IRVINE WELSH Visions of drug culture in Trainspotting (far right) and Ecstasy (right and below)
FIRST SHOT: JUST SAY ‘AYE’
We head oot and dive oantae a 16, bound fi r Johnny’s pad at Tolcross. It’s a blindin hot day so we sit doonstairs at the back for a better view ay the passin fanny. Back top deck wi Begbie, tae intimidate wideos, back bottom wi Sick Boy tae leer at lassies. Life has its simple codes. – This is gaunny be so much fun, Sick Boy says, and rubs his hands thegither. – Drugs are always fun. Do you believe in cosmic forces, destiny n aw that shite?
– Nup. – Me neither, but bear one thing in
mind: today was a ‘T’ day.
– What . . . ? ah ask, then it dawns on us. – Yir dictionary thingy.
– All will be revealed, he nods, then
starts talking about heroin. Smack’s the only thing ah huvnae done, ah’ve never even smoked or snorted it. And ah must confess that ah’m fuckin shitein it. Ah wis brought up tae believe that one joint ay hash would kill me. And, of course, it wis bullshit. Then one line ay speed. Then one tab ay acid; aw lies, spread by people hell-bent on self-extermination through booze and fags.
But heroin. It’s crossing a line. But as the boy said, anything
once. And Sick Boy doesnae seem concerned, so ah bullshit tae keep ma front up. – Aye, ah cannae wait tae dae some horse. – What? Sick Boy looks at me in
horror as the bus growls up the hill. – What the fuck are you talking aboot, Renton? Horse? Dinnae say that in front ay yir dealer mate or he’ll laugh in yir face. Call it skag, for Papa John-Paul’s sake, he snaps, then stares oot at a short-skirted lassie meandering wi seductive intent up Lothian Road. – She’s a peach . . . far too carefree in bearing and expression tae be a baboon . . .
– Right . . . ah feebly respond. ■ Extracted from Skagboys by Irvine Welsh with permission from Jonathan Cape.
‘THE 80S WAS THE LAST TIME WE HAD A PROPER INDIGENOUS BRITISH CULTURE WITH ACID HOUSE AND CASUALS’
The fi nale of Porno (a semi-comatose Begbie reeking of urine and retribution, rousing Carrie-style to scare the bejesus out of a mid- confessional Sick Boy) certainly left it wide open for a further instalment of these radge-own adventures. Welsh is not ruling out the prospect: ‘You can never really draw a line under it because the characters keep coming back to you; they gatecrash into the consciousness whether you want to write about them or not and you get curious about them.’
Certainly, Welsh’s curiosity was suitably piqued for him to dip into his characters’ early encounters with rough sex, hard drugs and rock’n’roll – all three even merging in Spud’s ill-fated encounter with ageing Dutch chanteuse Claudia Rosenberg, ending with him fl eeing the Caledonian Hotel, armed with only two silver room-service trays to shield his modesty. But as much as Skagboys is the story of a clutch of Edinburgh boys losing their way, it’s equally a novel about the viciously divisive decade that was the 1980s as Thatcherism and the free market ran riot around the nation, riding roughshod over communities (mining villages, inner cities, Scotland) which were viewed as surplus to monetarism’s requirements. The book begins with Renton’s rehab diary recalling the time he joined his father on the picket line at Orgreave and faced down a politicised and brutal police operation.
‘It’s more of a cause-and-effect historical novel about the 80s rather than just exploring a sub- culture, which Trainspotting did. You’ve had the hateful fi gures of Blair and Cameron to take Thatcher’s place. As she is old and feeble now, there’s a tendency to see her as this nice old lady who used to batter people with her handbag. But the 80s was a very bitter time and really made us the nation we are now.
18 THE LIST 26 Apr–24 May 2012
‘Unlike Europe, we chucked in any pretensions of building a social order and decided to become the 51st state of America where the market remained supreme and where things like a universal comprehensive education system and a general welfare state and a socialistic aspiration to build a better society were all shelved. They may never come back despite the insipid window dressing the Labour Party have tried from time to time; it was a time when this consensus was fi rst made by all the main parties.’ But Welsh sees one upside to that era’s social destructiveness. ‘It was the last time we had a proper indigenous British culture which had gone back to the teds through to mods and punks; in the 80s we had acid house and casuals. The 90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an offi ce deciding what was cool.’
Given that the interview started with shades of Begbie, we end it chatting about who, among his Skagboys crew, Welsh would feel most happy sharing a pint with in Robbie’s or City Limits. ‘Spud is the most loveable but you’d probably get a bit exasperated with him eventually. With Sick Boy, I’d be watching my wallet all the time, and I’d be a bit nervous sitting down with Begbie. I’d have to say probably Renton as you’d get quite a varied conversation out of him. But they’re all me, as are the extended characters; Alison and the guy in the suit she’s shagging are as much me as Renton, Begbie and Sick Boy. You have to inhabit every character you write and fi nd bits of you to put into all of them to make them work.’
Skagboys is out now, published by Jonathan Cape. Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy is on general release, out now.