30 years of Trainspotting, the great junkie novel

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30 years ago, an unknown Scottish author sprang up from nowhere with a vibrant book about a group of declassed and drug-addicted people out of the schemes of Leith, the degraded social housing complexes built in the 60s next to the port of Edinburgh.

In 1996, the film adaptation directed by Danny Boyle made Trainspotting a global phenomenon, and one of the most recognizable fruits of that British cultural display with Swiss lyrics that took place in the 90s, and of which they were part from the Young British Artists to the bands of Brit pop.

Since then, with his dialectal English and unleashed and iconoclastic imagination, Irvine Welsh (Edinburgh, 1958), first author and then co-writer of Trainspotting, has built a solid career as a writer. Coinciding with the thirtieth anniversary of his late and successful debut, he was last week in Madrid as one of the headliners of the Capítulo Uno festival.

Fresh from another literary meeting in Nîmes, he arrives accompanied by his third wife, the actress Emma Currie, a solitary and attentive spectator of the interview in a space more conducive to an interrogation, an old cutting room of the Matadero de Madrid. Elegant and fit, Welsh wears a soft collared sweater that he wants to play, and that seems to contradict his youthful past in the London punk scene and the hooligan image cultivated for decades. But the dissident mood remains in force in his speech.

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Culture.

Lessons from the 90s for a better life: wasting time, going through everything and not judging

• Writing: PABLO GIL Madrid
• Writing: IMAGE: EVALUÁ DE LOS RÍOS Madrid

Lessons from the 90s for a better life: wasting time, going through everything and not judging

Cinema.

Quentin Tarantino: "Since I saw that film at the age of nine I have not been the same again"

• Writing: QUENTIN TARANTINO

Quentin Tarantino: "Since I saw that film at age nine, I haven't been the same "How would young Irvine Welsh who left high school at 16 have reacted if someone had told him that over the years he would be a star touring literary festivals? I would have thought it was the crazy idea of some pub drunk. But no one at 16 is able to conceptualize any life itinerary or imagine what their life will be like. When you're young, your sense of mortality hasn't been activated yet. You have no real idea of the future. With his first book he became the voice of a time and a generation. How did you feel about the success of Trainspotting? Relief. I felt like I had finally found something to dedicate myself to. I had tried making music, but I wasn't good enough. And in all the food jobs he had had until then he had endured about a year. So it was above all that, a great relief. I've written a few books, some of them have been made into movies, some have been a success and some have not, but that's something that has never worried me. The theme was to be able to do this and enjoy it, and it has been ever since.Did you write Trainspotting in the spirit of social criticism? When I left for London in my twenties, none of my friends had touched heroin. They were guys who just went to the pub, they didn't take drugs at all. I was the guy they laughed at, because I was part of that little left-wing subculture, a working-class bohemian vanguard that used heroin as something elegant. But when I got back to Edinburgh, everyone was involved in it. The economy had collapsed, there was no work, nothing to do, and drugs filled that gap. People were dying of AIDS. Telling that was one of the motivations of the book. I wanted to write about neighborhoods and characters that had not been echoed in contemporary fiction. When it happened, nobody was talking about it in Edinburgh. No one wanted to notice what was happening. They were willing to talk about anything else. It coincided with the grafiosis of the elm, which was destroying the trees of the city, and all the authorities were overturned with that. The youth died in the schemes, but the motto was let's save our trees. I thought it was interesting to point out the narrative that the local power and bourgeoisie had adopted. Irvine Welsh.JAVIER BARBANCHOMUNDO

After that, Welsh has submitted seventeen novels and collections of short stories, several of them starring the characters of Trainspotting. The tone, style and attitude created school, but the writer does not feel responsible for it. "It was one more expression of many things that came up at that time in art and music and that worked together. People questioned Trainspotting as they wondered if a shark in a tank or an unmade bed were art, and in music something similar happened with house, but also with that slightly retro sound of the 90s, what was its novelty? All of this was happening at the same time, and it was a result of the same changes," he says.

Now he's writing his next book, Men in Love, about the same Trainspotting characters in their twenties, "when they first fell in love," and this summer he pulls out another six-handed one with fellow writers John King and Alan Warner. He is working on a series set in Berlin during the fall of the Wall, and is confident that Crime, based on two of his novels, will have a third season. He is preparing an eight-episode podcast with Bret Easton Ellis that should premiere by the end of the year, and is writing the songs for the Trainspotting musical that will premiere in London's West End. And he still has time for Jack Said What, the record label he is a partner with. "I'm pretty busy," he admits.

