I’ve always thought of myself as an anarchist,” says Irvine Welsh, “albeit kind of one with a bus pass.” A sly grin steals over the face of the Trainspotting author. He loves this sort of undercut punchline. “I’m a guy who writes fiction. I tell lies for a living. So I’m the last person anyone should listen to about this stuff,” he’ll say, after carefully delineating another tautly argued, radical view of class, politics, art, you name it.
We’re in the Groucho Club, fittingly. One icon of excess, who turned his experiences as a heroin addict into the most original novel of the Nineties, reclining in an armchair in another – the celebrity hang-out that became a byword for drug-fuelled hedonism around the same time. Both are reformed characters these days.
Welsh is tall, languid and soft-spoken, with a voice that displays minimal register changes however worked up he gets. He’s wearing a green high-collared Sixties-cut jacket, trainers and a T-shirt. At 66, the author has never shifted his look to “literati” – no open-necked linen shirt, corduroy or expensive knitwear – and like Quentin Tarantino, he’s never taken a polite step back from the graphic, violent, hyper-stylised, confrontational cult work that made his name.
He’s experimental, with an ear for speech and a credo of “character first”, but sex, drugs, sleaze and gallows humour are still staple ingredients, and it would be easy to come away from his writing thinking he gets a kick out of violence. “I like to get a reaction from myself,” he says. “If I’m not gonna get a reaction from myself, I’m not gonna get a reaction from anybody else.”
He’s also prolific – the novel Resolution, published in July, was his 14th, and there have been plays, short story collections and screenplays, too. One of these was Creation Stories, the biopic he co-scripted about record label boss Alan McGee, the man who discovered Oasis. Welsh, who has since co-founded a label of his own, Jack Said What, was closely aligned with the Acid House scene, and wrote a book of short stories with the same name, but he is often filed under the loose collective term used to describe Britpop’s satellites in art, film and writing – Cool Britannia.
He sees stirrings of something again. “One of the interesting things about this summer to me was that young kids started going out again. You had the Brat Summer – [celebrating an edgier, unfiltered lifestyle] – and kids started going out, to concerts and clubs again. That’s fabulous. They’re actually rejecting social media and being a bit grungy again. I think this is a big sea change.
“Look at the mad scramble for Oasis tickets,” he continues. “It’s the big-event culture thing and we’ve all been brainwashed into that. But the other thing is people are crying out for a unifying factor that gets people out, and that could be one of the kick starters, because to reclaim culture, to reclaim art, to reclaim life, we’ve got to get back out again.”
This kind of energy courses through his work. His method is to “try to smash the story out as quick as possible, doesn’t matter what it looks like or how it reads, just get the whole thing down, and then you can go away quietly somewhere and just mess around with it and get it how you want it to look and read”.
He’ll do this in Miami, where he spends the winter months (he lived in America for a long time with his second wife, Beth Quinn; he’s now remarried, to Scottish actress Emma Currie, and lives in London). I wonder how invested he is in the US election. “I dislike both candidates intensely,” he tells me. “Harris is that kind of neoliberal, Starmer-ised figure, you know – not a lot is going to change, and things will continue to decline under her, but I think with Trump, it could actually be the end of democracy in America. I don’t think he would be emotionally prepared to let go of the reins if he got in again.”
That Starmer-ised reference is telling. He’s not a fan, although he says the fuss about the PM’s free football tickets is not comparable to the corruption of the previous government: “You have to be an absolute imbecile to compare Starmer getting a freebie to that.”
He’s similarly outspoken on social media. I note that he retweeted a comment criticising Huw Edwards’s six-month suspended sentence for possessing indecent images of children, adding, “This is f***ing mental”. “Child sex abuse is almost like you’re setting out to wreck someone’s life in the most horrendously fast way,” he says. “And if you look at sentencing, the way the criminal justice system is set up to protect private property, to protect the interests of wealthy people. You look at things like four years for a climate change demonstration, and then you get a suspended sentence for that kind of thing. You just think, there’s something absolutely rotten about the whole system.
