Irvine Welsh: We’re More Addicted Now Than in Trainspotting

0:01Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Uh, sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice? I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyer's rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. this is a global player original podcast

0:42hello and welcome to full disclosure a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than i would ever get on the radio irving welsh welcome thank you james it's lovely to have you here um could start anywhere that's actually let's start at the end let's start with a new book men in love which is the sixth i'll take you i mean i'll take your well i'm doing it from memory so i think characters featuring the characters that you introduced us to in train spotting but there's one book set before trains was skag boys is set before train spot right yeah porno t2 this is how not to build a brand you know they tell me if you want to do that you want to be successful you write them sequentially but uh i've completely messed up there and uh i kind of have to have a reason to you know i'm writing these characters all the time so they're like a little guide these characters and the characters in another book glue they're like a little life guide for me and uh but to publish to actually be bothered getting them together in a book form i have to have a theme that hits me you know and uh i just think that everything is so negative in the world just now that the theme was basically love.

1:56And I'm thinking like, when do people get serious about love? And it's usually in their mid-20s. They've kind of been socialized by their parents and their family and their school and their neighborhood. Then they get into the influence of their peers. And around about their mid-20s, that's when people start to get serious about relationships and romance and to make all these big decisions about are we going to be together? Are we going to live together? Are we going to buy a house? Are we going to rent a house? Are we going to have kids? Are we not going to have kids? Who's going to have a career?

2:32Are we both going to have a career? How are we going to manage that? If we have kids, we'll have to move again so we can be in a better school for them. So everybody's got to make all these decisions in quite a narrow time frame. When you're at your least able to do it. you know so I thought who would be the least able characters to execute this uh in this time frame and I thought well the train spotting guys have got all those stories about them in their 20s so start pulling them together and um I didn't know that so you you're constantly for your own amusement you're constantly the you're unspooling their their lives their narrative arts and only now and then do you feel the urge to pull them they'll jump in you know they'll jump into my consciousness and I'll just go with it and write something.

3:18Sometimes it's just notes, other times it's a fairly detailed story, quite a dense, publishable story in itself, which kind of then becomes a chapter in the book. Yeah, I couldn't stop with that one, but once I got going, I thought how can I, you know, it's one of these books that you think to yourself, you start writing and you think, how did I finish this? So, I just You just wrote the end, obviously. No spoilers, you did get to the end. And chronologically, it was quite fortuitous, really, because age-wise, it coincides with the arrival of ecstasy, which has a complicated but very clear relationship with love.

3:59It was fabulous. It was a fabulous time because, I mean, I remember particularly growing up in Scotland, it was like a sort of a kind of sexual apartheid almost like you know you went to the the guys would drink in the bars in Leith and the girls would drink in the lounge and then you went on to a club and the guys would sit and drink in the club and the girls would dance together around the handbags and then you suddenly just hit the floor for the last dance and try and get off with someone and that was basically the whole courtship kind of ritual and ecstasy came along and then suddenly you're all sitting together talking together and you're thinking like this woman who I've kind of known for years who's my friend's wife or my friend's girlfriend she's far more interesting than my mates basically so you're talking for the first time and you're kind of realizing that my god you know there's there's so much more to to to life and to people and relationships and you kind of dig deep into these things um on ecstasy and chill out zones you've been kind of having these big bonding kind of rave dancey sessions together and then suddenly um you're sitting in the chill out zone you're sitting in a party kind of coming down from it you're chatting and you're spilling your guts out and all these guys who were never in touch with the feelings suddenly just won't shut up about everything like you know so um yeah it's it was such a an interesting time um i just got back from ibiza uh i was there on saturday were you dj i was dj until four in the morning which was terrible for me i'm i'm usually in bed by 11 o 'clock these days like you know so a shift like that it's a tough one for me but it was all my a lot of my old cronies from um some of us have got this record label the dance music label and we've got one of our pals dave beer from back to basics which is the oldest house music club he's brought an album out which is fabulous so it was a kind of like an old ravers reunion and it was great but I'm just thinking like I managed to do it without any alcohol or any drugs this is a great thing but also a terrible thing I don't know whether I felt proud of myself or embarrassed probably a bit of both Let's back right up then let's go back to Leith in 1958 there wasn't a lot as far as I can tell and you'll correct me if I'm wrong there wasn't a lot in your childhood that points towards where your life would later go in terms of who you are now, in terms of the literature and the...

