Irvine Welsh on ageing, addiction and why he still chooses life

Irvine Welsh has never been one to rest on his laurels.

The 66-year-old author, whose breakout novel Trainspotting catapulted him to literary fame, says he doesn’t think much about leaving a legacy.

In an interview with Scotland Tonight, he talks about tackling his demons, the reasons behind Scotland’s drug death crisis and why he barely looks back at his past work.

“I live in the moment, and I think everything else has gone by,” said Welsh. “I think when you write a book or you do a record or a film, you push it out there and you’ve given it away to make space for the next thing.

“The good side of it is the criticisms don’t really bother you,” he explained. “It’s just something that’s done and it’s gone.”

While most people know Welsh from his explosive debut novel, he doesn’t consider it his best work.

“I think your first one’s got probably got this new energy to it, and it’s the shock of the new, so it gets kind of recognition,” he said. “But I think you get better as a writer the older you get.”

Welsh believes his later works – including Glue, Marabou Stork Nightmares, and The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins – represent his more mature writing, although he acknowledges Trainspotting’s raw energy remains compelling.

One of the most striking aspects of his upcoming documentary – Reality is Not Enough – is Welsh’s attitude towards his personal struggles. Far from wanting to overcome his “demons,” he sees them as essential fuel for his creativity.

He said: “I think one of the curses of the modern age is that people are scared of emotion people, they’re scared of feeling bad or feeling good or feeling, you know, feeling sort of up and happy. They want to edit all that out and medicate that and become these Stepford human beings.”

For Welsh, life’s negative experiences – loss, heartbreak, addiction, financial problems – provide raw material that art can transform into something positive.

“If you don’t have any demons, you haven’t had a past. If you haven’t had a past, you haven’t had a life,” he muses.

The conversation inevitably turns to Scotland’s ongoing drugs crisis, with the country still holding the unwanted title of drug death capital of Europe.

Welsh sees this as part of a broader cultural pattern.

“Scotland’s always had a terrible relationship with drugs,” he observed, pointing to whisky as the national drink. “We’ve always gone for the hit, basically. And I think that culture has permeated right through.”

But Welsh argues the problem extends far beyond street drugs. “Everything we do is fuelled by addiction,” he said, listing mobile phones, prescription drugs, fast food, pornography, and gaming as examples.

“We’ve set up an addiction society basically.”

Perhaps surprisingly for someone once known as an atheist, Welsh revealed that his worldview has evolved. Experiments with the potent hallucinogenic drug DMT have changed his perspective on consciousness and existence.

“I’m not a believer in an omnipotent, almighty God,” he clarified. “But I think there is an afterlife and a before-life, and there’s just a very small sliver of who we are in this reality that we’re in – basically it’s a kind of working holiday.”

At 66, Welsh approaches ageing with characteristic unconventionality. He doesn’t see time as linear but as something moving through him rather than him moving through it. This perspective has freed him from conventional expectations about age-appropriate behaviour.

“I’ve never really felt that it was time to compromise what I wanted to do,” he said, whether that’s going to clubs or traveling to away football matches.”

When pressed about regrets, Welsh’s response was typically thoughtful: “The regret that I have is I don’t have more lives, basically. I’d like to squeeze more in, but you can’t in the time you’ve got available.

“I would like to have lived life as a woman, to have been able to do that as well, and hope I may be able to get a chance to do that when I come back.”

Welsh describes himself as an “incurable, insufferable romantic”, and the documentary deliberately focuses solely on Welsh himself, avoiding interviews with friends and colleagues

He said: “When you have all these journalistic profiles, you always buy into that Trainspotting dodgy kind of money from the schemes thing.

“But we’re all houses of many rooms, basically.”

Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough has its World Premiere on the closing night of the Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 20 and arrives in UK cinemas on September 26.