It struck a cord. Resolution returns to Ray Lennox, now also to be found in the hard-hitting TV adaptation, Crime, in which the relentless Edinburgh cop is played by Dougray Scott. Lennox first appeared in Welsh’s 1998 novel Filth, followed by Crime (2008) and The Long Knives (2022), but in Resolution, the former cocaine addict, now working as a security consultant in Brighton, comes face to face with the child rapists who ruined his life.
“I sat in with some survivors in Florida,” Welsh says. “There’s always this sense that somebody’s been almost cursed by this kind of incredible pain and humiliation and violation. Everybody has to make sense of things that have happened in their life, but people in that position have such an extreme thing to deal with – to get freedom from that… it must be always waiting there to sabotage them.”
Welsh spent the summer DJ-ing at clubs and festivals, and is about to head off to Estonia, before speaking at the Henley Literary Festival this Friday. He’s been upping sticks since his teens, when he left the Muirhouse estate in Leith, for London. (Clue: Muirhouse is the place of absolute last resort for Renton at the start of Trainspotting.) Welsh’s is a story of against-the-odds literary success by any measure.
He grew up hanging around the local chip shop, underage drinking, and underachieving at school – one report made it clear he would “never amount to anything”. He left at 16, became a TV repairman, then jacked it in and headed south, where he played in a punk band called Pubic Lice, before getting a council job. It was back home, though, that he began churning out the 300,000 words that were eventually boiled down into Trainspotting. He was writing in Edinburgh cafes at the same time that JK Rowling was scribbling her plans for Harry Potter there. “We wrote in different coffee shops,” he says, with a laugh. “I never seen her in my favourite coffee shop in Duke Street in Leith.”
He ran into controversy earlier this year when he expressed support for her in The Times. “I wasn’t coming down on any side,” he says now. “I’ve got tremendous empathy with anybody who’s trying to make their own way in life. Trans people are just involved in such a struggle to do that, such a struggle for recognition, such a struggle to just be themselves. And anybody, any adult, should be able to choose what to do with their bodies, it’s up to them.
“But women have got the right to feel safe,” he continues. “They’ve got the right to have their own spaces and all that stuff too.” He believes the online arena especially attracts “so many bad actors… You have very aggressive, misogynistic men pretending to be trans people hating on women or pretending to be trans sympathisers. And you’ve also got these very hateful men pretending to be feminists, being very abusive to trans people.”
The way we look at the issue of trans rights is changing constantly, he believes. “This is something that’s working itself out in real time… [and] you don’t often hear from genuine trans people, because they’ve had so much of a personal struggle that the last thing they want to do is to get involved in the politics of it.”
He picks out the treatment of JK Rowling and the Scottish comedian Janey Godley, who just days ago posted that she was receiving palliative care for cancer. “These two women are both abused and threatened and harassed continually by aggressive men, and they’re on completely different sides of everything. Janey Godley is pro-independence; JK Rowling’s pro-union. Janey Godley is pro-trans rights and JK Rowling’s seen as an old-school feminist, but they get exactly the same abuse.”
“I greatly admire both of them,” he adds. “They’re two incredibly strong, cool women who are getting s***loads of abuse just for having a voice, and that shouldn’t happen.”
Culture war questions, though, fit into a broader pattern for him. “The contestable areas are now things like identity – they’re seen as areas that we can talk about, we can contest, we can argue, we can get into little cults and abuse each other online about these things. We can’t talk about the distribution of wealth or economic inequities and all that, because there’s almost an outrage when people try to talk about it.” If someone dares raise the idea of a wealth tax, he says, “it’s like, ‘this is the end of civilisation’, because people that have got money and assets are going to be taxed. We’re going to lose f***ing probably half a million people with hypothermia this year but it’s like, don’t question the right of the rich and the powerful to continue to suck everything out… I think that human lives have become a lot cheaper, basically.”
