along with them. And you don’t have a hangover. Which is great. I always have a really good December. I drink way, way too much in December, over Christmas and New Year. By the time it comes to January, I’m so happy not to drink. I used to do January and February but I found that on the first of March I’d be going absolutely nuts. But the extra month gives that time to reconfigure your brain and your body. Alcohol doesn’t even taste that good. So I don’t do much drinking even in April. It usually takes me to the end of May and the festival season before I get back into it. By which time I’ve done quite a lot of work, I’ve almost done all my work for the year. So I feel I can doss off and stop everyone else doing their jobs!

TH You seem to be able to combine an amazing output with amazing hedonism.

IW Not so much now. The older you get, the less hedonistic you become. Hedonism for me is a cup of cocoa and a nice pair of slippers. I still have my moments but it’s precision bombing rather than saturation bombing.

This article is from Idler #91.

IRVINE WELSH AT THE IDLER FESTIVAL

Irvine Welsh will be in conversation with Will Hodgkinson at the Idler Festival  on Sunday 12 July – just days before “Trainspotting the Musical” opens in the West End. 

The Idler Festival runs from Friday 10 to Sunday 12 July at Fenton House and Gardens in Hampstead, London NW3.

See who else is performing and buy tickets on our Festival poster here. Just click on the performer’s name for more details.

See you there!

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