IT was three decades ago that Irvine Welsh’s brutal story of heroin addicts living in chaos in Edinburgh both shocked and thrilled cinema audiences.
Adapted from his 1993 novel, the 1996 Danny Boyle-directed masterpiece was a huge hit, taking £57million worldwide.
It launched the careers of actors Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle, and is ranked by the British Film Institute as the tenth greatest UK film of the 20th century.
And now, it’s back.
Welsh is bringing his bleak yet mesmerising tales of poverty, drug abuse and hijinks to the stage with Trainspotting The Musical, featuring a cast of little-known actors reprising his famous characters.
The show will open in London’s West End on July 15 at the Haymarket Theatre, inviting audiences to relive the Nineties through the antics of Begbie, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and all their troubled pals.
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In a wide-ranging interview, Irvine insists Trainspotting is more pertinent and relevant today, as millions suffer with addictions not only to street drugs but also technology and prescribed medication.
And he has little time for social media, which he reckons has now become a haven for losers and the stupid.
In fact, he feels the internet has killed creativity and our nation’s zeitgeist, adding that the Nineties era became a requiem mass for British culture.
I’m speaking with the tough-talking author at a London rehearsal studio and he looks tanned and fit, after spending several months boxing training and writing in the US.
And, as you might expect, the plain-speaking Scot doesn’t pull any punches:
“[This Musical] feels to me like a contemporary piece. When I was writing Trainspotting I was writing about people trying to find meaning in a world where they were running out of paid work and that affected the industrial working class, where all these guys came from.
“Now it affects everybody. You’ve got the people that rule the world, they’re actually boasting how many jobs AI is going to destroy.
“So it’s not just working class people now, it’s middle class people, professional people, even people who were quite rich in some ways being rendered economically and spiritually redundant by this modern paradigm, actually rendering the people that seem to be winners, it’s rendering them soulless as well.
“They’re isolated and they can’t connect with the rest of humanity. They’re the horrors of the system we are in. The middle classes have been levelled and there’s nothing for working class people to aspire to.”
Both the Trainspotting book and film were revolutionary moments in British popular culture, breaking new ground and tackling troubling issues such as drug addiction, poverty and sexuality.
The movie’s belting soundtrack featured Underworld’s Born Slippy and Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life.
Irvine thinks, three decades on, our addictions have only worsened.
He says: “It’s just so much more pertinent now, unfortunately. Addiction is bigger than ever — it goes beyond street drugs.
“People that are addicted to online gambling. The food we eat is processed, a load of sugar and salt and all the additives.
“All the pharmaceutical drugs we take for the depression and anxiety that results from the way we live.
“We’re given all these pharmaceutical drugs to take and then we’re given drugs for the side-effects of those drugs. So street drugs are a very very small part of this whole thing.”
And then there is the relatively new addiction — the one the world has become unwittingly hooked on since Trainspotting
Irvine explains: “We’re all walking around with these mobile phones stuck to our faces, literally kind of sucking dopamine into our systems, a slave to their algorithms, so it is a cry for freedom.
“It’s a cry for the collective experience. It’s a cry for the joy before.
“Everybody’s addicted to their phones — you go on the Tube and you used to see people reading books and now you see them sitting there just doom-scrolling on their phone, going from dopamine hit to dopamine hit.
“And you’ve got all these kind of charlatans pumping them up and saying ‘Here’s my GoFundMe page.’ You’ve got young kids addicted to pornography. They’re eating Viagra to masturbate.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom. He says: “The interesting thing is that, in the last two years, social media has gone down and a lot of clued-up people feel it’s quite passé now.
“That’s a healthy sign. I don’t think it’s dying, but I think people have sussed out that it’s just performative rubbish, sales, GoFundMe pages and shock merchants.
“It’s for slightly stupider people. If you’re clued-up you don’t want to be spending too much time on there.
“The person that’s your enemy isn’t the person you’re arguing with on X, your common enemy is X itself.
“It’s become kind of passé and boring and I think it will be seen as the haven of losers, and people who are quite smart and cool will opt out of it.
“Kids tend to be smarter and cooler than anybody so they might be the first ones en masse to reject it.
“They are being conned, we’re all being conned. It’s all nonsense. We know the emperor doesn’t have any clothes except dopamine and you can get a much richer supply of that if we just go to a big rave together.”
Irvine, 67, spends the first quarter of the year in Florida, which he says stimulates his creativity and fitness, but he is disturbed by the proliferation of delivery robots, breeding an even lazier stateside culture.
He tells me: “A lot of societal changes, a lot of it is the mobile phone, a lot of it is ordering-in culture. You can surely get out of your house to walk down to order and get a bit of fresh air.
“Miami Beach is quite a small area — you’ve got these food robots that go around delivering.
“You see them outside people’s houses and I’m thinking — this is absolutely crazy.
“It’s often quite affluent people that are doing this as well, I can’t understand it. You get somebody who spends a fortune on their gym membership and then they order the delivery robots.”
So, with the explosion of technology and self-curated content, many nose-deep in their own metaverse, does he believe there is a zeitgeist in contemporary Britain?
“No, there can’t be, it’s not a cultural society. I’ve always seen the Nineties as a celebration of British culture, but also as a requiem mass for it. It kind of froze in the Nineties.
“Particularly among the artists and musicians, there were a lot of clued-up people that realised that there’s something happening here, the game is up you know, we’re gonna sell off everything to the internet.
“We’re gonna sell it all online and it won’t exist any more in the way it has done.
“There were so many things plucked from the Sixties and the Seventies — it was almost like we had this clearing house and we synthesised it and we repackaged it. And I think that was the last stand.”
He thinks youngsters are still making good art but it doesn’t come from the same place. “The ironic thing is there are people making probably some of the best music ever made.
“But they’re making it in such volume, nothing really stands out — and it’s someone sitting in their bedroom, kind of messing around.
“It’s devoid of any cultural context, so you can get dance music made by people who’ve never danced.
“Band music by people who have never been in a band, so they don’t have the culture of humping gear around and borrowing a clapped-out mini van, kipping on mates’ couches in different towns.
“All that stuff is cultural and bonding, and that’s the rich texture that informs everything we do.
“If you take it out of that context, it does become soulless.”
These are heavy, dark themes for a theatre audience, something you don’t get with 42nd Street or The Lion King, I joke.
Not so, he says: “Musicals are traditionally quite dark ways of storytelling. You’ve got a lot of musicals that deal with social issues — like Rent and West Side Story, even.
“Oliver! is about destitute children, so you have a tradition of being able to look at sometimes very difficult material.
“We want to entertain and want people to come out of the theatre uplifted and full of song and dance but we also want them to go ‘Wow, that was mental, that was a real trip, a real ride.’
“This musical has a bigger, loudly beating human heart than either the book or the film.”
One of the most celebrated yet gut-wrenching scenes in the movie features Ewan McGregor’s strung-out character Renton — played by Scottish actor Robbie Scott, 26, in the musical — as he disappears headfirst down the “Worst Toilet in Scotland”.’
So how will that moment be recreated at London’s Haymarket Theatre over the summer?
He says with a chuckle: “We’ll be using a lot of screens so there’ll be a lot of film stuff you’ll see, an interesting multimedia approach.
“I’m not gonna say there’s gonna be a lot of s**t flying around the theatre — but maybe there will be.”
Bring your trainspotters’ anorak.
- Trainspotting The Musical is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, from July 15. Tickets available from 8am on 24 March at trainspottingthemusical.co.uk.