Latest news with #Leith


Spectator
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
A startling inversion of the original opera: The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor in Aix en Provence reviewed
On the continent this summer, new operas from two of Britain's most important composers. Oliver Leith likes guns, animals and dissolving sickly sweet sounds in acid baths of microtonality. In one recent orchestral work, the conductor becomes a pistol-wielding madman; his next, Garland, a vast pageant premiering on 18 September at Bold Tendencies, Peckham, sees a horse become a musician. He's 35 and already has a school. Listen out for it – in the London new-music scene you can't move for Leithians. The telltale sign is the sound of twisting metal: shiny pitches that warp and bend until brittle. He's English but in an outsidery way – jokey, gentle, sad, eccentric. The opposite of arch, insidery Benjamin Britten. But opposites attract and Aix's artistic director Pierre Audi – in one of his last creative decisions before his death in May – made a smart move to commission Leith to adapt Britten's seafaring epic Billy Budd. What we get is a startling inversion of the original opera. Where Britten goes XXL, giving himself the biggest canvas he can (70-strong cast, 70-odd-piece orchestra), Leith restricts himself to a postage stamp of sonic possibility (six singers, four musicians all playing keyboards or percussion). Where Britten ushers in gale-force threat, Leith is still and withdrawn, like a tide that's suddenly gone out. Where Britten is precise, Leith is carefully careless. (Some of the most striking musical drama blooms from simple walls of ill-behaved whistling or the subtle chaos of a thundersheet, slowly stroked.) In other words where Britten offers a proper operatic man-of-war – oaky, brutish, immaculately rigged – Leith presents a wispy ghost ship, almost digital in its evanescence, a 16-bit HMS Indomitable, pixelated and threadbare, bobbing along in dense mist, its harmonic sails in tatters. Out go the thick slashes of darkness; in come pure neons. Every tinkly, glisteny metal thing a percussionist could possibly get their hands on is here. It's the kind of palette you might put together if you were scoring the Teletubbies, not a Napoleonic-era tragedy of the high seas. It should be stupid as hell. It somehow isn't. There's a hallucinatory quality to the bright chimes and cloudy throbbing synths that speaks beautifully to the confused morals and heightened desires of this delirious, unhappy crew. Like Leith, director Ted Huffman takes the opera to places Britten never dared. Though it was in effect Britten's coming-out opera – Beecham had nicknamed it 'Twilight of the Sods' – the gay element was sublimated in a way that could offer the composer plausible deniability. Huffman cuts to the chase and makes it explicit. It's a sign of how right the move is that when a kiss comes between Budd and the sailor who will soon betray him it feels inevitable, swept up as it is in a moment of real musical ecstasy. A master of old-school ensemble theatre in the Peter Brook mould, Huffman moves things along economically and expertly. (He's also shaved 45 minutes off the original and you barely notice.) The cast are excellent (Joshua Bloom's hypnotic Claggart, the standout), the musicians heroic in juggling bits of acting and singing with their multifarious musical demands. More characters all at sea in Rebecca Saunders's first opera Lash – Acts of Love. And at the Deutsche Oper Berlin première, conducted by Saunders's partner Enno Poppe, you could really feel it. We open in freefall: vast liquid glissandi behaving like monstrous water chutes sliding the music straight into strange electronic static. K (and N, S, A – they're all one person) is on the threshold of death. She struggles to speak, then vomits up a parade of putrefied memories about hair and skin and sex. The words, derived from an original text by artist and author Ed Atkins, are a plotless tour de force, 'violent, emetic, immoderate, improper, impure', as Jonathan Meades wrote of Atkins's extraordinary novel Old Food. In Act Two body parts and love and longing are each addressed in a messed up memento mori. Transcendence sweeps in, through rapturous, convulsive duets, trios and quartets that entangle the four selves. It's Bosch-like, a danse macabre, funny and vulgar, and the directors at Dead Centre might have had far more fun with it had Saunders – in a rare misstep – not dictated so much of what happens on stage, including instructions for live videography. (Theatres, I beg you: put your cameras away.) No matter. Saunders's music is so full of expressive force, the text can afford to forgo story, the stage all visual interest. As in so many great operas, the score contains the drama. And here Saunders proves that she is not only the great genius of dramatic momentum, of subduction and eruption – her soundworld sits on thrillingly volatile faultlines – but also an intuitively lyrical composer. She even gives the four corpses a ravishing final a capella. If you don't like to be swallowed up or spat out, it may not be the opera for you. But for the rest of us, what an auspicious operatic debut this was.


