Trainspotting made Irvine Welsh cool with its portrayal of drug-fuelled Scottish low-life. But don’t mistake the creator for his characters: he’s had a job in local government and even deals in property. Can he hack it as a novelist, though? Critics say his new book may be his last chance to prove himself. By Andy Beckett
Until quite recently, in one of the quieter reaches of north London, a local bookshop was running a clever promotion. At Prospero’s Books on Crouch End Broadway, the staff had set up a display of volumes endorsed by Irvine Welsh. There was a book about football hooligans, an account of the rise of Oasis, a study of rave culture, even a biography of Robin Friday, an almost- forgotten striker from the Seventies. Welsh’s praise rang from each cover, amplifying a matter of minority interest into something worth noticing: ”The best I’ve read”, ”I read it again”, ”buy, steal or borrow a copy now”.
The books sold. And handily, Welsh’s own fiction was in stock too. There was The Acid House, with its short stories about council workmen and LSD; the three novellas that made up Ecstasy, riotous with stabbings and swearing; and the most best-selling of all, Trainspotting, a novel about death and heroin.
Prospero’s is not, generally, that kind of bookshop. It has half a wall of Penguin classics and histories of the nearby Alexandra Palace. Smart young mothers park their push chairs in the aisles. Outside, Volvos cruise past candle shops; up the streets off the Broadway, restored Victorian gables march to the horizon. Yet it no longer seems strange that Welsh should do well in somewhere like this.
Trainspotting sold more than 800 000 copies in 1996 alone, as many as the most mainstream thriller. It has become a film and two soundtrack albums and a play in several versions, and a poster so recognisable that newspaper cartoonists parodied it. Meanwhile Welsh himself, with his shaven head and troublemaker’s twinkle, his muttered Edinburgh vowels and drug-taker’s wrinkles, has become as much of a celebrity, perhaps, as modern British literature produces.
He drinks with Damien Hirst and Damon Albarn. He confides with Jarvis Cocker. He gets asked to DJ at the most famous club in Ibiza. And all the while, by word of mouth and weight of promotion, his books keep circulating. For all their glaring covers, their rave-culture packaging, their appeal is also quite literary, even traditional: the evocation of a world, in seething detail, almost entirely missed by current British fiction.
Welsh writes about the poor, the young and the very old, the wandering and reckless and feckless. He knows his kebab shops and council stairwells, his Scots dialects and dossers’ strategies, but he is not simply a realist. His stories abruptly hinge and twist, throw up bizarre possibilities, upset the order of things: a policeman frames a fanatically prudish businessman as a pornographer; a teenager looks under his grandmother’s bed for money, and finds she is a drug dealer.
”On a superficial reading, Welsh speaks for the dispossessed,” says Professor Douglas Gifford, who teaches Scottish literature at Glasgow University. ”But he has a wonderfully grotesque and inverting sense of humour.” This is attractive in unstable times. Few of Welsh’s readers, most likely, have been junkies, as he has; or grew up on the same damp council estate, with the wind slicing off the North Sea. Yet these days plenty of people have met a drug dealer, or plunged from comfort into poverty, or wasted whole years in dead-end jobs and nightclubs. They can understand what Welsh is writing about.
There is only one problem. Trainspotting came out in 1993; The Acid House in 1994; Marabou Stork Nightmares, another novel, in 1995; Ecstasy in 1996. Last year, Welsh contributed short stories to at least three collections, and several pieces to magazines, and a column for Loaded, and a foreword to a book about legalising drugs. This year, he has done a play, You’ll Have Had Your Hole, and a screenplay for a forthcoming film of The Acid House, and two records, and more short stories, and now a novel, 400 pages long, called Filth. Plus all those cover blurbs for other people.
At Prospero’s Books, after three months displaying Welsh’s recommendations, they got rid of his section. Now, one of the staff says, ”We’re going to put a new one up – books not endorsed by Irvine Welsh.” Some people are getting sick of him. Ecstasy got his first bad reviews. You’ll Have Had Your Hole got his first terrible ones. Some of the critics were simply, predictably shocked – by the torture scenes in both works, the rape scenes, the calculated relentlessness of the violence – but others said something more damaging. Welsh was becoming boring.
