Irvine Welsh on the trigger warning for his Trainspotting sequel: ‘It wasn't my idea'

Telegraph

12-07-2025

It is easy to forget, more than 30 years after it was first published, how shocking Trainspotting was. Think of Renton losing his opium suppositories in a bookie's lavatory, Begbie beating up his pregnant girlfriend as she begged him not to leave her, or Sick Boy pimping out his junkie partner because he was so desperate for drug cash.
Irvine Welsh 's debut novel painted a bleak picture of post-industrial Britain through the experiences of a group of drug addicts in Leith, an Edinburgh suburb, and was written mostly in patois. 'C--t' was the 25th word; Welsh once reckoned that he used it a further 835 times. (The book was longlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize, but did not make the shortlist after offending the 'feminist sensibilities' of two of the judges.) It went on to sell millions of copies and was adapted into Danny Boyle's acclaimed 1996 film.
So it's a surprise that copies of Men in Love, billed as the 'immediate sequel' to Trainspotting, come with a trigger warning (labelled here as an 'author's note').
'As a novel set in the 1980s, many of the characters in Men in Love, as in society in general, express themselves in ways that we now consider offensive and discriminatory. As a work of fiction, Men in Love aims to replicate the speech patterns commonly used by many people in this era,' it reads. 'This is certainly not an endorsement (or even a condemnation) of such behaviours; merely an attempt to authentically replicate them through the voices of the characters in the Men in Love story.'
So when I meet Welsh in a North London pub, the obvious question is: why the disclaimer? 'It wasn't my idea,' he sighs. 'What publishers – kind of correctly – get concerned about now in the internet age, is that everything is decontextualised. Somebody could take one line of this book, stick it on the internet and say, 'He's a Nazi,' or 'He's a communist,' or 'He's a sex offender.''
This pearl-clutching sensibility is relatively new. 'I remember back in the day that publishers wanted as much controversy as possible, but now it's like, 'No.' I'm hoping Kneecap [the controversial Irish rap trio] have changed the landscape on all that. The playbook is: keep your head down; don't alienate anybody; don't upset anybody.'
That's like saying not to be interesting, I offer.
'Yeah, it definitely is,' he says. 'I'm doing an author's note, and I'm not condoning or condemning,' Welsh says. 'You don't f---ing condone or condemn. It's none of your business as a writer. All you do is just depict: it's a novel… Now, if people are being f---ing lazy and stupid and choose to decontextualise that, it's not my problem. But it is the way the world is, unfortunately.'
'[The note] was literally an afterthought, and not my afterthought,' he says. (Unlike many such trigger warnings, it is buried at the back of the book.)
Still, the hard-living enfant terrible of British literature appears to have mellowed somewhat now that he is 66: rather than a beer, Welsh asks for a lime-and-soda, and he credits the fact that he's in 'reasonable nick for my age' to his regular boxing sessions. Welsh, a passionate fan of Hibernian Football Club, pairs his garish yellow jacket with a T-shirt that has the slogan 'Football without fans is nothing' across it.
His characters, by contrast, have stayed the same in Men in Love. The novel picks up where Trainspotting ended, as the friends deal with the fallout of Renton betraying them by absconding to Amsterdam with all of the money from their big drug deal. It's the dog days of Margaret Thatcher's premiership; the language is still filthy and the behaviour is often despicable. It's also the fifth of Welsh's novels to star this cast. What keeps drawing him back to them?
'They're kind of my go-to to understand the world.' He points at his bald temple. 'They're lodged in there. I don't think about them at all until I come to write them. Because as soon as I put pen to paper, as soon as I start typing, it just all comes flooding out… If you leave them alone, they'll basically write the story for you. You just try not to get in the way too much.'
But the way Welsh brings the characters to life is unorthodox. He has 'masses' of longhand notes and vignettes about the cast filed away, and it's only once a theme emerges in the stories that he decides to turn the notes into a book – otherwise he has 'no interest in publishing them'.
The theme for Men in Love is, well, falling in love. Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie have tried to leave heroin behind and now are pursuing human connections to replace the lost highs. The idea came to Welsh after his second marriage – to Beth Quinn, an American 23 years his junior – ended about eight years ago and he started dating again. He says he started going out with women who were 'more age-appropriate, for want of a better term' and was pleasantly surprised by those he met.
'They'd been through everything, they knew who they were, what they wanted to do and all that... and they took no f---ing s--- from guys,' he says. 'What should have been quite intimidating was actually incredibly refreshing, because it meant you could just get rid of all the old bulls--- and start to relate to them with honest, open, one-to-one communication. And that, in turn, made me think about myself and my friends, about my age, how we show up in relationships.'
