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 chord. 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.”