Ecstasy showed all the signs – the obviousness of its title, the clumsy nudge of its cover (a man with the letter ”e” in his mouth), the rattled-off quality of the writing within. The tower- block Dickens who wrote Trainspotting seemed to have shrunk to a much narrower talent, the in-house spokesman for that style magazine invention, ”the chemical generation”. Previously, Welsh had used drugs as a window onto his characters’ lives and deaths; now he was just writing about drugs.
Welsh’s publisher knows standards have slipped. ”Ecstasy was a rushed job,” says Robin Robertson, who has edited all his books. ”The film of Trainspotting was about to come out, so we wanted a book. We were victims of his momentum …” The same, says Robertson, goes for some of the short stories: ”The magazines were besieging Irvine for new work. They wanted rave stuff, and he obliged them.” His new book, at first sight, looks just as predictable. The protagonist of Filth, brags the book’s back cover, is ”one of the most corrupt, misanthropic characters in contemporary fiction”. The novel’s milieu is ”the lower reaches of degradation and evil”. The cover copy concludes like the hard sell for a horror paperback: ”In an Irvine Welsh book nothing is ever so bad that it can’t get worse … ”
Welsh is 39. He has recently recorded a rap record. His books still contain jokes about trainers. Two months ago, after being flown out for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, he sabotaged a discussion panel in a fury of beery silences and swear words. ”There’s fuck-all to say about my books,” he said, ”other than what’s written in them.” A career that once astonished now seems to be tottering over. Edinburgh councillors have queued up to condemn Filth before it has even appeared. Plenty of other people – Welsh has never won a literary prize – would love to see the Scottish upstart disappear back to Leith.
Even Robertson has his anxieties. ”I was worried at the time that Ecs-tasy came out. The bubble might burst.” Welsh does not seem particularly nervous. ”Writers will go through their whole lives to achieve what I did with Trainspotting,” he says, in his soft insistent voice, without a single pause for modesty. ”It’s a passport, not an albatross, to do whatever I want.” His small sharp eyes shine with mockery. ”When Trainspotting came out, there was this idea of me as a noble savage … a thick fucker from a Scottish council estate. The idea that you could become a proper writer is more of an overt challenge.”
He has not bothered to dress up for our meeting. His T-shirt is a black sack, almost grey with age; his jeans are dead straight, tight around his thin legs, not the sort his hipper readers would wear. At the back of the caf, behind his chair, he has dumped a record bag and a baseball cap and a flying jacket, also black. He is quite tall; he looks like a slim, off-duty bouncer.
His face suggests the same: lines round the eyes, hair shaved to the skull, a raised web of veins behind one pointed ear. But when he smiles, which he does intermittently, with a wolfish flash of teeth for each boast or small confession, his profile changes. His cheeks become like a bright baby’s, his wrinkles like the marks of a shrewd old man. Like everyone else in the room, Welsh has his tabloid and his mug of tea, his slouch and his easy patter, yet he is the man here who has made a name by watching others.
The caf is in Islington, among antique shops; its formica and tiles have the air of a listed interior. Welsh lives in London these days, up the road, in rapidly gentrifying Stoke Newington. He has just come back from Ibiza. There is a tinge of brown in his pale bare arms. What sort of records did he play there? ”A bit of house, a bit of techno, a bit of disco, just party tunes … ” Welsh’s answer trickles away. This is the way the afternoon goes. He is polite, he replies to every question, he never tries to be tough or aggressive or silent. But he evades particularities, speeds chattily through areas of potential difficulty. Each issue gets 30 seconds.
No, he is not worried about being labelled as an author for ravers. ”There’s nothing you can do … You just sort of go along with these sort of labels.” He takes refuge, as he likes to, behind a barricade of jargon: ”Trainspotting has been appropriated so much it’s like a Richard Branson product. A zone of identity that’s used to sell products.” Does he think he’s too famous? ”Celebrity is about swapping a lot of good friends for a load of acquaintances … I experimented with it for a few months, but it kills what I want to write about.”
