About halfway through the new documentary on Irvine Welsh, Reality Is Not Enough, the Trainspotting author lies down on a mattress on the floor of a Toronto office with an eye mask over his face, and slurs: “I had a sensation that I was kinda in the womb, and, errr, about to be born.” If you think that sounds like he’s on drugs, well, you’d be right. Reality Is Not Enough is built around intermittent peeks at Welsh going on a trip with DMT, the plant-derived hallucinogen used in some shamanic ceremonies. Street drugs are out (Welsh was himself, like his Trainspotting characters, once a heroin addict); medically supervised pre-birth experiences are in.
Paul Sng’s excellent, surreal film, which took 18 months to film and recently closed the Edinburgh Film Festival, may be the definitive look at Welsh, 30-plus years into his artistic career. There are no talking heads whatsoever, no peripheral “experts” mouthing off about how seminal Trainspotting was, how great Welsh is, or how trashed they all got in the 90s. “You can’t really capture the spirit of someone that way,” chortles Welsh to me over Zoom. “‘Oh, we got f***ed up in that club.’ Who cares?”
It’s the opposite of the pedestrian 2023 Welsh documentary Choose. Instead, the camera follows its subject around various places, from libraries in Hackney, where Welsh once worked for the council, to visiting smart country houses with his (third) wife, the actress Emma Currie, where they joke about how posh she is, intercut with excerpts of his books read aloud by celebrities including Liam Neeson. The film paints Welsh as an intelligent man with an endless lust for life (Iggy Pop pun intended) and an approach to things that is a curious mix of easy-going and philosophic.
The Welsh I meet over Zoom, now 66, is friendly and considerate, with only the occasional hint of the voluble enfant terrible I’ve been led to expect. He certainly isn’t a larger-than-life, foul-mouthed piss-head, and in fact swears just four times over the course of 45 minutes – although he certainly can spit out the word “c**t” with practiced venom.
Much of the documentary considers the impact of aging: the way it makes us contemplate our mortality, how it pushes us towards religion. “Such a cliché, I know,” says Welsh. “You get old and want a passport to the next place, you know?” In a newspaper piece eight years ago, an interviewer wrote: “You sense that nothing terrifies Welsh so much as the thought of growing up,” but I get the impression he’s actually enjoying his sixties tremendously. Is he mellowing? “I think I’m still just trying to work it all out. I am definitely more religious – I believe in a bigger cosmic entity. The big problem with religion is not people having religious beliefs – it’s those w**kers that tell you that they’ve got a special hotline to God.”
Welsh grew up on a housing estate in Leith, the port district of Edinburgh, then fairly destitute. His mother was a waitress, his father a dock worker until ill health forced him to stop and he became a carpet salesman. Both encouraged Welsh to read, although he didn’t really get into books until much later. “I was always privy to stories though, oral storytelling, you know, in the family, in the schools, everybody was just telling stories all the time. I grew up a storyteller. It was in my DNA.”
Welsh left school at 16 and took a course in electrical engineering before moving to London to be in a punk band. His dad died when he was in his twenties, and in the film he describes this as launching a “destructive spiral”, an impetus for subsequent drug addiction. “My dad had no knowledge of Trainspotting. He was dead before I even put pen to paper. He cast quite a big shadow.”
Later, after kicking heroin addiction, although still a massive fan of raves (“I wouldn’t have become a writer without acid house,” he says in the film), he moved back to Edinburgh to work for the city council’s housing department and studied business administration at Heriot-Watt University. He always wrote music, but in his early thirties started dabbling in fiction, produced Trainspotting fairly quickly and the rest, as they say, is history. “I’m not tortured by writing. I love it. I feel like I retired 30 years ago and have just been pursuing my hobbies ever since.”
The documentary has arrived at what feels like a moment of intense national nostalgia for the 90s, from Oasis’s megatour and other Britpop revivals, to a revived fondness for Millennial fashion and food. Trainspotting was a landmark Cool Britannia 90s moment – not so much the publication of the novel in 1993, but the release of Danny Boyle’s iconic film starring Ewan McGregor in 1996.
