Novelist Irvine Welsh arrived on the literary scene in 1993 like a pugnacious gatecrasher. His mercilessly grim but funny account of a group of no-hope Leithers ushered in a new age of fiction. This original take touched a nerve in readers and spawned a thousand imitators, most far less able than himself. In one of the earliest interviews he gave, Welsh was keen to paint a portrait of the artist as an only partially reformed reprobate.
Should we kick off with Irvine Welsh’s life as a punk, when he collected dogshit to wear on his clothes and screamed abuse at strangers on buses? Or his criminal record, which includes a suspended sentence for smashing up a north London community centre in a whisky-crazed frenzy? Maybe we should begin with his heroin experiences and current enthusiasm for ecstasy. Or I suppose there is always his book.
It has to be said that Trainspotting is a bum title for a would-be bestseller – just try asking for it in Waterstone’s and watch the funny looks from other customers. Undaunted, PR people from Welsh’s London publisher, Secker & Warburg, are waging a campaign of hype unprecedented for a debut Scottish author, enthusing breathlessly that the book will be huge and that Irvine is ‘just a lovely man’. A Secker executive makes known his belief that Welsh will ‘do for Edinburgh what Jim Kelman did for Glasgow’. Jeff Torrington, winner of the Whitbread prize, calls the debut novel ‘wickedly witty … a bad day in Bedlam’. This month’s Literary Review hails a ‘wonderfully sordid depiction of how the other half dies and why it matters’.
All this flannel usually has self-respecting journalists reaching for the vitriol. But not this time – Trainspotting turns out to be a genuine wonder. In a nutshell, it is the Sunday Post reader’s worst nightmare, an everyday story of drug-taking folk with invaluable advice on injecting heroin into your genitals, using a glass ashtray as a pub weapon and scoring with opium pessaries while suffering from diarrhoea. The book has swearie words, a heart and a smidgin of hope. Peopling its pages are characters with names like Second Prize, Rent Boy, Jam Rag, Sick Boy and The Swan. Imagine Jim Kelman with a sense of humour and six cans of superlager, and you will be close. It is revolting, funny, scary and deeply affecting. Best of all, it destroys the myth that the only Scottish urban working-class culture worth a damn can only be found a pub crawl’s distance from Parkhead and Ibrox: the east coast keelie has arrived.
Irvine Welsh, in the kitchen of his second-floor flat overlooking Leith Links, offers a can of export (13% extra free) and talks about a friend of his who tentatively suggested including a glossary so that posh people could understand words like barry, rage, swedgin, shan, biscuit-ersed, skaggy-bawed, shunky, spawny and donks. ‘No way,’ he says. ‘One thing I can’t stand is these Merchant City yuppies with a copy of Michael Munro’s The Patter next to their Filofax. The last thing I want is all these fuckers up in Charlotte Square putting on all the vernacular as a stage-managed thing. It’s nothing to do with them.’
Welsh is tall and thin with receding black hair, cut short and gelled spikey. He is wearing a black jumper, drainpipe blue jeans and black boots. His face has a beery, asymmetical look about it, and he speaks in an even monotone, almost without moving his lips. Every now and again he breaks into a grin that takes 10 years off him, and his eyes gleam. We zip through a condensed life story:
Born in Leith. Father was a docker and then a carpet salesman. Mother was a waitress. Moved to a maisonette in Muirhouse, a pretty rough Edinburgh housing scheme. Got drunk for the first time at 14 while camping in Arran. First took speed at 17. Worked as apprentice TV repairman. Went to London, blind drunk on a bus, to be a punk. Lived the punk life, sleeping in Green Park by day, pogoing to bands like 999, Chelsea and Slaughter and the Dogs at the Vortex and Marquee at night. Played in bands with names such as The Pubic Lice, always getting ditched because he was a talentless guitarist. Lived in seedy shared flats and not-so-sleazy squats. Threw rocks at police at Wapping picket line and miners’ strike barneys. Had short-term jobs as dish-washer, road-digger, clerk. Took lots of heroin, speed and alcohol. Got arrested frequently. Then found decent job in local government, married, flitted to Croydon and tried to settle down – his first really bad move.
‘I was more worried about myself then than I was at any other time of my life,’ he says. ‘You’ve fallen into something that’s so ugly and horrible. Instead of My Drugs Hell, it’s My Suburban Hell. That’s not being flippant. One thing I really fear is living that whole kind of home/ garden/kids kind of suburban existence. DIY and all that. I’d much rather be selling my arse in King’s Cross than living that kind of life. It’s sick and sordid that people have set such limitations on themselves, thinking that’s all they’ll get.’
These days, with a middle-class job in staff training in local government and a comfortable home, you could be forgiven for believing he has at last succumbed. ‘I’m basically Mr Straight from nine-to-five during the week. Maybe every other weekend I’ll go to a rave. My finger isn’t jammed on the self-destruct button any more – but I’ll give it a wee flick every now and then just for a bit of intrigue. Maybe once in about six months I’ll go through a miniature breakdown and I’ll disappear for a few days at a time; I’ll vanish into this labyrinth of places in Edinburgh I never knew existed, and come out of the other end.’ . . .
Asked how bad his drug-taking became, Welsh looks thoughtful for a full 15 seconds. ‘I can’t really say I’ve had a great deal of personal problems with drugs,’ he says eventually. ‘The problems were caused by the procurement rather than the effects. In your teens and your twenties you’re not really aware of your mortality, you’re just steaming in.’ He thinks it would be hypocritical simply to condone or condemn drugs. Heroin, he says, always causes problems. If you want to take a class A drug, he advises, go for ecstasy instead. ‘There’s a tension when you write a book like this, that you are some kind of middle-class voyeur looking in and writing an exploitation book about other people’s misery, which equally I don’t think I am. Probably you could point to people in my past and they’d say: ‘‘Oh, he was never into anything like that to that extent.’’ Or get people saying: ‘‘That bastard was much worse than any of the characters in the book.’’’