Nowadays, he adds quickly, ”I’ve got certain golden rules. I don’t know how to find the Groucho Club. I keep out of places like that.” While he was writing Ecstasy, Welsh may have been having too much fun. ”I never sat down properly with it. I was doing the Acid House screenplay at the same time. Ecstasy was like somebody writing an Irvine Welsh exploitation book.” Had it damaged his reputation? Welsh almost says yes: ”With the first three books, I’d established something … ” His hands are darting over the table top.
But half an hour later, he knots his brow and suggests the opposite: ”Writing is something I’ve stumbled into. It’s been lucrative, opened a few doors … Part of me is hoping that Filth doesn’t do so well, that it bombs in a way. Because it’s not something I see myself doing for ever.”
In truth, Filth will probably extend his career a while longer. ”He’s got such a huge fan base,” says Robertson. Even Ecstasy, he claims, has sold 230 000 copies. And Filth is better than that. ”I was determined with this one,” says Welsh, ”that I was going to put a bit more into it.”
For one thing, Filth is his first full- length novel for more than three years. Its paragraphs are dense, worked-on. He has bothered to establish a world again.
His protagonist is an Edinburgh policeman. Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is not fashionable or young: he listens, lovingly, to heavy metal and Michael Bolton. He hates ravers, football hooligans, slackers and every subculture Welsh has previously treasured. He plots against his colleagues (”spastics”) and for his own promotion with relentless ingenuity. In the background is the unsolved murder of an African diplomat’s son, and, more promisingly, a minutely drawn panorama of modern police unpleasantness. Freemasons rule. Crossword solving comes before crime solving. Drugs are planted to prompt informers. Hoarding overtime is the great goal.
‘Organisations are like churches,” says Welsh. ”They are where people learn their behaviour.” The book’s flaw is to argue this too fiercely. Robertson is almost nothing but a monster: always lying, abusing prostitutes, comparing women to milk cartons and kebabs. In this bleak lads’ landscape, only scattered stumps of emotions are allowed to grow.
”Welsh has been trapped into a certain category,” says Gifford. ”Struggling underneath, there is a very genuine humanity that he has to conceal, because the boys wouldn’t like it … There is a guard there, a carapace that has grown very strong indeed.” Welsh shields his life story well. In interviews, a process he has called ”the manufacturing of passions”, he usually offers a paragraph’s worth of fragments, at best. At worst, he makes things up.
He was born, it seems fairly certain, in Leith in 1958. Leith is Edinburgh’s port, a couple of miles to the north, incorporated into that city against its will in 1820. Leith natives have grumbled ever since. From the tiered and elegant hills in the centre of Edinburgh, Leith looks drab, its horizon cluttered with cranes and silos and the odd sallow towerblock. Only the pale sea glitters, behind the docks. Welsh’s father worked in them until his health gave out. Then he became a carpet salesman. His wife waited on tables.
When Welsh was four, his family was moved by the council to a new housing estate in Muirhouse, a few miles along the coast, further from Edinburgh. Leith had been hard – the docks fading, prostitutes on the cobbles, Victorian relics all around – but this was much worse. At first they lived in paper-thin prefabs, then in a maisonette in a two-floor block. Like all of Muirhouse, with its open spaces, avenues and sea views, the Welshs’ house had been built for Marseille or Morocco. It had under-floor heating that was too expensive to turn on.
There was one pub, a few shops, hardly anything to do. ”You’d get covered in dog shit when you were playing football,” Welsh says. ”As a kid, you were more or less tolerated, hanging around or roaming the streets. When you got to be a teenager, there was more of an air of menace”
He left school at 16. ”I was only interested in English and art.” He went straight back to Leith – jobs in Edinburgh meant 40 minutes in a juddering bus – to train as a TV repairman. Telectra House was a grey concrete box owned by the co-op, but it was right in the busy middle of town, which was full of working-class families, as Welsh remembers it, escaping the estates they had been exiled to. There were record shops, and discos. Welsh lasted six months as a Telectra House apprentice, until an old valve set nearly fried him.
