S10, Ep4: Irvine Welsh, writer

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Hello listeners, just a heads up. In this episode, we talk about boozing and substance use. If you're struggling, there are details in the show notes for places to get support. I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life. Because even as a restaurant critic, I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled up on the sofa. Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:55Hello friends, it is so good to have you here. Welcome to comfort eating. Now, I've been having a little bit of a tidy round. I've been hoovering, I've been dusting, and right now I'm making my bed before my guest arrives. Now, I'm hoping he's not going to see my bed, but I am a strong believer in tidy bed, tidy mind. It is so hot here today. If you could see my bed right now, you might judge me. You would say, Grace, is that not a very heavy wedge feathers for this time of the summer. And I would say to you, it's none of your business because I love a thick duvet all the year round. I'm not happy unless the backs of my knees are quite moist at three o 'clock in the morning.

1:43I like to be snug. Now, I bet no one has asked my guest today what their preferred dog rating is. Ladies and gentlemen, in my house, Mr Irvin Welsh. Irvin Welsh is a Scottish novelist and short story writer. He has been a towering figure in our cultural galaxy for 30 years. His best-selling novels include Porno, The Acid House, filth and of course Trainspotting. Now Trainspotting was famously autobiographical. It followed a group of heroin addicts in a deprived area of Edinburgh. It was a huge, stellar, massive selling hit, sold over a million copies. His new book is accompanied by his debut album, both with the same name, Men in Love.

2:38It is a sequel to Trainspotting and it picks up where the characters left off back in 1993. I reckon Irving Welsh is a hot sleeper. I think I'll ask him.

2:57Irving Welsh, welcome to Come for Eaton. Thank you, Grace, yeah. I've got an incredibly important question for you. I think that it's going to tell me so much about you as a person, as an author, as a human being. What tog duvet do you like on your bed? Light. I'd rather be a bit cold than too hot. You know, when I go to bed, I usually start off really cold and then I sort of kind of warm up a bit. But by the end of the night, you know, especially last night, I mean, I had the covers off me. It was just too much. It was just so kind of hot and humid and close and all that. What would you say is the worst thing you've ever slept under?

3:38probably the stars basically like you know i mean i've literally slept on park benches um not regularly fortunately but to sleep on something really hard like that yeah is it's terrible as well but the last time i slept on a park bench was with this friend of mine he was sleeping on the park bench opposite me and his head was underneath the rest yeah yeah i just sort of wonder if i said wake up he would hit his head and he did like he sprung up and bang he did about three times before he realised he was being constrained.

4:12Every time I invite a guest to my house, I ask them to bring with them their ultimate comfort food. Now, this is the nourishment that they need after a day in the writer's room or they've had a solitary all-nighter tapping at a laptop. This is the kind of thing when you've just got to get that draft into the publisher. Now, it's sitting on a tray underneath a tea towel. I've got to say, my producers keep it ultra secret from me, right? I never know what's here. This meal has produced an awful lot of quiet chuntering from the producers, right? There's been a lot of, this can't be right. Is this it?

4:58Have you got the machine? That was when alarm bells went off. Have you got the machine? I've heard whirrings and I've heard people kind of grimacing. All that said, Irvin Welsh, can you please reveal your snack? Here we go. Oh. Now, there's a big waft of what's in the smoothie. Smoothie is beetroot juice, celery, broccoli, banana, a raw egg, protein powder, red pepper and celery. And do you drink this every day? If I'm going to, I went to the gym this morning and I didn't drink it because I knew we were going to have some here. So it's usually a pre-workout drink. You wouldn't want to spoil that, would you?

5:51the site. So, I mean, the first thing I would notice is it's not moving in the glass. I mean, it's kind of set. Yeah, I mean, it's quite, it's a bit, I never put water in them. You know, it's a bit more, I like it quite thick, but it's not, this is a bit pulpy. So what this is, is an eggy broccoli banana smoothie with beetroot in it. Yeah, with beetroot in it. Shall we both have a little sip? Let's have a little sip. Cheers. Cheers to you. Didn't even move when we clinked glasses. Let's hang on. Oh, God.

