Irvine Welsh on Cork: ‘People were playing music everywhere, it had a great vibe’

Welsh has never been one for easy categorisation, in literary terms at least. He made the most of the massive success of his first novel Trainspotting, an electric portrayal of the lives of heroin addicts in Edinburgh, which became arguably one of the best ever screen adaptations of a book. He acquired a reputation as someone who liked to live it large, with homes in London, Edinburgh, Miami, and at one point, Dublin, where he lived at the height of the Celtic Tiger. When we talk, he is in Edinburgh, where he did a DJ set the previous night — music is another passion. He now lives mainly in London.

“This is my third spell in London and I am actually really enjoying it, it has been the best one for me. The first time, I was just a party guy, the second one, I was the big famous writer guy, now I’m the relatively sober guy with a lot of friends and I’m going around the city enjoying the benefits of it.” 

Welsh will be appearing at the upcoming West Cork Literary Festival, along with his good friend, the Irish novelist Emer Martin. Welsh is no stranger to Cork, having first visited the city in the 1980s.

“I think 1987 was the first time I went, then the next time was in 1995. It changed so radically in that time. It was like Musselburgh, a town on these two islands, with the river splitting it in two. When I went back it was like New Orleans, the sun was out, people were playing music everywhere, it had a great vibe about it. I’ve been back a couple of times since then and it has maintained that, it’s great.” 

 Welsh’s output is prolific and he doesn’t know the exact number of books he has written; “I can’t be bothered counting them. I count the royalties when they come in,” he says. 

His latest is Resolution, a follow-up to Crime and The Long Knives, both of which have been filmed for TV, starring Dougray Scott as Ray Lennox, a detective and recovering addict. Welsh says it is planned to also adapt Resolution for television, a process he finds enjoyable, if amusing.

“We’ve had to change the stories radically to fit television. In The Long Knives, a guy loses his hand, it gets cut off by the revolutionary guard in Tehran. In the TV show, we had it getting cut off by a lawnmower in a public park in Edinburgh,” he says.

Welsh’s characters have been portrayed by a host of talented actors, from Scott to James McAvoy in the screen adaptation of his novel Filth, and of course Ewan McGregor et al in Trainspotting.

“I have been lucky but I think that if you write memorable characters, actors will really want to play them. They don’t do it for the money so they have got to be interested in the part,” he says.

He tries “to have characters who normally wouldn’t address big weighty issues, forced into a situation where they have to contemplate life, and where they are in the grand scheme of things”.

Where does he see himself in the grand scheme of things as he gets older, I wonder.

“One of the things that I am really quite proud of in a perverse way is that I’ve still not been really co-opted by the literary establishment yet, they find it hard to assimilate my stuff. I must be the only writer in the world who has written what is regarded as an era-defining, generation-defining book and have never had a single literary award or been given an honorary degree.” 

It is indeed hard to fathom why Welsh never received any kind of award or official acknowledgement for Trainspotting — in 1993, two judges reportedly threatened to quit if it was put on the Booker Prize shortlist, due to its vulgarity and use of the Scottish vernacular.

“I think that set the template really. It was a great thing because imagine if I had won it, I would have been another one of ‘those guys’. Now, I have all the bad boy credibility for doing nothing. I can sit there in my carpet slippers with my Horlick’s and I’m like a literary outlaw,” says the author.

He has written books, plays and screenplays but Trainspotting, published 31 years ago, is the gift that keeps on giving for Welsh, attracting new readers with each generation. That vulgarity and vernacular language, seen as radically experimental at the time, have been embraced by readers around the world.

“It is the same for everybody. When I finished that book, I almost shat myself because I looked at the words on the page and couldn’t understand a word of it. Everybody, whether you’re Scottish, Irish, or American, if English is your first language, you’re just not used to seeing words on a page like that. You have to give it a few pages and sort of say it in your head and then you get into the rhythm of it.” 

Trainspotting became a cultural phenomenon, and though very much rooted in Scotland, it was also one of the standard bearers for the cultural boom in Britain in the ’90s.

“Trainspotting got caught up in all of that Britpop phenomenon and the Cool Brittannia nonsense. It was like a celebration of British culture since the war, the Mods, punk rock and all that, fused with the retro of Bowie, The Kinks, The Beatles. Oasis, Blur, Pulp was a reinvention of all that. 

“It was also a kind of requiem mass for British culture, that realisation ‘that this is it’, we are selling it all off globally to the internet, and we will never see its likes again. I think we are still recovering from that big fire sale, we haven’t really had much of a culture since then, it has all been about mass entertainment. Mass entertainment has diminishing returns when there is no vibrant culture to fuel it.” 

Welsh says it is harder now to create such a defining moment in literature or film. “Everything goes on the internet and is very quickly disseminated across the world; nothing has time to percolate in the culture. I think it’s harder for young people to write novels now because their attention spans are wrecked with the internet and smartphones. It is hard to concentrate and knuckle down. It’s harder for me now, I find my concentration isn’t what it used to be, I used to think it was old age but I think it is more to do with spending too much time on a smartphone.” 

• Resolution, published by Jonathan Cape, is published on July 11. Irvine Welsh will be at the West Cork Literary Festival at 6.30pm on Sun, July 14, at the Maritime Hotel, Bantry, alongside Emer Martin. www.westcorkliteraryfestival.ie