We meet in Dublin, where Welsh has been principally based for the past four
years. (He also has homes in Edinburgh, Chicago and Miami.) He has picked
the venue, the café of the Irish Film Institute, which is thronging with
groovy young folk. He is wearing a suit – as instructed for the photographs
– but it is not one of those sharply tailored black designer numbers. If
anything, he looks more like a middle-aged bank manager than someone on the
cutting edge of counter-culture, where part of him still firmly wishes to
reside. The first impression is of someone solemn, reserved and modest, with
gentle manners but lacking a certain joie de vivre. The latter, it turns
out, can be partly put down to jet lag (he has recently flown in from a
wedding party in New York) and a prolonged hangover.
The cocaine binge in the new novel one can safely assume is written with the
knowledge of experience. Indeed, there is a fight involving an overturned
television and a smashed table which had a familiar ring. In previous
newspaper stories, there are a number of references to Welsh getting
belligerent in a pub and a friend’s flat – both involving karaoke – and him
completely trashing both places.
“Yeah, nothing’s wasted,” he grins when I point out the similarities. Why, I
wonder, does karaoke bring this out in him? “I think it’s this desperate
need for attention but at the same time hating it in myself and trying to
resist it. I’ve never liked people who are brash and I’ve always
been fighting that in myself.”
This tension between repression and, shall we say, excessive ebullience is
particularly pronounced in the Scots, Welsh thinks, and the older he has
become, the more his dour tendencies have come to the fore. He calls it his
Dewar (as in the late First Minister for Scotland) streak: “Donald Dewar on
acid, that’s me.”
The other streak still runs strong in him. Even relatively recently, there was
a drink and drugs binge which almost did your head in just reading about it.
As part of one New Year’s Eve revelries, he consumed intoxicating substances
that were so extreme in their variety and quantity that it seems almost
miraculous that he survived such a gruelling recreational marathon. The list
included: malt whisky, champagne, magic mushrooms, base speed and crack
cocaine. When I ask him about this, he says: “The kind of quality control
rationale thing goes right out of your head. You get into such a state that
you’ll put anything in: ‘Just give me some of that, and I’ll take it.’”
He appears to have had a passing flirtation with crack cocaine and talks about
visiting a crack house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “Yeah, it was
quite interesting,” he says, ever the observational participant. “I was
there with a bunch of guys from Stoke-on-Trent – I’d just met them – and
there was an altercation and shots were fired and it was the first time that
I’d been so close to gunfire.” Did it frighten him? “It didn’t at the time
because I was pretty wasted but it did afterwards.”
There has always been a dance between hard work and hedonism for Welsh. In his
early twenties, he was a junkie himself, but only for 18 months before he
managed to go cold turkey. Inevitably, perhaps, some of the die-hard drug
addicts he knew accused him of being a heroin novice and of exploiting their
experience for his own betterment. Most of the junkies he knew then are now
dead, but he is still friendly with a couple of survivors who lead
reasonably normal lives.
The bare bones of Welsh’s biography are well known: born in a tenement home in
Leith, moved to the new-build estates in Muirhouse, where drug-taking later
became rife. Left school at 16, completed a City & Guilds course in
electrical engineering, fixed televisions and may or may not have blown one
up accidentally. Arrived in London in the late Seventies, lived in a squat
and became part of the junk and punk scene, playing in the bands the Pubic
Lice and Stairway 13. Worked for Hackney Council and studied computing,
became a minor property developer in the Eighties, buying studio flats in
North London, doing them up and selling them for a profit, then (to quote
his website) “cleaning up his act” and “finding a nice lassie and settling
doon”. This, I take it, is Anne (Antsy), to whom Trainspotting
was dedicated and who was his first wife for around 20 years; these details
are flimsy because he has chosen not to make them public.
The couple returned to Edinburgh, where he worked for the city council’s
housing department and studied at Heriot Watt Uni-versity, writing his
thesis on equal opportunities for women. (He still talks about the
“patriarchal society” and feminists’ “self-empowerment”.) Encouraged by the
rave scene and loosened up by Ecstasy, he worked on a draft of the novel
that became Trainspotting and sold a million copies in the UK alone,
and was translated into 30 languages including Hebrew and Arabic. In August
1995, he gave up his day job to concentrate on writing full time. Ten years
later, he married for the second time to a young American woman, Elizabeth
Quinn, who at 26 is almost half his age.
The point about this curriculum vitae is that even in Welsh’s wildest years,
the extreme behaviour was balanced by pragmatism: the work-orientated
training schemes, nine-to-five jobs with local authorities where colleagues
consistently described him as solid and reliable, the serious-minded thesis.
There is also something almost Zelig-like about him being at the centre –
or, perhaps, more edgily, just off the centre – of the Zeitgeist,
in punk bands at the height of punk, seguing into a property developer
during the “greed is good” Eighties, and a fully paid-up member of the
Ecstasy-fuelled clubbing scene in the Nineties. Perhaps this constant
reinvention explains his hang-up about ageing; the anxiety that the onset of
middle age might ban him from being embraced by whatever scene is happening.
He says that he never believed he would still be alive at 50 – which he will
be this September. Some time ago, there was a story doing the rounds that he
had been born a number of years earlier than 1958 and Welsh was so rattled
by it that he resorted to taking his passport along to interviews to prove
to journalists that he had not been massaging the truth. Wasn’t this a bit
uncool?
“I don’t know why but I’ve always been sensitive and touchy about it,” he
says. “The dramatic thing for me was being 30 – when I was still
doing loads of Ecstasy and cocaine and drinking – so everything since
then has been a kind of bonus. I’ve always believed that it’s very much a
young society, and that line that you can’t trust anybody over 30, you know,
the older I get the more I believe it.”