6:26It's an acquired taste. It's getting bigger in my mouth. It's one of these things that... It's quite fizzy. It's called a machine gun. Is it? My buddy, Phil, who invented his nickname in the box ring was Machine Gun Coppola. So, but it is a fabulous ring. What do you think it brings to you? Is it like nourishment? is it? You've just necked it Irvin. The whole thing I like the fact that it's given you kind of red wine, red wine those lips you have after you've woken up at a lock-in. My wife can't even watch me eat sometimes. She goes you just cram everything into your mouth and you talk when you're eating everything.

7:06Just keep your mouth shut when you're eating. So I'm trying to improve my kind of table marathon. It's the only smoothie I've ever had where there's bits kind of coming back up out of my mouth and it's like bits of like skin and pulp. It's fabulous. It's good. You know, it's like what it brings to you is if you're doing a workout in the gym, you get all your protein from that. You get your veg a day without all the fuss of kind of the boredom of those vegetables. You know, it's all stuff that's good for you. What's on the plate? You've like, because not only the, what did you call it? The bullet.

7:44The machine gun. Right. But not only the machine gun, you've brought, explain what's on the plate. You've got a bit of scrambled egg, I usually make it with a little bit of cheese, some sourdough bread, some grilled mushrooms, a bit of avocado and a bit of kind of sautéed, kind of steamed spinach.

8:08Irvin, you're known as a writer, but there is a less well-known side to you, a musician. you're currently here in promo mode for a new album to accompany the Trainspotting sequel Men in Love now if I was an A &R and we were at the back of the Town and Country Club years ago and you were swaying up to me to do a pitch for this album how would you describe it? I would say it's a 70s style disco soul album influenced by all the great kind of 70s artists I liked in Motown and Philadelphia the great vocalists like Teddy Prendergast Luther Vandross and Marvin Gaye but done with a modern technology with a kind of a house sensibility that just gives it that extra lift Do you feel like you've scratched an itch by going and doing this album?

9:04Is it something that you've wanted to get out of you? Yeah, I mean, I've been messing around with music for years, and Steve, who's my partner in the label, and we've got a small dance label, but he's also my writing kind of producing partner for the music. We did an album for the Trainspotting West End musical, which hopefully will be out next year. We did songs in all different genres, you know, so we did a bit of blues, a bit of country, a bit, you know, everything, heavy metal, kind of obviously house, techno. and the one we enjoyed most was disco and we just thought, this is fabulous we just really enjoyed doing it it's just sheer joy because I'm known as quite a dark writer and Steve's known as quite an edgy techno guy but when we get together for some reason everything's just very upbeat So this is influenced by 70s disco but if I take you back to the 70s that wasn't a disco period for you, was it?

10:02No, I mean You came to London and you were focused on music, but from a punk angle. Very much. I used to love the Vortex in Soho because you went there Monday and Tuesday and it was like the hardcore of maybe a couple of hundred punks. And the idea that everybody was a certain punk overnight is nonsense. It was a daft little cult for 18 months before it went mainstream. But you'd come from the outskirts of Edinburgh. When you come to London, do you come with the idea to be a punk? Do you want to join that scene? Yeah, I mean, for me, it was like life changed when I heard Anarchy in the UK, basically, you know, the black sort of thing.

10:46I just thought, no, I've got to get involved in this in some way. And I was very fortunate that my auntie, Jesse and Uncle Alec, they lived in West London in Southall. They just decanted down there, and I had the 207 bus kind of right down the Oxbridge Road into the West End and I was completely mesmerised by the scene and completely mesmerised by the idea that I realised it's a myth that anybody can join a band. You don't have to have any musical skills but they don't tell you, you do actually have to have the competence to acquire them which I never had and I was always the one that was getting turfed out the bands because I could never get to the same level as anybody else.