6:50I don't know. I mean, when the shore in Leith now is all kind of posh Michelin-star restaurants, but it used to be a kind of, you know, a sort of sailor's kind of bars and kind of prostitutes under street lamps. And I remember going down there as a kid, we went pre-school with my mum and my auntie Joyce and my cousin Raymond and there was a woman standing literally under a lamppost in the street corner waiting for the boats to come off and I remember running across the road and hugging her kind of grabbing her around the legs and saying my mum was really embarrassed trying to pull me away and was saying mum I'm going to marry that lady and the prostitute was embarrassed as well and And you can see when we got home, my mum said to my dad, I think we're going to have problems with this one.

7:47So what was that? I don't know. I think it's like I was just fascinated by, I think when you come from a port area, you're always fascinated by travel. And I think one of the guys in the book there, the old merchant seaman who's a sage, says to the guys that if you're born in a port, this is not your home this is a gateway to your home and your home is a world basically So you were conscious of the world outside? Yeah, I was conscious of all these a boat would come in and you'd hear all these people with strange accents a boat from Holland, kind of Dutch seaman and it was just there was something very vibrant about it there and it drew you from Leith up to Edinburgh during the festival where everybody came in from all sorts of places.

8:43And then it kind of drew me down to London just for that... Not that kind of sort of middle-class kind of cosmopolitanism, aren't these restaurants nice? You know what I mean? But just interested in lots of different people from lots of different places with lots of different stories to tell. So it was the stories you were chasing? I think so. But, yeah, I mean, and also trying to get some kind of experience of life and trying to find out places where I might get that from. So to get your own stories as well, to do things. Yeah, to do things. Stories that happen to you, right? Yeah, I mean, again, we're fortunate and we're a living culture.

9:32now everything's online and we don't really kind of have a we don't really have a culture anymore we have um we're moving into a post-cultural era where everything is just you know we're there to take instruction now basically that's the way the world is going uh the way the technology is driving the world all that we have that they want is our attention yeah all of our attention and experiences that are being kind of farmed basically

10:01What were you like at school, Irvin? Terrible. Were you really? Really, I mean bright but easily distracted and full of mischief and the sort of kids who kind of wound up a lot of the other kids to, you know I always felt that I was a bit of a class warrior in two different ways because I always thought that we're here, we live in this scheme, the teachers aren't from here. And they were just kind of, you know, working people trying to do their best, basically. But to us, they were these kind of snobby outsider enemies. They were, gee brody. Yeah, and it was a sort of, you know, we did give them a terrible time.

10:50You'd moved to Mule House by then? We moved to Pilton first to the prefabs and then down to Muir House to the estuary and what they called the slum clearance then. They knocked down a lot of the old tenements on one side of the Burlington Street, Burlington Road, Jane Street, all these places, Tennant Street, and we all moved en masse down the estuary basically. So I suppose what I meant was academically then and there wasn't much indication of where you might go. But in terms of the sort of timeless business of storytelling, you were steeped in it from a very early age. Yeah, I mean, I loved it when there was parties in the house, and I would be put to bed, and then I would sneak down, and whenever we got drunk, and just listen to them kind of telling all their tales.

11:44It was almost like a kind of storytelling, was like a sequential thing that people did. They would spin the bottle and everybody would have a chance to sing. They would do it with storytelling as well. Somebody would tell a tale. And this really fascinated me. And when did you start telling stories? I don't think it ever stopped. I mean, well, I think that's what happens to us in life, isn't it? We're natural storytellers. All we do is we write, we draw, we listen, we run around and kick a ball about. and then basically the division of labour creeps into the picture and we're kind of assigned to these roles and all that's knocked out of us.

