Irvine Welsh on Trainspotting 2, drugs, football and more.
Danny Boyle’s 1996 Trainspotting is something of a cult classic for Indian adolescents. It invariably lies there waiting on intranet servers of most colleges and cyber-cafes, a rite of passage for youngsters who’ve just escaped the confines of their conservative households.
In most cases, it invariably leads the viewer to Irvine Welsh’s masterpiece of the same name. In person, Welsh doesn’t disappoint. He’s Jack Kerouac on acid, a man whose persona gives an insight into his unique ability to create British characters whose universal appeal transcend space-time barriers. It didn’t matter whether you were from Etawa or Edinburgh, Sick Boy, Renton, Spud and Begbie’s anarchic rebellion was instantly recognisable.
While success changes most people, it barely seems to have made a dent on Welsh, whose life choices – sartorial, economic or otherwise – are on his own terms. Rocking an Al Pacino Scarface t-shirt on a chilly Jaipur morning, Welsh gave us a peek into his life, football and drugs.
Excerpts from his session on a sunlit session at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival.
My book is a gateway drug!
The man who only had hand-me-down books as a child observed that Trainspotting appealed to people who had never picked up a book in their life. Welsh revealed that not only was it the most popular book in prison, it was also the most shop-lifted in Britain.
He added: “A friend picked up the book after coming out of prison, become a professor and now tells me he only reads proper literature (none of my books). In a way, my book is a gateway drug!”
Technology, he observed was making people redundant, pushing them to the edges. As society moved from feudalism to industrialism, it left destruction in its wake. Drugs, he felt, chased away that existential angst, a mechanism to cope with the pain and suffering.
How are drugs different now?
Drugs he observed was part of a major scam, with particularly the kind that came with prescriptions. The idea he observed, was to keep us ‘living longer and sick’.
On re-reading his books
He said he was forced to re-read his books simply because the movies had become so well-known that characters started looking like the actors in his head and he had to re-read all of them to capture the original creations.
On flushing drugs
He said that while he flew, he had to ensure he didn’t end up with drugs in his pockets.
He stated that he would often flush them down a toilet, which would invariably make him sad.
He said: “I spent half my life trying to score drugs, and now the other half trying to get rid of them.”
Book he keeps going back to
He said: “The book I keep going back to is Ulysses by James Joyce. I didn’t get it the first time I read it, 10 years later it was better. I keep going back to it.”
What if he was a professional footballer?
He said that just for the money he would’ve loved to have been a professional footballer. However, he added that they were landlocked, and the constant stick from opposing fans often made it a hard task.
On Danny Boyle
He added that he and Danny Boyle – the director of Trainspotting – had become great friends. However, he observed that when Boyle wanted to buy the movie, he accidentally ended up selling it to a guy who he thought was Danny Boyle’s representative and was offering more money. This led Boyle to accuse him of betrayal but in the end it worked out. “Boyle got to direct the movie, and I got a lot of money.
How he writes
He said: “I let my subconsciousness do the heavy lifting and just bang out text.”
On Iggy Pop (Trainspotting used Lust for Life as the main theme)
Calling the Godfather of Punk, a close friend, he states that he never lets him into his house (in Miami) fearing that Iggy Pop will see his own huge picture.
On the sequel T2: Trainspotting
He added: “I had to like it because Danny Boyle gave me a part again and I couldn’t say anything”
On the novel and movie comparison
When the movie released, Trainspotting got a lot of hate from critics who felt the film would ruin the book. He said: “We got a lot of people who we thought would be critics but ended up loving the film.”
Explaining how the movie managed to appeal to people, despite the fact that most movies based on books tend to be terrible, he said: “You have to respect the different disciplines, most people forget that. You have to respect cinematic sensibilities.”
Also read:
War on drugs is war on youth, says Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh
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 "Irvine Welsh at ZEE JLF 2019")
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