11:27Where were you living? At your auntie's? First at my aunt's and then I was in a spot in Shepherd's Bush, which was fabulous. And I've kind of lived all over London. Do you think your auntie was sad to see you go when you went to the squat? Because by this point, you're like, you're a punk. You know, I was always back there every Sunday for the roast dinner. Oh, wow. Basically, yeah. So were your auntie and uncle Scottish? Did you find white pudding sneaked into your Sunday roast? No, my auntie was, my uncle was, my auntie was English. and one of the things I love about England is the Sunday roast culture.

12:00We don't have that in Scotland. My mum, she was a great woman but she's never a cook in a million years. And like a lot of Scottish women, they learn how to make soups, these big, beautiful kinds of broths. But that's about it. That's the repertoire. And it's every kind of pub in London and every household in London, and every girl I went out with in London would try and get invited back to their mum's house for the Sunday roast, because everybody did it. They did it so well. You know what I mean? They still do. That's one of the things that we actually do well in England, is the Yorkshire pudding.

12:40Had you had a Yorkshire pudding before you got down here? Like the pork crackling, all of this type of thing? Well, you know, the thing is, it's exactly when you want loads of something to eat. You know what I mean? You just want all that, because you've been out on the piss all weekend and all that and you're feeling terrible. You just think a big lot of food now would just be great because I'm not eating anything this weekend. Gravy as well. You can't put a price on that kind of... The gravy and the bits of veg. And you tell my first wife, her mother, the ex-mother-in-law, we never got on great.

13:14But one thing I did review was our Sunday roasts. It was just a genius. You kept finding bits more underneath the Yorkshire Pools and all that. They're the best ones! You've gone from living with your aunt and you go, and you're saying you're living in a squat in Shepherd's Bush. Right, it's the 70s, punk times. So do you get in a band? Are you in a band at this point? Yeah, I get involved in a couple of bands. I need to know the names of the bands. The pubic lice was the one that was a sort of ongoing one. That is, again, that is a lovely name, isn't it? The pubic lice. Someone told me that you saw an advert for your own job.

14:01Yes, I saw an advert looking for a bassist and it was in one of the record shops on Inverness Street in Camden and I kind of recognised the phone number, you know, and it was a guy who was a guitarist and I phoned him up and I put on the accent, like, you know, what's all this, mate, what's happening there? And he was going, yeah, I'm looking for you, what's this bassist gig like? And he's going, yeah, I've got a mate, he's a bassist now. He's a good lad but can't fucking play for shit, mate. Oh. So I was going, yeah, yeah, bastard. Did you break character immediately? Yeah, yeah, immediately.

14:38And that was the kind of bit of a wake-up call because I kind of learned then that this is never going to happen this way. Take me back to the squat just for a moment. What was your diet like when you lived in there? It was not a great time for eating, basically. And I even went vegetarian for the first time in the squat. And it was back then, you know, you can imagine sort of kind of late 70s, early 80s. It was all kind of egg and beans and stuff like that and chips. And it was terrible. So basically most of the things that were in your smoothie. Yeah, really. No egg, beans and chips. This would be high end.

15:19If I discovered this recipe, I could have opened the coffee in Shepherd's Bush.

15:28I want to go back a bit to your boyhood. You grew up with your mum and dad in Edinburgh during the post-war slum clearances, which meant you were moved to the outskirts of the city and spent part of your childhood in temporary prefab housing. Can you paint a picture of that for me? The prefab was very, very damp. It wasn't designed for the Scottish. But I do remember we had massive gardens because it was like land was no option. We were right on the banks of the river. We just moved from Leith, the tenements, down the estuary. And then they were supposed to be up for five years, but they stayed up for 10 and they moved us into these flats down in Muir House and the great thing about that then was that it was everybody in the same street that moved into the same place so it was a real kind of community the community in Muir House has always been very strong I was at this too recently they were showing the 80s heroin films they wanted to respect that legacy So we had a screening of these three heroin films in the 80s and it was fabulous.