12:25So I never really stopped doing these things. But when would you, I mean, what would you do? Tell stories to your mum or tell stories to your friends at school? Stories to my mother and my dad. And would you be writing stuff down as well from an early age? Not really writing stuff down so much. Maybe more drawing, more kind of illustrating things. And I kind of got into writing properly from an English teacher who took an interest in me because she read one of my compositions. And I think before that, though, my mother had said that the school had phoned her to come up at primary school. And she said, not again, basically.

13:08but she says no it's a good thing he's written this essay which is really really good very advanced and all that I kind of thought well it was just a story and it was like a one off basically but it was a glimmer of hope for my parents that something would kind of turn out okay So they spotted something the school spotted something a little bit out of the ordinary what did your parents want for you? do you know? Well the thing was then that it was all about getting a trade if you were working class get a trade I didn't leave school with any qualifications but through contacts I managed to get a job the job I was completely unsuited for which was a kind of TV technician, you were kind of repairing televisions and radios and I was just so inept at that kind of job, that kind of work.

14:07I just, you know, it's the most... I can't believe that they put someone in that position that was so ill-equipped for that kind of work. But they did, and... So this would be 16, 15, 16. Yeah, and I packed it in to go to London to stay at my aunt's. And my mum and dad were pretty horrified at that because, you know, you don't pack in an apprenticeship. particularly something like electronics, TV mechanics as soon as the thing of the future that was the big cliche and within about a decade that trade was gone you moved from valve sets to transistor sets to circuit boards to just replacing the TV because you can make these things at zero cost now so yeah so that was that was a good thing that I did that because the trade was kind of redundant.

15:06I like most trades. Did you dream as a boy of the future? Did you have like mad dreams of what you wanted to be? Yeah, I mean, like a lot of kids, when you grow up, the Apollo thing is a huge cultural thing. Everybody wants to be a spaceman, basically. Every kid of a certain generation, if you ask them, you say, I want to go to space. And I fancied that, you know, and I didn't quite make it. You know, I decided dinner space was a better bet. What about slightly less stellar dreams? I mean, if I'd met you when you were, say, 12 and said, what do you want to be when you grow up? What might you have said?

15:50Or 13, 14? Post-astronaut? I wouldn't have... Post-astronaut? I don't think I was post-astronaut until 14. I think I was still way in that game, like deep embedded in that game. But there weren't things like, I don't know, I mean, writing, for example, wouldn't have struck you as something you could make a living from. No, no, because I remember when I was an apprentice, I met Mrs. Tate, my teacher in the street. The one who'd spotted your talent. And she had said to me, like, are you still writing? And I thought this was a silly thing to say. I thought it was a very strange thing to say. but it was quite a shaming thing to say as well.

16:30And I thought, well, why don't I do this? And I kind of realised that because I was obsessed with music and I was writing songs for bands, for these bedroom bands that I was in, I actually was, in a way, I was still writing ballads, basically. I was writing these long sort of, you know, I'd have my mates and I would be trying to write this song together and he would go, how many more verses have you got? And I'd go, just one more we've got to have this one in and he'd be like, no, you can't do that chorus, verse, chorus, verse chorus, verse, that's it finish, you know who ever heard of a punk song that was 25 minutes long?

17:14It's the undiscovered genre isn't it? It's the genre we never had. Well, you know it's funny that the great, you know the big influences on me were people that wrote stories and um i mean bowie did occasionally but you know through bowie i got into lou reed diggy pop and they wrote kind of long stories basically there was always a there was always a tale there um bob dylan wrote kind of you know all these kind of um oblique kind of stories and you know there was it was uh so that was what really turned me on you know nick cave shane mcgowan you know that that sort of um kind of songwriting so your creativity was never about any more than your creativity it was it wasn't a means to an end it was an end in itself whether you were still is it still is clearly because we began by talking about the stuff that you write without any real clear idea of publishing i mean i've got you know I'm pretty clueless as to how these...

18:15I don't really have a... I can't... I've just about now worked out that there's certain things that you have to do in a novel and certain things you have to do in a screenplay and certain things you have to do in a TV play, a stage play. But it's been a process of trial and error down the years. I didn't have any kind of training or any idea how I should do this or any idea about how I would manage a career. I don't really see myself as having a career. I see myself as having a hobby that I've been able to make pay. And doing it at every turn, the thing that you most fancy doing for you rather than thinking, well, this would be a good career move or an agent says, have you thought about doing this?

