I was cancelled long before it became cool
Authors and artists have a right to be offensive and confront the truth, ‘Trainspotting’ author Irvine Welsh tells Jake Kerridge
Irvine Welsh has been cancelled more times than the premiere of the latest James Bond film. His first novel, Trainspotting (1993), a seamy portrait of Edinburgh drug and booze addicts, was widely hailed as an instant classic but was omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist, reportedly because it offended the “feminist sensibilities” of two of the judges.
Then there was the period in 1998 when police officers started taking it upon themselves to enter bookshops and seize the posters advertising Welsh’s novel Filth, depicting a pig in a policeman’s helmet.
While millennial snowflakes were still in their nappies, the police were anticipating their language: “The officer … was quite within his rights to seize the posters. I have looked at them and I find them offensive,” said one senior Southampton policeman.
Today, Welsh chucklingly thanks both the snooty Booker judges and the police for the free publicity. But these days cancel culture has become more problematic: censorship has become hip, and, as Welsh puts it, “with the power of the internet you can properly cancel someone for good now”.
It’s a theme he explores in a witty and nuanced new documentary, Offended by Irvine Welsh, in which he defends the right of authors and artists to be offensive.
“I think it’s very, very difficult for any artist to be honest with themselves in this environment, to be able to tell when sensitivity becomes self-censorship,” he says. His own novels still offer 100-proof offence – “I’ve been really fortunate in that my publishers have never asked me to censor anything on these grounds. I think it’s because they realise in some ways my brand is about being offensive” – but in his parallel career as a screenwriter he notes that his scripts are starting to be toned down in production.
He says that the 2013 film of Filth (which he was not directly involved with) made the central character, the psychotic cop Bruce Robertson (played by James Mcavoy), less racist than he was in the book. “A lot of rank and file coppers loved Filth
– they used to come up and ask me to sign their notebooks – because they knew the character (‘We’ve got a Bruce Robertson in our station’). I think it’s good to confront that truth. And the great thing about art is that, because it’s a special construct, it’s not real, it gives us a safe space to debate these issues.”
Welsh admits the force of the argument made in the documentary by the Somali-british writer Nadifa Mohamed: that cancel culture goes some small way to redressing the balance of power in favour of long-marginalised groups. “It’s good that people who put disgusting views out there that result in other people getting attacked in the street can be called out. But the danger is that witchhunting is not an exact science.
“The alt-right and the po-faced liberal Left use the same tactic of saying that they’re offended to emotionalise the debate and take it away from the rational arena. People may start with good intentions but we end up in a kind of Orwellian controlling, suspicious and not very human place.”
He has little time for identity politics. “If everybody’s concentrating on their minor differences, they’re distracted from the big picture, which is the government project to redistribute resources to the wealthy. It’s classic divide and conquer.”
Welsh is keen to point out that his brand of offence is “about upsetting power, punching up, or at least punching sideways”, but I’m sure that the reason so many of us love his books is that he clearly revels in bad taste for the sheer fun of it.
He admits that he used to write a lot of scenes in which dogs were tortured or maimed because they would bring him so many letters of complaint. Did he grow out of that? “Well I love dogs, and I got a dog that always knew when
I was typing these scenes – it would look up at me with sad eyes.”
Despite being one of our most linguistically inventive and compelling novelists, Welsh has never been so much as longlisted for the big British book prizes – which is fine by him. “It makes me feel like I’m doing something right. I’ve got a lot of people into reading, and that’s more important to me than the endorsement of the literary commissars.”
The main reason he has offended so many people, from those 1993 Booker judges onwards, is that he tells the unpalatable truth about the people he knows from growing up in the housing scheme prefabs in the Muirhouse district of Edinburgh.
His characters do and say offensive things because “they have no spirit left. They live in an industrial society, so when deindustrialisation happens it takes away their sense of self. They take drugs to help them negotiate that, and that’s what more and more people are doing now, across the whole of society, not just the working-class, as we enter a post-work world. That’s what Trainspotting is about, and why it’s probably more relevant than ever.”
Welsh became a heroin addict
himself in his 20s. “I did a bit of petty crime, you can’t not, the physical power of the drug is very much about this imperative that you’ll do anything, or almost anything, to get what you need. I was very fortunate not to be incarcerated.” He was able to kick the habit because he had a good job with Hackney council in London and decent prospects. “So many people that I saw in rehab, they’re never gonna come out of this because they’ve got no future or opportunities, there’s no incentive to come off it.”
At 62, Welsh, who is talking to me from his flat in Edinburgh, looks a bit less like a particularly terrifying bouncer these days and is starting to resemble Victor Meldrew’s harder twin brother. After a frenetic two or three years since he split from his second wife, the pandemic has brought him a welcome period of calm. “I’ve been just ricocheting around, London, Barcelona, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Singapore, it’s been absolutely fantastic, but it’s time to narrow the focus a bit. Covid’s been great for me because it’s enabled me to keep off aeroplanes and work.”
He lives life at a gentler pace now: “I don’t really take drugs, but if I’m at a festival or something like that I still have a little tickle, I’ve got a kind of ‘Get F----- Up Plan’ over three days and a recovery plan that lasts longer than that. The only thing I can drink now in any quantity is mezcal.”
Nevertheless it feels all wrong that circumstances mean I’m talking to Welsh remotely rather than, say, in an Edinburgh pub: it’s customary for journalists who interview him to wake up in a ditch, whereas I’m shutting my laptop and returning to my lockdown jigsaw. And in Welsh’s view the new working from home ethos should not be extended to debate and discussion.
“Talking to each other online, there are these layers of distance and remoteness that are dehumanising, that make it harder to see other people as human beings. So as soon as we can I think we really do need to spend more time in salons of interaction again, we need to get the pubs open and get the nightclubs open. These are the places that improve our mental health.”
‘By saying you’re offended you make the debate less rational’