16:42It was all the people in the community came out again but it did show how many people had died. It was like a massive cull of people. Is that how, when you look back to this part in your childhood, do you think of it like that, the downside of it, the drugs, the heroin, or is your overall memories happy? No, they're very happy because I was fortunate in a way that I was like, I was fortunate that I had my heroin experiences in London rather than Edinburgh. You know, it's funny, when I came back up to Edinburgh, people used to say to me like, oh, he's a waster, he's a junkie and all that. And that was like me just basically playing around in that pug subculture and trying every drug that I could and getting maybe a bit too deep, but only for about a year, 18 months.

17:29Then I'd come back and I'd see people that had never, they'd maybe drank a pint of Tennant's Lager before. suddenly come hardcore needle addicts. And that just happened with the mass unemployment in the 80s. There was nothing, there's nowhere else for people to go or do. So the drugs flooded in. Did you see that when you were a little boy? No, there was no drugs. I didn't even know what cannabis was when I was in my teens. If I look at you when you were eight years old, you think it's like a happy childhood? Yeah, it was, yeah. I mean, again, as I say, two of my best mates, I've known them since I was six years old and they're still two of my best mates now.

18:09So there was a real closeness and a real bond between people back then. You were an only child. Your dad was a dock worker. Your mum was a waitress. Were you like a tight unit, the three of you? The two of them were a tight unit. Mum used to say, son, you were an accident. A beautiful accident, but an accident. She had quite a way of thinking about things. but they were really into each other. They were kind of emotionally and romantically connected. So was there that sense that when you were in your living room watching telly that they would be just having an equally as lovely a time if you...

18:48Yeah, well, it was always fun. Here's a couple of bobs of them, maybe you can vanish for a while. When we get down to business here. So there was that vibe to it. Because there's so many people that come on this show and their parents didn't love each other or they come from families where there was only one parent or arguing. And I don't think I've ever had anybody on whose parents just absolutely adored each other. It feels like quite a rare thing. I've never heard anyone feel like the third wheel in their house. Yeah, you know, when I moved down to Mantes, it was like kind of, you know, when you could move to London in these teens, you would think that there'd be oh son come back, are you alright?

19:35There you go pal. On one level they were lovely but very early on I had a sense that I'm going to be down in London I'm going to be working down here I'm going to be spending more time down here. Going back to that family picture were mealtimes something to look forward to at home? It's like my mum could do great soups and all that but because of the, you know, she works as a waitress and because of the hours that she worked, she never really, I mean, she didn't get it. My grandmother was a terrible cook as well, her mother. So she never really got much in the way of cooking skills passed on to her.

20:13And my dad would make big bowls of tripe and all that, which was kind of, you know. Hang on, sorry, your dad made big bowls of tripe? Yeah. What did you eat it with? Onion? Yeah, onions and bread and all that kind of stuff. But everything would go into the mix. Hang on, I think for anybody listening, just to make that clear, that's stomach lining. I always felt that I never really got enough food when I was younger. It was that kind of penny-pinching Scottish Presbyterian sort of small plate full of food. And everything was, you know, it was like mince and tatties on a Monday, fishing chips on a Friday when the fish van came round.

20:52Salads in the summer, it was salads with bits of tongue on the salad. You know, I just, I couldn't, you know. Like a bit of like iceberg lettuce. A bit of iceberg lettuce, kind of slivers of tomato, frozen cucumber from the fridge, a bit of tongue hidden under the lettuce, which was just horrible. Salad cream? Salad cream, yeah. Terrible stuff like, and you think to yourself, how did people actually get the nutrients to survive back then? But I mean, as you're saying this, I'm thinking, you know, we're really trying to drill down on food here. your dad ate tripe your mum couldn't cook your gran couldn't cook and you can't really think of any food apart from a bit of mince and tatties what did you eat?