18:58And you're just getting on with getting on. Yeah, that's usually no. Was music a joke? I mean, you played in punk bands as well. Yeah, I mean, it's terrible. I mean, again, it's like the thing is, we've done an album to go with this, actually, a kind of soul and disco album. And it's interesting that like writing, I think music's been opened up to me again through digital because I don't really have any... It's something about my brain that's not wired to my fingers properly. so I don't have any great fretboarding or keyboarding skills, I've struggled for ages to play guitar and it's just one of these things that I can't seem to grasp no matter how, I mean I must have done you know they say do 10 ,000 hours I must have done 30 ,000 with no discernible sort of increase in quality so you know it's just the interesting thing about you know with keyboards and synthesizers and samplers and you can build something slowly it reminds me of when I got my first Alan Sugar Amstrad which I wrote Trainspotting on that was a kind of breakthrough for me you know I was going to say thank you Alan Sugar but I can't quite bring myself to do that I talk on this podcast a bit about ambition It strikes me you've never had any.

20:35In the conventional sense. Yeah, I think my ambition's always been to express myself creatively and to travel, basically. These are, you know, and kind of romantic ambitions as well, you know. And I've kind of pursued these things. That's been, to me, has been the stuff of life. I think mostly I've wanted to be a kind of free citizen, you know, because I didn't want to be in a relationship whereby I would have to work for someone for money. And I wouldn't be, you know, every time I've tried jobs, I can do them and I'm good at them for about a year. and then I think to myself, I can't go into this place at 9 o 'clock every morning and come away at 5 o 'clock every morning every single day.

21:28Nobody can feel like doing that every day, you know. So I think, nah, I can't. It's the same thing as school. I can't be here. I just can't be in this one place. I've got to, I want to go for a walk, you know, and I want to just, there's a movie on, I want to go to this afternoon thing in the cinema, you know. I want to chat up this girl who works in the bakery that I met I want to do all these kind of nice things in life I don't want to sit at an office or sit in a factory knocking kind of house panels together and stuff like that I can't really do that for very long basically I mean thinking of the kinks when you say that it's got a sort of Ray Davis feel to it oh that's brilliant hasn't it though that idea that I don't want to get stuck in this rut because you start off in it and suddenly 40 years have gone by.

22:18Yeah, it goes by really, really quickly. And, you know, I think that... I remember I really annoyed the Telegraph. You know, this is not when I worked for them. I annoyed them enough when I worked for them, but I annoyed them more when they... I said they did some feature, and somebody said, do you regard yourself as middle class now? You know, I said, no, no, I regard myself. you're thinking it would be all kind of defending, no, I'm working class. He said, no, I regard myself as upper class because middle class people have mortgages and debts and all these kind of things. I don't have any of these things.

22:58I just write and travel, and that's what toffs do, basically. Write and travel. It's quite a 19th century existence. Yes, I'm a 19th century aristocrat, basically.

23:18the tv business i think there was a some sort of electric accident wasn't there that crystallized your conviction that this wasn't the job for you you go straight to london after that is that so to stay with you or do you stay in london yeah it's actually i mean it's um i stay in south or middlesex which is kind of maybe not the most fashionable part of london And people think, well, you know, it's like I kind of tend to exaggerate my tenure in Shepherd's Bush and kind of in squats and all that. And kind of play down. Print the legend. Play down when I was staying at Manti Jesse's in Southall in Somerset Road and getting kind of looked after with big roasts every Sunday and kind of sort of fried breakfasts most days and all that kind of stuff.