Things were very different when Welsh was dating in his 20s – he 'didn't have a f---ing clue' – and 'I thought, what a great opportunity to put these guys who have completely f---ed up anyway, who know nothing, who are addicted to drugs or addicted to some… compulsive, obsessive behaviour' into such scenarios. Trainspotting fans will not be surprised to know that Renton is earnest and really tries romantically; Spud is a loser; Sick Boy enjoys the thrill of the chase and Begbie is a psychopath who becomes violent if it's even suggested that he's gay. Welsh, for his part, married the former Taggart actress Emma Currie (who is seven years younger than him) in 2022.
Welsh has kept returning to these characters' stories but his five novels about them are not chronological. 'If I had any sense, I would have done them in order… and built a f---ing franchise like any sensible, commercially astute, aware writer would have done,' he says. It also means that it's vanishingly unlikely that a film of Men in Love, starring original Trainspotting stars such as Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle, will be made. Welsh does, however, suggest the whole lot will be adapted as a new TV series at some point, because 'that's the way everyone's going now, isn't it?'
Welsh is an unlikely literary icon. Growing up in Edinburgh's Muirhouse, he left school at 16 and did a brief stint as a TV mechanic until one afternoon, when he was on the wrong end of a powerful electric shock. A period of menial jobs followed, including dishwashing and paving roads, during which he developed a heroin habit. He was addicted for about 18 months and quit by going cold turkey.
During his 20s he tried, and failed, to make it as a punk rocker in a succession of bands in Edinburgh and London. By the late 1980s he worked in local government in the Scottish capital and, so the story goes, much of Trainspotting was written while he was at work. The novel's success meant he could give up his middle-management job.
All of that is long behind him now. He is rich and famous, and splits his time between homes in Camden, North London, Edinburgh and Miami. It must be difficult to get back into that 1980s Leith mindset, and lexicon, I suggest. 'It's the easiest thing to do, really,' he insists. 'I spend a lot of time in Edinburgh, and I spend it with the guys that I knew and hung out with. In some ways, we're in an 80s time warp.'
He adds: 'We still go out, we go to the occasional rave. So everything feels… It's a bit sad actually – we've not moved on 40 years later.'
Welsh is an engaging conversationalist but, despite his sunny demeanour, much about the modern world appears to unsettle him. Take artificial intelligence, which threatens to put swathes of white-collar workers and creative types out of work en masse, much like the blue-collar workers of Leith in the 1980s.
The thinking around AI is the wrong way around, in Welsh's view. 'If I went to ChatGPT and tried to get it to write a novel for me, or give me a first draft of a novel, what would I spend my time doing?' he asks. Really, he says, 'you want ChatGPT to wash the dishes while you write a novel – you know what I mean? – not the other way around. Otherwise, I don't know, we can shovel s--- or pick up litter outside while the robots are writing all these novels that you've read a million times before?'
The danger is that individuals become reduced to 'this f---ing daft, shambling, flesh robot that presses this button and you have your needs met. It's this incredibly dystopian place of humanity we've gone into.' (On a more hopeful note, Welsh reckons 'people are going to reject [AI]' in favour of man-made output.)
When it comes to the economy and politics, there's less for him to be optimistic about. 'We're coming to the end of capitalism,' says Welsh, ever the Left-winger. 'We've not been able to eke it out in a sensible way.' The biggest problem is what he sees as a hoarding of resources at the top of society that has squashed aspirations for those below.
'You have to have consumers; you have to have people with money to spend. And everything's being sucked out of the economy now. The working classes have got no money, they're f---ed. The middle classes are increasingly f---ed, they're debt-ridden, they're precariats. Governments have got no money. They're just used to borrow on behalf of citizens,' he says. 'If you want to preserve capitalism, you have to spread the wealth. If you can't, there is no capitalism. There is corporate capitalism but there's no market society. There's no free market. There's no social mobility.'
Keir Starmer is Welsh's local MP but he is no great fan. 'They're all a bunch of f---ing w---ers. Everyone, all of them. Everybody that is involved, right across the political spectrum.'
By Welsh's telling, social democracy and free-market economics have been abandoned in favour of neoliberalism, and leaves humanity on the precipice. 'Thatcher's property-owning democracy soon became this mergers-and-acquisitions culture, the building of the big corporations and the taking over governments through the lobbying system,' he says. 'She built a communistic corporate state, basically. And when you have that, you've lost social democracy, you've lost a free market... We don't have that kind of opportunity in society, the genuine aspiration and wealth creation in society.'