He notes, too, that “the toxicity that’s been spread for decades” means that “it’s easier to say your old granny, your old mum is freezing to death and starving to death because of these b******s coming off the boats. That’s something that people can see and buy into – that kind of visceral, racist response to this economic massacre of their own peers and the people around them.”
Welsh made the papers again recently by suggesting that everywhere outside of London “is like a third world country”, linking it to what he saw as the “disaster” of Scotland not voting for independence in 2014, which he claimed would have energised the country for decades. “If you say that Edinburgh is dead, Glasgow is dead, Dublin’s buzzing, people come up with all this s*** about the Barnett formula [by which public expenditure is allocated to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – often cited, as Scotland gets more public money head for head than the UK average]. And it’s like they don’t understand what the concept of a unitary state is, what that involves in a global neoliberal economy – it basically means that everywhere else [outside the seat of power] is dying and withering.”
Welsh is tapping into one of his most deeply held beliefs here. “Nobody actually answers the question, you know – why, when Ireland left the Union [in 1922], it was the poorest part of these islands, now it’s the richest part of these islands? Why is that? Are people in [Scotland] richer than we were 10 years ago? We’ve had another 10 years of this unitary government. Nobody is addressing these straightforward questions.”
He says the pattern of closure that afflicts the Scottish economy (Grangemouth, Scotland’s only oil refinery, recently announced plans to shut, with the loss of 400 jobs) is repeated across the north of England and the Midlands. “It’s really bizarre. There really is nothing there. Everything is moving out. Everything is shut down. There’s no opportunity for people. Why is anyone supposed to defend this type of regime?”
Nobody is addressing these straightforward questions
Some of it, he believes, is the legacy of Thatcherism, which “destroyed the twin foundations of the post-war settlement – social democracy and free enterprise. We saw the mergers and acquisitions taking place in the Eighties. It’s set up this massive corporate state with these controlling powers that communist states could only have dreamt of. It’s realised all these objectives of totalitarian control, and it’s done it in a much more subtle way. It’s done it through the use of technology. And we’re all compliant, almost like farm animals being milked for our experiences. And this is what the state is doing to us now, the state, the corporations, offering nothing back.”
He explains how although he did poorly at school, he was able to study for A-levels “for a pound, at night school, go to [Heriot Watt] university on a full grant. You had full employment. These were seen as responsibilities of the state – education and employment, that’s all gone. The human resources of the country are basically left to rot. And the state is all about fill in this form, fill in that form, it meets people in a malevolent, controlling way, and it does it on behalf of corporate interests. You can’t buy anything in a shop now without getting a questionnaire, you know, what was your experience like?”
He won’t cop to Renton being the character he’s written that’s closest to himself, but it’s hard not to hear their voices merge sometimes. How does it feel to have written a generational novel about rejecting everything society had to offer – washing machines, cars, game shows, mortgages – only to find his own generation being rejected by the ones coming up from behind? “You have all these labels, like, Gen X, Gen Z, Gen A…” he says, “but there’s no commonality between someone who’s grown up in a really poor, marginalised community with no economic prospects, no education to speak of, and someone who’s going to go on to university, maybe going to get some money back from the parents. Like everything else, it’s a way of not talking about class.”
Even culturally ubiquitous technology, he suggests, will have very different effects. “We’ve got these mobile phones that are actually designed specifically to give you ADHD, jumping around from second to second,” he says. “And people are now realising all this s*** is actually quite harmful to us…” That’s where the divergence will occur, he believes. “I reckon it will get back to a point that clued-up, intelligent, educated people will use it very judiciously, and people that have got absolutely nothing will use it as another form of addiction. Like the sugar and salt and Deliveroo addictions, the online gambling addictions, the online pornography addictions; for people who’ve got nothing, everything is set up for addiction.”
He stops. Irvine Welsh may have turned his back on heroin but he knows addiction from the inside. He chose life. The unquiet one.
Irvine Welsh will be in conversation at Henley Literary Festival, in partnership with The Independent, on 4 October; henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk. ‘Resolution’ is out now via Jonathan Cape