24:06and you know so yeah so that was but that was great because you know it was a lot that 207 bus down the Oxford Road until you got to Ealing Broadway then you jumped in the tube to Soho and usually the Vortex for the punk gigs on Monday and Tuesday which was a hardcore kind of punk sing then and it was only a few hundred maybe about two or three hundred people when this all started off and then it just gained this kind of potency and this sort of mass basically and Acetous was even more so because you get people who are going to these little clubs and dropping E's and all that and then suddenly everybody was doing it all my mates back in Leith who used to say I'll never get into that that's just nonsense they became the most hardcore ravers of the lot within six months you know so I love it when these things used to happen when before everything was put online we could just word of mouth people would just get involved in stuff and do crazy stuff and put on parties and put on raves and yeah these were I was just so lucky to have been very young at punk and still just about the fag end of youth kind of in Acid House and that's too great these things really define you if you've been formed by these things in terms of your culture it gives you so much I think when Acid House met football that was the moment you're describing as the lads who thought they'd never be into it suddenly were that was crazy that marriage of cultures yeah it was It was a whole new generation that had come through on the terraces, that old casual thing that had come through just as all the old 70s kind of mob were kind of dying out.

26:10And that was their scene, basically. So many of the guys who were the main guys in the football scene became the main guys in the Assetah scene. So suddenly you're 19. and I don't know in the telling how in fact I'm already alert to what you've just said about the reality of Shepherds Bush versus Southall so I want to check what's the legend and what's the actuality but but you're 19 and you're involved in a hideous um road traffic accident you lose a friend in it Mark that that in some of the stories that I've read in some of the accounts that I've read that that is the beginning of of of a spiral that that led you to heroin I don't know if that I think really, no, I mean, I think there's quite a lot of things.

26:57I mean, when I was 16, I was out, we were underage drinking, there was four of us out, and two of us went to the chip shop. Myself and my mate Johnny Toll went to the chip shop, and two other pals, Rami Stevens, Paul Sevier, they got into a van to go back to the scheme, and they had nicked us van, basically, and they were driving around, and we were just, basically greed saved us because we were sitting, we couldn't leave the queue, we were getting closer to the chip shop, and it was the queue, and it was Albadoro, which was Great Chips and Hannibal Street. And me and Paul took off, and they died in a crash on the fourth road bridge.

27:38I remember going into work as an apprentice, and it was like, it was that kind of thing, there was no kind of counselling then or acknowledgement, you know and we were just we were just kind of like kind of little car thieving bastards and all that like serves you right and all that kind of thing with the older guys and it was you know so I think when you learn at that age about the finiteness of life and there's other things on the way as well I mean I think that the thing about the car crash is that a really good mate of mine who was working with insurance got me compensation for it. And that was instead of just like kind of pissing it up against the wall, I decided that I would buy somewhere, I would get a mortgage.

28:36But what I did was I put it into an account, but I couldn't get at it and just left it and let myself just disappear into the ether for a bit. for how long? for a couple of years until I could think of what to do with it I went to America when I was 20 I met this girl who was a photographer and she invited me out to the States and I went to Orange County I went to New York first and then down to Texas and I'd barely been abroad so that was a bit of a culture shock and then I went out to LA and Orange County but that set me off on this path I knew that I just wanted to travel, you know. And then I was, you know, I'd always been, I'd been into Northern Seoul and gone down to, didn't go to Wigan, but I went to Blackpool Mecca fairly regularly.

29:33And I was just into going to places where it was gigs. So, and there's a Venn diagram there, isn't there? There's a sort of clash of influences. you talked about a nihilistic phase is that an exaggeration then? was it more the case that you were just getting stuck right into everything? stuck in everything because if you've got this money in the bank there's a part of you, even when you were struggling with things there's a part of you that's got the concept of a finish line or a light at the end of the tunnel maybe definitely I've always thought that I never wanted to get trapped I wanted to experience everything but I didn't want to get stuck in anything I wanted to kind of experience it and then move on and I think that I think the most nihilistic I got was the time when I really got into heroin because my dad had died and that was quite hard on me basically you were very close to him very close to him yeah great guy and again at that point you have that thing that you think you're immortal at that age you don't have any concept of your mortality and to see that kind of curtain come down was like you think everything's fucked now I can't really I can't get past this or get over it or go through it and it was like the fun drug taking and I mean I'd been occasionally using heroin but it became hardcore that one summer that I was just trying to basically pain manage with it, you know, blot out that kind of psychic pain, and then it comes flooding back times ten when you're looking for a fix.