The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Irvine Welsh: ‘I'm often astounded that any relationships take place these days'
I was born in the great port of Leith. Stories are in my blood; listening to them, telling them. My family were typical of many in the area, moving from tenement to council scheme, increasingly further down the Forth estuary. I was brought up in a close community. I left school with practically no qualifications. I tended towards the interesting kids, the troublemakers. All my own fault. I was always encouraged to be more scholarly by my parents, who valued education. But I left school and became an apprentice technician, doing a City & Guilds course. I hated it. I was always a writer: I just didn't know it. I cite being crap at everything else in evidence. It's why I've never stopped writing stories about my youth and my go-to gang of characters from Trainspotting. Their reaction to events and changes in the world helps inform my own. They've been given substance by people I've met down the decades, from Leith pubs to Ibiza clubs. But I have never seen myself as an author. If I wrote purely for publication, and let it become a franchise, it would just be another job, albeit an enjoyable one, and better than digging coal. But I never wanted it to be that. As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer. I de facto retired from the world of work over 30 years ago, packing in my day job at the council to pursue my hobbies of writing and music. If I had the inclination for franchise building, I would have released my books sequentially, in a temporal order, following the characters' lives. If I wanted to chase literary prizes, I'd have written the kind of novels expected to appeal to the people who judge such affairs. Basically, I wait until something inspiring emerges – theme, event, character or storyline – to act as a catalyst and pique my interest in finally writing up my notes, sketches and stories to publishable standard. Skagboys was the first thing I wrote, appearing on my Amstrad word processor as the opening sections of Trainspotting. The resulting book was way too long, so I threw away that first part, opting to take the reader right into the drug-addled world of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and co, all the way back in 1993. When I got older and more reflective, I thought I'd revisit how the protagonists got into the state they did before Trainspotting: I'd write about the Thatcherite destruction of the traditional working class. So Skagboys (2012) revisited old territory. But in the meantime, I had leapt ahead almost a decade into those characters' lives with Porno (2002). I saw that book as being about the increasing commodification of sex, as we moved into the internet age. Way further down the line, Dead Men's Trousers (2018) was inspired by my experiments with the drug DMT, and the even more astonishing phenomenon of Hibs winning the Scottish Cup. And now I'm back with those characters again. Men in Love, taking place directly after Trainspotting, opens on a junk-sick Renton sweating in an Amsterdam hotel room with his bag of cash, with Sick Boy ferreting around London on the perma-hustle, Spud and Second Prize back in Leith, trying to avoid heroin and alcohol – the drugs that chose them – and Begbie a guest of HMP Saughton. As the title suggests, Men in Love is mainly about that time in life when men (generally in their mid-20s) start taking the quest for romance more seriously. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Novels, no matter how well researched, composed or projected, are always – whether you like it or not – at least tangentially about you. Writing Men in Love made me realise that, when I stop running away from it, I've usually enjoyed love unquestioningly, without feeling the need to analyse or even understand it. The checklists of dating apps, articles, self-help books, the inventories of salient points of attraction, ideal types and red flags always seemed to me a boring, algorithmic and reductive response to a very human, mystical phenomenon. Much of what I've learned about love has been experiential, not observational, about not being gun-shy and diving in when the opportunity presented itself. And yes, some romantic sensibilities have been augmented by the imagination and insight of various novelists, from Jane Austen to James Kelman. Looking back now, it strikes me that your mid-20s is a strange time to be embarking on serious romance. Linked to traditional modes of commerce, procreation and survival, we remain culturally bound by such influences, driven to 'settle down'. Once ossified in our social structure, such imperatives are now fading, and perhaps it's about time. For men in their mid-20s, the influence of your partner suddenly becomes greater than that of your peers. It also seems that, in an atomised, narcissistic society, we are left less equipped than ever to meet our bonding needs. The nurturing 'village' of old is replaced by the shouty swamp of the online experience, where people are compelled to create ludicrous personas that they can't live up to in reality. No wonder so many people can no longer be bothered with the whole business. I'm often astounded that any relationships take place at all. Men in Love is my attempt to look at where men go wrong (and maybe sometimes right) in our efforts to subjugate our own pulsating needs to do daft, fabulous things like watch sport, get drunk and obsess about obscure musical offerings, for the greater good of romance, commerce, status, procreation, sex, and yes, L-O-V-E; whatever the motives for joining together with someone are. I think it is as much – probably more – a book for women, who acutely understand the nutters they went out with in their 'bad boy phase', as it is for such men (and I still count myself as only a semi-reformed version of that breed) to understand themselves. It's a crazy, romantic, joyous journey through our higher aspirations, and the inherently ridiculous mortal stupidity and selfishness that constantly undermines them. Things have changed since I wrote Trainspotting. The working class (like the middle class and the government) no longer have any money, trades or careers; just a patchwork quilt of precarious, low-paid jobs waiting to be destroyed by AI. Some deal drugs. This is usually not really for profit, but youths – like the preening oligarchs who dominate the world – need compelling drama. They engage in meaningless turf wars, constantly in search of their own dopamine hits to distract from the uselessness society has pushed them into; an existence of eating rubbish and watching crap on screens, bloating into obesity as their mental health crumbles. The working class are no longer represented by any political party. They have no voice: nobody will write about them, make films about them, far less advocate for them. They are expected to die quietly. Why publish Men in Love at this time? I think we need love more than ever. Loads of it. Orwell wrote: 'If there is hope, it lies with the proles.' I think now, if there is hope, it lies with the lovers. Men in Love by Irvine Welsh is published by Jonathan Cape on 24 July. To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.


