Author profile: Life in the fast lane for Irvine Welsh
IRVINE WELSH’s latest romp, A Decent Ride, features the return of ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, whom we first encountered in the 2001 coming-of-age novel, Glue, and then in a later novel about his exploits in the porn industry.
In A Decent Ride, ‘Juice’ Terry gets embroiled with a rich, arrogant American reality TV star, a violent mobster called ‘The Poof’, and the mystery of a missing dead girl who used to work at one of The Poof’s saunas.
‘Juice’ Terry, with his corkscrew curls, bulldozes his way through life. He is defined by “bombastic confidence”, an insatiable appetite for sex and a revulsion to committing to women. When one conquest parades around in one of his T-shirts, the morning after, his alarm bells start ringing: “As ah eywis say, the time ye git nervous about lassies is no whin yir tryin tae git their fuckin knickers oaf thum that night, but whin yir tryin tae git your fuckin T- shirt oaffay thum the next morning!”
Welsh clearly enjoys riding shotgun with ‘Juice’ Terry as he careers around the streets of Edinburgh in his taxi cab. “I wanted to do something about ‘Juice’ Terry,” he says. “He’s one of my favourite characters. I like writing about him. I thought: ‘what would he be doing’? He worked selling juice in Glue. What would give him access to plenty of women around town? What would get him bouncing about? He’d be driving a cab.
“The appeal of him as a character is his indomitable force. He loses his sexuality at one point in the book, through this heart [condition]. He actually still tries to have a go. That indomitability appeals to people. We all like the idea of being that type of character — somebody who just acts without any fear of consequences. It’s an attitude to life — that nothing good or bad is going to last forever; just enjoy the good times and ride out the bad times. It’s a strong, empowering philosophy of life to have. It’s a great blessing.”
Welsh is sprinkled with stardust himself, getting by on his wits as one of the world’s diminishing band of commercially successful authors. He is in his mid-50s. He lives with his American wife in the United States, in Chicago, while wintering in Florida.
They lived in Dublin during the Celtic Tiger years, while she was studying history at University College Dublin. He talks fondly of old watering holes like The Long Hall, The Stag’s Head, and Grogan’s, and of Gaelic football and hurling.
“When you see kids playing hurling, they play it like hockey, hitting it along the ground. Then, when they get to 14, 15, and start playing in teams, the ball miraculously leaves the ground. It’s an amazing thing. It’s kind of a sport that defies logic. People shouldn’t even be able to do that — to hit the ball on the run with opponents trying to take your head off,” Irvine says.
Welsh was born in Leith, the port town adjoining Edinburgh. His dad worked in the docks, before relocating the family to Muirhouse, a council-housing estate in Edinburgh. Welsh left school at 16 and gravitated to London’s punk scene, where he took heroin, worked menial jobs and married, before climbing out of the 1980s with an MBA and a return to Edinburgh.
He shot to prominence following the success of Trainspotting, his debut novel. Partly inspired by diaries Welsh had written 10 years earlier, it was published in 1993. Having sold a million copies in the UK alone, it has been translated into 30 languages and millions more have seen the scabrous scenes, or heard the funky soundtrack, from the movie version, which was released in 1996.
Written in the vernacular of Edinburgh housing estates, as are the bulk of his novels, its mix of debauched and apolitical characters resonated with readers: “We start off wi high hopes, then we bottle it...Basically, we live a short, disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up oor lives wi shite, things like careers and relationships tae delude oorsels that it isnae aw totally pointless.”
Other novels and short story collections
followed, often with trademark, catchy titles, like If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work... but the zeitgeist-capturing Trainspotting has defined his career. He says its success didn’t change his approach to life, however.
“I’ve always had a ‘fake it till you make it’ attitude to life, as if I was extremely successful even when I wasn’t.” he says. “I always had a hedonistic style of life. It just meant I had more money and more toys and more fame. I could indulge myself. My life didn’t change drastically. I was just doing it in more high-class company.
“It’s funny. I’ve been living and working in Hollywood and people say, ‘You must find it difficult with all these big egos in Hollywood’. I say, ‘You’d want to go drink with some of my mates back home.’ You’d think they were rock ’n’ roll stars, instead of working in the building trade. Guys like Harvey Weinstein wouldn’t last 10 minutes in that company. They’re all at the centre of their own universe. They all have that massive, swaggering arrogance, a cockiness about them.”
Welsh reckons the innate confidence of the average Scottish man became more pronounced with Scotland’s move towards independence. He has been a vocal advocate of the ‘Yes’ vote during public debates, and believes that Scotland’s break from the United Kingdom is unstoppable.
“Britain is disintegrating. It’s not so much that the Scots are leaving Britain. It’s that Britain doesn’t really exist anymore. Britain was formed by industry and empire.
“It was sustained by fighting two world wars, the welfare state, nationalised industries and the 1944 Education Act, which gave higher education to anyone who was bright enough for it. It began to die away with Thatcher, Blair and Cameron. Liberalism has taken all that away. There’s no glue that’s holding it together. Its nations have reverted back to their original, pre-union national identities.
“The Britain that people are invested in doesn’t exist anymore. It’s inevitable that Scotland is going to go its own way. It can’t become part of greater England. English nationalism is a big thing now in England, people who believe that the union can be replaced by the St George’s Cross. There is no place for Scotland. It’s nothing to do with the SNP; it’s to do with Thatcher, Blair and Cameron.
“The process is going to continue throughout England. There is going to be such a demand from the regions for more power. The way the economy is set up, it only benefits the south-east of England.
“Scotland is slowly evolving into its own nation. It’s got its own institutions. It’s got its own parliament, political parties, a political system.
“It’s just basically moving out of the house into its own pad. With the issue being unresolved after the referendum in September, it means that with every single general election it becomes a re-run of the referendum.
“When you have a Labour Party and a Conservative Party that is decimated in Scotland, how long can it go on when neither of those UK parties have any real representation there? In the 1950s, Scotland returned loads of Conservative MPs. [Now it has one.] It’s not going to return any Labour MPs after this election in May. It’s so volatile you can’t really say, but I think there will be another referendum very shortly.”
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