31:24And so, yeah, that was a difficult time. But even then, as much as it is kind of as bad as it was, there was interesting things in it. There was a lot of excitement and learning in it. You were taken away from your groups, your peer groups, and stuck in this place where there's all these characters that have had very different lives and very different backgrounds from yourself. Some who were very, very damaged and who, you know, heroin was basically just a symptom rather than the underlying kind of cause of their pain, basically. And I think, well, and it kind of taught me then that I wasn't in that position.

32:16Me and a few others were just like, it was a short-term thing like bereavement, relationship breakdown, and all these things that you kind of, they're horrible, but you get past them. There wasn't any deep-seated post-traumatic stress disorder stuff going on. so I think that was that was a kind of a good learning experience for me and ultimately I don't really belong here where do you belong? because I'm struck that you've talked about a few cultural movements a few geographical locations you've clearly got and class mobility as well to the telegraph's great chagrin you're clearly fluid so where do you belong?

33:03I don't know I mean I think that we get we get too obsessed about belonging and identity I don't think it ultimately does us any good you know but you get on with people so you don't you never felt that you didn't have a tribe partly because your family was so big and then you had groups of friends and then yeah I think that you know that you have always found a tribe whether it's been like kind of football or music and it usually is when you're walking classes usually you're your football mates or it's usually your um the the people you go to gigs with or the people you go to raves with or um you know and it's i mean it's like kind of um it was interesting that one of my main tribes is is that kind of acid gang and we're all still together basically you know we're all still jumping around in ibiza at the weekend um and uh it's a it's kind of like a a bunch of segments of different people it's like you know there's my my edinburgh mates my london mates my mates in america and um you know west coast in chicago and miami and you know just everywhere you've been you you find your people basically so getting off heroin wasn't like a an epic exercise it wasn't it's it's definitely you know it's it's horrible for um it's horrible for physically it's horrible for about a month maybe three weeks to a month um and then psychologically i think that's um i think that's when you can tell when somebody has really bad post-traumatic stress disorder if somebody's harboring something because you if if you've not got that you think to yourself well I feel a bit down I feel a bit depressed but you start making plans basically but for people that haven't, you know that are trapped in the cycle of the cycle of kind of stress and have maybe had some kind of abuse going on in their life previously, they're stuck in this place again, you know it's almost like that, how do I get past this?

35:07And I think Spud in the book is a character a bit like that how do I, you know he can clean up easily enough but You can't get past the psychological barrier and the psychological dependency on the drugs. And in order to write a character like Spud, and indeed the characters that can almost take it or leave it, it's not about how addictive the substance is. It's about how addictive the personality is. And you need to take drugs very seriously to write that well about them. Let me rephrase that. I don't mean you have to take drugs very seriously. It helps a little bit sometimes. Yeah, but you have to recognize the seriousness of the process.

35:46You have to recognize what's happening with addiction, what happens with addiction in society in general, and how things, I think, are much more desperate now. And street drugs are just the tip of the iceberg, really, and the whole sort of monster of addiction. If you look at the kids that are the equivalent to these guys in the 90s now, in the late 80s, early 90s now, everything for them in schemes these days is set up for addiction. You've got online pornography. You've got young guys who can't get an erection without Viagra, masturbate into pornography. They can't form a relationship with the real person in front of them.

36:40you've got online gambling online gaming that people can quietly lose everything they've got and you know in seconds um you've got the kind of online delivery you've got you know got salt and sugar basically and and additives just kind of fats and all that just thrust into your body literally spoon-fed by a delivery driver it's like you know um you've got gaming you've got you've got the drip of the dopamine hit as you're playing these games, these kind of sort of crazy kind of mad games that get more kind of violent and twisted and out there all the time. And, you know, so everything is set up for addiction, but it's set up for people to be addicted quietly at home.

37:24God, the more you describe that, the more... And that's before you stop kind of, you know, the big pharma and the colonisation of the NHS and using doctors as basically their local pharmacist to punting their drugs for them. So if it wasn't clear already, the rationale behind going back to the late 80s for the new book Men in Love is partly as an antidote to where we are now. Yeah, and we did the album, which is a disco soul album, because I wanted to write an optimistic book that flies in face of these times. You couldn't set it now. Yeah. Could you set an optimistic book now? It's very difficult to do that.