When did you start writing? The really relevant question would be when I stopped doing it. As children we paint, draw and also write naturally. We try to express ourselves, to represent what we have in our heads until we are taught to stop doing it. I probably stopped writing, and also painting, when I left high school. Let's reformulate, then. When did he write again and thought he could devote himself to it? I started fantasizing about the idea of writing songs. I came up with great ballads that I thought would one day become stories and be published as such, but one day I told myself that this would not happen if I did not do something to make it so. Then I found some old diaries, and when I reread them I discovered that they were neither reliable nor real, and that in fact they had a lot of fiction, but that perhaps I could write from them a novel that would help me understand what I had seen and lived. Trying, basically, to make sense of the reality of my life. I was doing it from a seemingly safe but also very desperate place: I had a nine-to-five job, a nice life, a nice apartment, but I wasn't really happy, because I wasn't doing something I liked. I wanted to write a book, but I didn't know if I would make it or if it would be good. I guess during the process, after writing the first two or three chapters of Trainspotting, I felt like a writer for the first time. That's when I said to myself, this is great, it's actually great, it all makes sense, the characters are alive and I'm really enjoying it. The stories started to fall into place, but I didn't really know how to end it. I didn't stop writing, and that grew and grew. At one point, after a couple of years, I decided to take a good cut in the middle and wrote an ambitious ending that I copied from some shitty movie or a cheap novel. And I sent it.What did you like to read? At school, when I was supposed to, I didn't read anything. He rejected everything that had to do with the school: the place, the building, the order, the very atmosphere of the classroom. When I left high school I realized that I could actually take responsibility for my own learning and became an obsessive reader. I think it all started thanks to my uncle Jack. He was a firefighter and was studying for a degree at the Open University. He left me some books. I started reading things randomly, I came to Graham Greene, then I started with the Brontes and George Eliot and all those English classics, until I discovered a series of Scottish writers that I had in my nose and who came from the same social environment. People like William Mcilvanney, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman or Janice Galloway. The influence of David Bowie was also very important. He assumed all the musical styles he liked, and through him I became passionate about soul, electronic music or punk. I started reading the beats, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Richard Brautigan, and other American authors. There was always a new underground writer from New York who was worthwhile. He devoured contemporary fiction published by labels such as Serpent's Tail. And from there to the Russians, Stendhal and everything else. Gabriel García Márquez opened me to Latin American literature. I remember when I read Salman Rushdie's Children of Midnight... They were books that opened you up to new worlds. I was obsessed with everything. There are many authors and artists of his generation who complain about the corrCurrent political ection. I don't know if that's the case. Would Trainspotting be publishable today? I think the big problem today is that culture is no longer on the street. Today's is a media culture, hierarchical, which is transmitted without discussion or debate or dialogue. People shout at each other about any issue on Twitter but the result is that everything is polarized into two camps. Culture has always been questioned, but now there really isn't an opportunity to do so. It's like a party ideology that is above individuals. And I think this kind of environment ultimately favors a regime of self-censorship. This is the most serious thing, and not so much that there are a series of cancerberos who tell you what is right and what is not. And I know this to a large extent because I work for television, film and for one of the largest publishing groups in the world, such as Random House. I know that these companies look after the interests of their shareholders first and foremost, and therefore try to avoid any controversy. Their ideal is for people to be passive consumers.

Before the lockdown, Welsh returned to Scotland after several years living in the United States. He maintains a house in Miami, a place that interests him a lot. "It offers a huge contrast to where I come from. By Celtic tradition, Scottish culture is very verbal, everything is discussed, but nobody listens to anyone, they only know how to rant. The people of Miami don't talk to each other that way. Their narcissism is not verbal, it's visual, people skating in swimsuits and all that. The art scene is huge, but the literary scene is not. I like it better than the rest of North America. At times it seems that you were in Rio or Bogotá and not in the United States. It's like the capital of the Americas," he explains.

Last September, after the death of Elizabeth II at Balmoral, a young Scot broke the mourning and general adherence to the monarchy by protesting loudly as the royal coffin passed through the streets of his city, Edinburgh. What does the crown mean to you? It is very strange that we continue to endorse all these symbols of elitism, authority and hierarchy that come from imperialism. We have a monarchy, an aristocracy, a House of Lords. What is all that for? They are institutions of the past that have absolutely no relevance to the lives of the majority. It has been decided that they will continue to symbolise national continuity or a certain British greatness, when in fact they have nothing to do with the people they represent. I wasn't interested at all. In the end it is the other elite, the old nationalist, swindling and overwhelming elite of always, with their accounts in tax havens, wanting to turn Britain into a kind of Hong Kong and distribute the pasta among their compadres [uses the word in Spanish]. Basically, a successful lashing operation that could draw on the card of nationalism was thanks to global neoliberal institutions. It didn't seem real to me. In a context in which ordinary people have been deprived of their rights, with European social democratic parties absent, in which trade unions have vanished in most countries, all instruments to challenge the power of capital have disappeared. Capital dominates everything. Big corporations and political parties are extensions of the same system that has co-opted everything.And how do you see things in Scotland after the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon? She and the Scottish Nationalist Party have opted to embarrass Westminster by hoping to get a new referendum, but the only reason it was granted in 2014 was because in London they believed nothing would happen. In the end the result was very close, and that debate has been perpetuated in Scottish politics. Maintaining this division of blocs is very useful for the political elite. But it is not to test the scenario, because when people get excited, talk seriously about the issue and it starts to make sense to them, as happened in the first referendum, they end up wanting a change of that kind. So a referendum would now be very risky for the British establishment. And not because Scotland matters particularly to them, but because an independent Scotland, with no monarchy, no House of Lords, no City, would make the rest of the country start to wonder, do we really need all this?

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