In the late Seventies, he decided to be a rock musician. He played in bands at community centres, and collected Iggy Pop and Sex Pistols singles. But Leith’s youth culture was not London’s punk scene. One night in 1978, Welsh went south, drunk on a bus. He slept in Green Park for a while. Then he shared squats and bedsits with other sunburned Scotsmen.
The way Welsh summarises them, his twenties were nothing but drift: ”Go down to London, get some work, stay for a few months on someone’s floor, go back up to Scotland, do the same thing.” But, every now and again, when he had run out of amphetamines, or was just plain bored, a self-improving impulse stirred. Welsh had already done a City & Guilds course in electrical engineering; in London, he began doing clerical work for Hackney council, then was sponsored to take a computing MSc by the manpower services commission. He had money now, and an idea what to do with it. During the mid- Eighties, Welsh bought up bedsits in Hackney and Islington and Camden, did them up, and sold them six months later. He made ”about 50 000”, then lost some of it in the property slump, but the habit stayed.
”I’m always buying flats,” he says. ”I rent them through a property management agency. Edinburgh is a booming market, and I don’t like to have too much cash … ” Then again, this is not quite what fans of Welsh’s dead-end dramas, or his frequent polemics against the gentrification of Edinburgh, might expect. Leaning forward over his caf table, he lifts his voice a little: ”I get really schizophrenic about it. I didn’t invent capitalism. It’s not the best way of running things.” He pauses. ”But I’m not going to be a stupid martyr.”
While Welsh was living in London and, briefly, Croydon (which he hated), and spending half of 1984 exploring Los Angeles, some of his Leith and Muirhouse friends were taking up heroin. The docks had long been a conduit; the disappearence of local factory jobs did the rest. Muirhouse, in particular, had all the right conditions for addicts: poverty, boredom, remoteness and a sense of decay, as the original plaster peeled and the pebbledash blackened, and the barrack blocks filled up with families displaced by the sell-off of other, more attractive council properties.
Welsh saw all this happening when he came back to visit friends. The extent of his actual involvement in the local heroin subculture has long been less clear. Two years ago he said, ”I don’t claim to have experienced everything I write about. I was just in the area of those things for a time.” When we meet, he seems franker: ”I’ve got this friend who’s been a junkie for 25 years. He said to me when Trainspotting came out, ‘Why have you written this book? You’ve only been a junkie for five minutes.”’ Welsh’s eyes dim for a moment. ”Well actually, it was 18 months.”
He seems keen to go on. ”It was a stupidity and a weakness. I’ve not touched it for years, but it’s in your vocabulary. If something bad happens in your life, it’s always there in the background, waiting for you to trip up.” Welsh kept a diary when he was on heroin; sometimes the odd note, sometimes whole therapeutic pages about addiction. Trainspotting in embryo. But chasing round estates after china white was not the way to properly cook up a novel. He needed Edinburgh council to get him started.
In 1988, he got a job as a training officer in the housing department, which had planned Muirhouse in the first place. The irony of his new role did not stop him being good at it. Welsh worked hard and won promotions – ”he could have gone right to the top in local government”, says one old colleague – and was offered time off to study at Heriot-Watt University. Here, on the other side of Edinburgh from Leith, among the business students and the campus trees, he studied for an MBA.
By late 1991, Welsh had finished at Heriot-Watt, and had strung together enough of Trainspotting to send out to a publisher. Who it went to first, and who made it take off, is a matter of controversy nowadays, but the most convincing claim comes from a big-boned Geordie called David Crystal. He runs a south London literary magazine called DOG. In December 1991, for his first, illicitly-photocopied issue, he received about 20 unsolicited pages, in typed-up fragments, of Welsh’s novel.
”I thought it was very funny,” says Crystal. He published the extract, without paying for it, in just 100 copies. A few months later, when he had 25 left, an order came through: ”I thought, ‘They might as well have them all …”’ Crystal pauses, mid-afternoon pint in hand. ”Some lucky punter’s got them.”