Telegraph
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Irvine Welsh on the trigger warning for his Trainspotting sequel: ‘It wasn't my idea'
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.'


Malay Mail
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Malay Mail
Irvine Welsh calls ‘Men in Love' an antidote to hate, criticises AI and social media
LONDON, July 12 — Scottish author Irvine Welsh on Friday described the new sequel to his cult novel Trainspotting as an antidote to a world full of 'hate and poison', as he took aim at social media, the internet and AI. Men in Love, the latest in a series of sequels, follows the same characters — Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie — as they experience the heyday of rave culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Welsh's novel was turned into the wildly successful 1996 hit film of the same name directed by Danny Boyle and starring Ewan McGregor. The black comedy drama featured a group of heroin addicts living in an economically-depressed part of Edinburgh. 'We're living in a world that seems to be so full of hate and poison. Now it's time I kind of focus more on love as a kind of antidote to all that,' Welsh said. Although his novel was published over 30 years ago, there were many parallels with the world today, he added. The 1980s demise of much heavy industry such as shipbuilding in the Leith area of Edinburgh heralded a new world for some 'without paid work'. 'Now we're all in that position. We don't know how long we'll have paid work, if we do have it, because our economy, our society, is in just a long form revolutionary transformation,' he told BBC radio. 'It's a big, contentious, messy revolution. There's lots to play for, but there's some very dystopian tendencies within it,' he added. Despite the problems faced by earlier generations, Welsh said he detected less optimism now. 'Natural stupidity' 'I think we're just a bit more scared... I think we've got this existential threat on the horizon, basically, of species extinction... through kind of wars and diseases and famines and climate change and no economic means for younger people to make their way in the world as we had,' he said. Welsh also took aim at artificial intelligence (AI), an internet appropriated by big corporations and a social media culture marred by 'vitriolic pile-ons'. He said the internet had stopped people from thinking and had created a 'controlling environment' in which 'we just take instruction'. 'We've got artificial intelligence on one side, and we've got a kind of natural stupidity on another side. We just become these dumbed down machines that are taking instruction. 'And when you get machines thinking for you, your brain just atrophies.' He said he hoped that people's current addiction to mobile phones would be a phase that runs its course. 'You look down the street and you see people with a phone stuck to their face. 'Hopefully, if we survive the next 50 years, that's going to look as strange on film as... people chain smoking cigarettes did back in the 80s,' he added. Men in Love is due to be published by Penguin on July 24. — AFP


France 24
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
Irvine Welsh takes aim at 'brain atrophying' tech ahead of new Trainspotting sequel
"Men in Love", the latest in a series of sequels, follows the same characters -- Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie -- as they experience the heyday of rave culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Welsh's novel was turned into the wildly successful 1996 hit film of the same name directed by Danny Boyle and starring Ewan McGregor. The black comedy drama featured a group of heroin addicts living in an economically-depressed part of Edinburgh. "We're living in a world that seems to be so full of hate and poison. Now it's time I kind of focus more on love as a kind of antidote to all that," Welsh said. Although his novel was published over 30 years ago, there were many parallels with the world today, he added. The 1980s demise of much heavy industry such as shipbuilding in the Leith area of Edinburgh heralded a new world for some "without paid work". "Now we're all in that position. We don't know how long we'll have paid work, if we do have it, because our economy, our society, is in just a long form revolutionary transformation," he told BBC radio. "It's a big, contentious, messy revolution. There's lots to play for, but there's some very dystopian tendencies within it," he added. Despite the problems faced by earlier generations, Welsh said he detected less optimism now. 'Natural stupidity' "I think we're just a bit more scared... I think we've got this existential threat on the horizon, basically, of species extinction... through kind of wars and diseases and famines and climate change and no economic means for younger people to make their way in the world as we had," he said. Welsh also took aim at artificial intelligence (AI), an internet appropriated by big corporations and a social media culture marred by "vitriolic pile-ons". He said the internet had stopped people from thinking and had created a "controlling environment" in which "we just take instruction". "We've got artificial intelligence on one side, and we've got a kind of natural stupidity on another side. We just become these dumbed down machines that are taking instruction. "And when you get machines thinking for you, your brain just atrophies." He said he hoped that people's current addiction to mobile phones would be a phase that runs its course. "You look down the street and you see people with a phone stuck to their face. "Hopefully, if we survive the next 50 years, that's going to look as strange on film as... people chain smoking cigarettes did back in the 80s," he added.