Trainspotting’s Irvine Welsh: We’ve become ‘dumbed down machines’

Irvine Welsh, the author of the groundbreaking 1993 novel Trainspotting, stands in Leith, Edinburgh, pointing towards a second-story window of a weathered stone building. It was in this very room, overlooking a local park, that he penned the iconic book that later became a celebrated film, catapulting Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller to stardom.

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Welsh, the son of a docker and a waitress, reflects on his unconventional path. He studied electrical engineering, played in a punk band, and battled heroin addiction in his youth. After a period in London, he returned to his roots in Leith and, as he puts it, “just started typing.” Before Trainspotting, he felt it was his “last chance to do something creative.”

Trainspotting plunges into the lives of a group of heroin-addicted friends in Edinburgh. The novel is a raw, often disturbing, and darkly humorous depiction of the social decay that followed the decline of Britain’s industrial heartlands. It was Welsh’s debut novel, and it resonated deeply, selling over a million copies in the UK alone.

Despite the book’s eventual success, Welsh had no expectations as he wrote it. “I just wanted to get it done,” he admits. The book and its subsequent film adaptation captured the cultural mood so powerfully that even now, decades later, guided Trainspotting tours are available in Leith.

Welsh provides a personal tour, guiding through the locations that fueled his imagination. One stop is Cables Wynd House, nicknamed the “Banana Flats” for its curved shape. This distinctive building dominates the Leith skyline and is where the character Sick Boy, portrayed by Miller in the film, grew up.

The tour also includes the Leith Dockers’ Club, a place where Renton, played by McGregor, visits with his parents. Welsh recalls spending time there as a child, “sitting there with lemonade and crisps” and feeling a sense of resentment as adults around him indulged in alcohol.

Welsh revisits his beloved characters in his latest novel, Men in Love. He has previously explored the lives of the Trainspotting gang in follow-up books and a prequel. This new story picks up immediately after the first book ends, with Renton absconding with the money from a drug deal.

This time, Welsh delves into the complexities of young men navigating love and relationships. He explains that his motivation stemmed from a desire to counter the “hate and poison” prevalent in the world by focusing on love.

However, Men in Love is far from a sentimental romance. Welsh’s signature style remains evident in the characters’ cheating, lying, manipulative, and sometimes shocking behavior.

The book includes a disclaimer acknowledging that, because the story is set in the 1980s, some characters express themselves in ways that are now considered offensive and discriminatory. Welsh reveals that his publishers insisted on the disclaimer, citing the current “sensitive times.”

He believes society has become increasingly censorious. While he acknowledges that misogynistic terms used in the book are hurtful and should not be used, he expresses concern about the potential dangers of state-imposed restrictions on speech.

Men in Love, set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arrives during a wave of 90s nostalgia, fueled by reunions of bands like Oasis and Pulp. Welsh, who says he “never left” that era, believes younger generations are drawn to it because “people had lives then.”

He points to the internet and social media as contributing factors to cultural shifts, arguing that they have become “a controlling rather than an enabling force.”

Drawing on his own experiences with addiction, Welsh hopes people will become more “judicious” in their use of social media. He observes the prevalence of people constantly glued to their phones, predicting that this behavior will eventually seem as strange as chain-smoking in the 1980s.

Welsh also fears that the internet is contributing to a decline in intelligence. He suggests that relying on machines to think for us can lead to brain atrophy. He envisions a future “post-democratic, post-art, post-culture society” dominated by artificial intelligence on one side and “natural stupidity” on the other, where humans become “dumbed down machines.”

He believes Trainspotting‘s success was partly due to a time when readers were more open to challenging and unconventional books. The financial success of the novel gave him the freedom to continue writing.

Welsh is also a DJ and is releasing an album with the Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra to complement Men in Love. The disco tracks are inspired by the characters, storyline, and “emotional landscape” of the novel.

Music is “fundamental” to his writing process, and he is always “looking for that four-four beat all the time while I’m typing.” He creates a mental playlist for each character and theme.

He identifies Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and the Velvet Underground as influences for Renton. Sick Boy also enjoys Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, and New Order. The aggressive and violent Begbie, on the other hand, prefers “Rod Stewart and power ballads basically.”

When asked if he thought his Trainspotting characters would support the Reform UK party if they were growing up today, he dismissed the notion, arguing that the Scottish working classes “still have a radical kind of spirit” and are unlikely to be “the stooge of some public school idiot.” However, he acknowledged that “people are so desperate that they’ll go along with anybody who has that rhetoric of change.”

Welsh has always been politically engaged. As he walks through his old neighborhood, he recalls how Margaret Thatcher’s policies decimated the shipbuilding industry in Leith, turning five thousand dockworkers into none “at a stroke.”

He believes Trainspotting resonated because it “heralded the adjustment to people living in a world without paid work” and that “we’re all in that position” now.

He argues that Britain’s class system is shifting due to “this massive concentration of wealth towards the wealthy.” The working classes already lack money, and now the middle classes are being burdened with increasing debt, making it harder to pass on assets and creating greater insecurity.

“We’re all members of the Precariat, basically,” he says. “We don’t know how long we’ll have paid work if we do have it, and we just don’t know how long this will last because our economy, our society is in a long-form revolutionary transformation.”

Beyond the tour of Leith, spending time with Welsh offers a glimpse into his mind, which is filled with strong opinions on a range of topics, from dystopian futures to the superiority of analog music and his refusal to accept a knighthood.

Before parting ways, Welsh heads to the Dockers’ Club bar to meet a friend he has known since primary school, 60 years ago. His old friend, a plumber, jokes about their different paths in life. Despite the changes Trainspotting has brought to Welsh’s life, he remains connected to the community that shaped him and the Leith that he transformed into compelling fiction.