Between 1991 and 1996, Trainspotting swelled, via friends of Crystal’s up in Scotland, and small-press publishers there, and Robin Robertson in London, into an almost impregnable cultural leviathan. Welsh was not about to discourage the process – he had to keep working at the council until 1994, and even set up his own training company to supplement his income. Yet some of his book’s subtleties, perhaps, were lost along the way.
Trainspotting, as originally written, was morbid, almost gothic, and full of rage: an addict’s shivers covered his back ”like a thin layer ay autumn frost oan a car roof”; another heroin user was a homeless Falklands veteran; even the novel’s title came from a bitter joke about the abandoned Victorian cavern of Leith station.
”Irvine’s knowledge of British politics is encyclopaedic,” says Duncan McLean, a Scottish writer who has known him for years. ”He and [James] Kelman and I went on an American tour during the election last year. On election night, Irvine would keep saying, ‘I see Sir Henry Smithers in West Sussex North has had his majority reduced by 17%.”’ Trainspotting- the- phenomenon, however, steered away from such seriousness. The film only set one scene on a housing scheme, dropped the hospice visits for drug capers, and brought forward the setting from the mid- Eighties to the late Eighties, making the characters into ravers.
Welsh’s next three books, produced in a rush, played along. The Acid House seemed to be called that for marketing reasons – there was no mention of the dance culture until past page 200. Marabou Stork Nightmares shoe-horned in nightclub scenes, which were much less vividly written than the episodes around them. And Ecstasy was just chemical-generation clichs, many of them recycled from a Welsh novel that Robertson had rejected in 1994. It was called The Chill-Out Zone.
Welsh may need saving from his image. His music spin-offs have not been universally applauded, even in the dance music press. Remarks have been made about age and appropriate fields of activity, but he has already written an album. ”He can’t help himself,” says Kris Needs, Welsh’s main musical collaborator. ”Irv’s got a younger attitude than these kids who slag off our records.”
In the caf, with his red record bag, Welsh is expanding on his activities as a DJ. ”It’s a way of retaining an interest in the music,” he says. Is he good? ”No. I can’t fucking mix – or not very well yet.” He looks out of the window, towards the record shop he’s going to after the interview. ”But it might be a way to go.”
Professor Douglas Gifford, for one, would be disappointed. To him, Welsh is the latest of an important line of Scottish literary experimenters, going back to Iain Banks and Alisdair Gray and Alexander Trocchi. Each has mixed up street lore and philosophy, the earthy and the existential, to better and more popular effect than most postwar English novelists.
Gifford is persuasive – in Welsh books, unlike ones by Martin Amis, the council wallpaper and cooked breakfasts really sweat, in a deeply-felt detail that perhaps only experience brings. And Welsh, too, seems to know and think about all of modern Britain, not just the bits which dream of Manhattan.
But authenticity is not enough. Filth, for all its foul energy and texture, feels like a narrow achievement in the end. Were it not by Welsh, it would be a genre book. As in most of his writing since Trainspotting, the novel strains when plot invention or character justification is required; there is a sense that he is still happiest with his memories and notebooks. ”I’ve got another 500 pages of Trainspotting,” says Welsh. ”I might sit down and rewrite it, as if it’s five or 10 years on, take the story on … ”
Or he could follow the example of his least-known book. Marabou Stork Nightmares has never sold heavily , yet Welsh is protective. He has already sold the film rights to Filth, but he has refused all offers to shoot this earlier novel. ”I don’t want it to be exploited,” he says. He is worried that the book’s ”issues” – Scottish racism, his country’s complicity in the British empire, the consequences of all immoral actions – would be smoothed away.
As he says this, for a few moments, Welsh’s literary worldview opens up. He admits to being interested in apartheid, World War II, even Evelyn Waugh.
Then he stops himself. He says he can’t remember which Waugh book he read. ”I’ve never been a great reader of fiction.” Soon afterwards, he slips out of the door, record bag swinging, leaving a remark to linger. ”I’m not that reflective – it’s good to remain a bit strange to yourself.” Welsh, the restless entrepreneur, with his compartmentalised life, and the wife he won’t discuss, or even confirm as existing, has many projects to finish. He may be too busy for great literature.
Filth is published by Jonathan Cape