21:38how are you alive? what did you what was the thing that how did you get your nutrients? yeah well basically I went out of London to my auntie Jessie's and stocked up for the summer the fish and chip shop because you've got loads of chips with your first supper that kind of filled you up I always kind of thought that I had to eat practically half a loaf of bread before I was full back in these days. And what about your appetite for reading? Were you into books at that point? Yeah, yeah, I was. I was always a reader. It was like, there was a public library in Muir House, which was basically just like, it was the only place you could go in the winter once it was warm.

22:19Everything that I could get my hands on, I just read. I practically must have read almost everything in that library. I would be reading at night, you know, it would be time to go to bed and my dad would always bust me, he'd always see the light on coming out and they'd say, come on you, bed. It feels like you were, you know, showing signs really early that you were clever, you were switched on little kids. Yeah, I mean, I was very, I didn't leave school with any qualifications. I was too, I was very disruptive. I wasn't a great influence on other kids. and you know, to basically wind up the nutter in the class to get them to do something.

22:55Most of the teachers didn't really like that kind of energy. I mean, I had a great English teacher, a great art teacher who let me do all that, but all the other classes I was kind of quite disruptive in. Is there an argument that when people said that their child got in with a bad crowd, you were that crowd? I was a bad crowd, basically, yeah. Not in a malevolent or nasty way, but I had that kind of class war type anarchist mentality that all these teachers, they're the enemy. But not many kids kind of have that class war attitude but then go back to home and sit in bed and read Evening War. Yeah, but I've always had that sense of entitlement that kind of everything is potentially mine, everything cultural I can access and enjoy.

24:20We'll see you next time. Apron 20. Terms and conditions apply. Visit blueapron.com slash terms for more.

24:28You had a run-in with the police, and I think this is a record for comfort eating. Your first run-in with the police was when you were eight, and it wasn't just a small telling-off. No, we got taken up to court, and it went to trial. and the crime was playing football in the street. They charged six of us and we had to go up to court with our parents and we were just wee boys, we were terrified we were going to get put away. But the judge was really annoyed at the waste of time and he admonished us, but it was still on a record, it was still a criminal record. But the thing about Aftermore's is that there was a sort of notoriety about us in the school, like when they got done, they got arrested, they got taken charge and all that.

25:16But you can see the process by which people become how they are. You know, people habitually get on the wrong side of the law. If they get that kind of harassment when they're young, it's some kind of attention. By the time you're in your mid-twenties, you're a heroin addict. How did you end up a heroin addict? Can you see pads that you jumped to from here to here to here? I think with me and drugs it was always the case of if it's there I'll try it and there was also when you're involved you're on the fringes of a certain music scene I mean I got right into kind of Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground and all that this would be great to try Hero and the Enigma of it and hanging out with it and I really liked it when I first tried it when I first got into it Funny that though it's like funny how you really liked it Yeah, that's been great.

26:10I've heard it's very Moorish. Yeah, no, it's fabulous. The run-up to that was drinking at 14? I think the run-up to it was cider, speed, and then heroin from there. I never smoked, I never smoked. I was one of the few people that never, ever smoked. I didn't like smoke going into my lungs. I smoked a bit of heroin off the foil, but I was more into injecting, basically. Before you took heroin, did you have strong opinions about not taking it and not getting involved in it? Yeah, I mean, it was always seen as the kind of taboo drug. It was always seen as a quite dirty drug. You didn't really do that.

26:48When I first went into rehab, suddenly I got a sense of what was going on with people that were doing it. And they've either been abused as kids or they've had some bereavement of not getting over or they've had some kind of shock or they've seen something or something's happened to them in some way. So the heroin has become some kind of... It's not really the root cause of what's going on with them. It's something that's maybe taken over as a bigger problem. But for me, it always felt like a transient thing. I think, you know, I'm trying this, I'm into this, I've gotten a little bit too deep, but I'm not going to stay.