For many, especially young people, old class politics has been replaced by identity politics. 'We've got the danger of wars, plagues, floods, famines, existential threats, shortages. What can we control? We can control this identity,' he says.
'And then you get the most rapacious elements of capitalism that come along: the medicalisation of life. They'll come along and say you've got depression and anxiety, let's just cut off your d--- and see what happens, or cut off your t---s and give you this medicine and everything will be fine. And then down the line, it's not fine.'
The trans debate is one that most authors would choose to swerve – but then Welsh is not most authors. Men in Love includes a scene when Begbie, Welsh's most violent lunatic, gets incensed when he thinks that some women are actually trans; it comes a couple of years after he published The Long Knives, a crime novel that also features a transgender storyline.
Welsh insists that he is not 'sceptical' of the trans movement, then tees off. 'The word 'trans' is so unhelpful. You've got transsexual people – body dysmorphic people – who are really trying to find a way in this world, and it's a f---ing horrible, challenging, nasty world for them, and they're really working hard at it,' he says. 'And that has been hijacked by a bunch of transvestites, basically; a bunch of narcissistic men who feel sexy wearing women's clothes, and they want to f---ing get their d--- and have a w--- wearing a woman's dress and all that, and then impose that term onto it.
'Then you've got the confused, exploited f---ing teenagers who have been manipulated by the medical opportunists. And all this is being enabled by the gender ideologists. , who are these f---ing weird, freaky descendants of the Paedophile Information Exchange, these weirdos who are trying to create this f---ing ideological matrix to enable all this chaos,' he says, properly on a roll now. 'If I was a trans person, a genuine transsexual person, who was having this struggle I would really be resentful of the way that movement's being hijacked by these narcissists.'
Then there are the likes of Andrew Tate, and their disproportionate influence on alienated young men online. Welsh says the creed of Tate and his ilk – aggressive masculinity and misogyny mixed with conspiracism – is much more appealing to such men than 'some f---ing liberal t--- saying 'You're a scumbag, you're sexist, you're misogynistic, you're a useless piece of s---. Aren't you brainless? Shouldn't you f--- off?' What do you think a young person – a young white guy living at home in his bedroom, w---ing himself into f---ing blindness – wants to hear?'
Part of the problem, he believes, is that 'people don't read books. The attention span of people is about maybe two paragraphs… We only start writing again when we start reading again. I think women are just much more clued up emotionally about all this stuff, they're much more clued up culturally. They have different instincts. And they know what the internet is doing to them. And they also see guys, predatory guys on the internet, making a fucking t--- of themselves.'
He proposes a solution: seizing the money of tech moguls such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to cheer everybody – including the oligarchs – up. 'They'll live life: they'll cook a meal, they'll write a poem, they'll go for a walk, and they'll look at trees, and they'll have people around. They'll chat to people, spend a bit of time with people. They'll have a f---ing life. They don't have a life now.'
Welsh, on the other hand, gives the impression of somebody who loves life and has not quite abandoned his hedonistic ways. He co-founded a record label, is releasing an album of disco music (also called Men in Love) as a tie-in with the novel and wrote the lyrics himself. 'It's quite a dark book, so you don't really get the joy of love,' he says. 'Whereas if you have a complimentary album, you can just express the pure joy, the pure rapture of it all.' Welsh plays some of it on his phone, drowning out the music in the pub. It's funky, with catchy hooks and soaring vocals.
He is a rare thing for a novelist: so successful that he can indulge such passions. But it's hard to imagine a publisher releasing something like Trainspotting today. 'You'd probably have to self-publish first and hope that it was recognised and picked up,' Welsh says. 'Nobody's going to publish something like that.'
Now, we are moving into a 'post-culture society', according to Welsh. 'My theory is, if you became big in the last millennium, in the analogue culture, it kind of ossified. So Trainspotting is a bit like The Dark Side of the Moon now: you're ossified in that culture, and it becomes something that people have to read, like a rite-of-passage book,' he says. 'Which is great for me, but it's s--- for a vibrant ongoing culture. You have these things that are just there all the time, and everything else now is created to be disposable.'
Another constant refrain in today's publishing world is that there are not enough young male novelists. 'It's a chicken-and-egg thing,' he says. 'Men have got to read more… They've got to stop f---ing gaming, spending so much time online, and start reading books again.'
'Preferably mine,' he says. 'But anybody's really.'