“The 90s was the last decade before the internet really grabbed hold of us,” says Welsh. “The last decade that we went out en masse to enjoy things together.” The huge popularity of certain recent stadium gigs is indicative of our need to come together like that, he says. Not just the actual 90s ones (he’s friends with the Gallagher brothers and describes seeing them live as “fabulous”), but also, rather incongruously, Taylor Swift. “I mean, obviously I wasn’t there, but you could see that every young woman from 10 to 22, who had been in lockdown and had two years taken away from them, wanted to go out. It was a bit mad, that energy, a mad communion like a church, almost, ‘This is our time, this is our place, we’re free!'”
I actually grew up about an hour north of Edinburgh, and in my teens my friends and I would hang out on Edinburgh’s Princes’ Street gardens, idolising Renton heroin chic (no street drugs for us, just alcopops and a heady dose of teen naivety). Welsh, though, wrote about drug-users in Scots dialect with a real and brutal knowledge of what their lives really entailed.
Isn’t it annoying to him that the middle classes glamorised Trainspotting in the way they did? “I mean it’s annoying to me that everything’s embraced by the middle classes but nah, it’s not. Why not have this dynamism and disagreement? Why not have someone saying: “You’re being a middle-class wanker who likes Trainspotting but, you know, why can’t I like Evelyn Waugh?’ Everything is for everyone.”
Welsh says he’s taken DMT about “half a dozen times” and it’s “fantastical, astonishing and also somehow mundane”. I’m surprised, I say, that someone who was once addicted to heroin feels they can be so relaxed about taking drugs. Yes, he has got hammered with Primal Scream and turned up to interviews hungover over the years, but he also recently posted on the social media website Bluesky that he now only enjoys the occasional glass of booze on holiday.
“We live in a society of addiction,” he says to me now. “Phones, food. They’re all there to wreck our memory and consciousness. Street drugs are just a small part of that. It’s recognising that we all have compulsive obsessive disorders. I channel mine into writing.” Welsh has published 16 novels as well as numerous screenplays and short story collections. He’s also made a disco album and sometimes DJs.
He’s pretty prolific on social media too, recently reposting the Irish Times column by Sally Rooney in which she promised to spend her royalties supporting Palestine Action, after they were proscribed as terrorists under UK law. Does Welsh support them? “I support not starving and shooting children.” Does he think proscribing PA was a mistake? “Yes. It’s stupid. You’re in a situation whereby 35 rabbis in New York are described as anti-Semitic because they’re protesting against the genocide of children. That’s absolute nonsense.”
Welsh is careful to add that he feels that it’s entirely up to individuals how much they speak or act on this type of thing. “If you start shaming people because they don’t do enough for Palestine or Ukraine or whatever, then you’re into that kind of controlling, ideological blueprint where people have to tick all these boxes and it becomes a kind of version of Trump. Like, you know, we have to agree on everything, and we’re basically all a bunch of c**ts.” He is not, however, reticent when it comes to his feelings on current UK politicians. He says of the current Labour government: “They’ve done absolutely f**k all except laying the pockets of the super-rich. But that’s exactly what I expected.”
The key thing I notice about this older and, if not wiser, certainly more judicious Welsh than the one who once called heroin “kind of sexy”, is his love of contradictions. He’s wholly happy with his inconsistencies, too. “Tensions are the stuff of life. You don’t want everything to be in harmony, you don’t want resolution!”
At one point, discussing his most recent novel Men in Love, another Trainspotting sequel, he observes that “so many men have been de-powered by the economy that they’re embracing a kind of fascism that is detrimental to humanity”. He seems quite worried about the state of things, I say. “Oh no, human beings are problem solvers by nature. We’ll work it out.”
You’re a man of contrasts, I laugh. Despairing one minute, wildly hopeful the next. He shrugs. “I know the world is going to shit in a rational way. But emotionally, I feel very optimistic.”
Perhaps, it is because he is a man in love? I spy Emma in the background of his screen. In the film, which features wedding footage, they look very happy indeed. “Yeah, it’s fabulous,” he says discreetly, beaming.
