Fame spotting
It is one of the world’s most successful books and made stars of a bunch of unknowns. As Trainspotting turns 25, 25 amazing facts about the novel...
IT is 25 years ago this week that the world was first introduced to Trainspotting, the darkly comic novel of young heroin addicts in Edinburgh, featuring the unforgettable characters of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and the psychotic Begbie. Fast-paced, shocking and incredibly funny, this startling debut written in a swear-laden, phonetic slang by Scots author Irvine Welsh drew heavily on his own experiences as a drug abuser. The novel spawned an era-defining film and a critically acclaimed movie sequel, T2. It also launched the Hollywood careers of Ewen Bremner, Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Kelly Macdonald and Robert Carlyle. To mark the book’s silver jubilee, the Scottish Daily Mail reveals 25 fascinating facts about the phenomenon that is Trainspotting.
1 IRVINE Welsh penned his greatest work in the 1980s while working as a £20,000-a-year training officer at Edinburgh District Council. He revealed: ‘I had two offices – one in the housing department where I was seconded and another in the department of personnel and management services, and spent a lot of time between the two. That’s how I wrote Trainspotting.’
2 IT has since been translated into 30 languages. More than one million copies have been sold in the UK alone. Fittingly, it is also said to be the most shoplifted novel in British publishing history.
3 DESPITE the book’s ultimate success, Welsh only received a £1,000 advance and a print run of just 3,000 copies was ordered amid fears such a graphic work would never sell. The author even contemplated sending anonymous letters to The Scotsman, condemning the book to drum up publicity, although such ‘guerrilla tactics’ proved unnecessary.
4 IN one chapter, Begbie and Renton stumble across a drunk in a disused railway station who asks them if they are trainspotting. It turns out to be Begbie’s estranged father. Welsh has stated that the book’s title refers to something considered pointless by those who do not enjoy it. Just as non-trainspotters consider it a ridiculous pastime, so non-addicts cannot fathom heroin use.
5 BEGBIE’s psychotic character started life as a woman. Welsh grew up in the tough Edinburgh district of Muirhouse where, according to one biography, ‘among the family’s close neighbours on the avenue were a Mr Renton and a Mrs Frances Begbie’.
6 WELSH, who now lives in Miami, wrote a sequel, Porno, in 2002, catching up with his characters ten years on; and Skagboys, a prequel charting the descent into heroin addiction of Renton and Sick Boy, was published in April, 2012. A fourth novel published this year catches up with Renton as an unlikely international jetsetter.
7 THE film appeared three years after the novel and was shot in 35 days on a shoestring budget of £1.5million. It went on to become the highest-grossing British film of 1996, earning £48million at the global box office.
8 THE book soon transferred successfully to the stage with Ewen Bremner, who played dimwit Spud in the movie, cast as Renton. He was annoyed when the film part went to Ewan McGregor but later admitted: ‘I was being a stupid snob.’ McGregor had to lose two stone – mainly by giving up alcohol and dairy – to look convincing as a heroin addict.
9 DIRECTOR Danny Boyle wanted an unknown to play schoolgirl Diane so dished out flyers in Glasgow, looking for ‘the new Patricia Arquette’. Waitress Kelly Macdonald, 19, went along to the open auditions, dressed in a charity shop jumper and ripped jeans. Boyle later said: ‘It’s a terrible cliché, but as soon as she sat down I said, “That’s her”.’
10 PRUDISH US distributors insisted that the brief sex scene between Renton and under-age Diane was cut. The film’s first 20 minutes also had to be re-recorded for American audiences after complaints that moviegoers could not understand the strong Scottish slang and dialect.
11 FORMER Doctor Who actor Christopher Eccleston was Boyle’s first choice to play Begbie. Eccleston and McGregor both starred in Boyle’s previous film Shallow Grave, but the part went to Robert Carlyle.
12 BOYLE wanted Begbie to look like a ‘gay Ian Rush’, hence the character has a moustache similar to that of the Liverpool striker. Carlyle has said that he played Begbie as a closeted gay man whose rage stemmed from selfloathing. Welsh agreed that the character was sexually confused.
13 BOTH Jonny Lee Miller and his character have an obsession with James Bond. It helps that Miller is the grandson of Bernard Lee, who played 007’s boss M in numerous Bond films. Although English, he was hired for the role of Sick Boy after impressing filmmakers with his pitch-perfect Sean Connery impersonation.
14 DURING filming, Miller was dating an up-and-coming actress called Angelina Jolie. They liked to rollerblade on set between takes, which drove the director mad. They married in 1996 but divorced three years later. By then, the film had missed out on an Oscar for best adapted screenplay to Sling Blade by Billy Bob Thornton, who would go on to marry Miss Jolie.
15 PETER Mullan’s dealer’s nickname, Mother Superior, references The Beatles’ song Happiness Is A Warm Gun, which many people believe John Lennon wrote about heroin.
16 MILLER and McGregor were so hungover on the day they filmed a scene in which they shoot a bull terrier with an air rifle that they both had to lie down. The scene has become an oft-quoted classic. Boyle had intended to use the Mission: Impossible theme tune for the scene, but the licence would have cost triple the film’s entire £1.5million budget.
17 WELSH appears in the first film as drug dealer Mikey Forrester, who sells Renton those famous opioid suppositories, but his is not the only unlikely cameo. Oscarnominated scriptwriter John Hodge plays one of the security guards who chase Renton and Spud along Princes Street during the shoplifting scene. 18 MEMBERS of the Glasgow drug rehabilitation charity Calton Athletic Recovery Group worked as ‘advisers’ and taught McGregor and others how to ‘cook’ heroin authentically.
19 LARGE parts of the film were filmed in Glasgow with 30 of the film’s 50 locations inside the city’s Wills’ cigarette factory. Corrour railway station on the West Highland Line is among the few places to appear in both Trainspotting and T2, which was filmed 20 years later.
20 BOYLE asked his cast to watch films including Goodfellas, A Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, and The Hustler to get the feel for rebellious youth. In a nod to A Clockwork Orange, Boyle modelled the Volcano nightclub on the Korova Milk Bar, while the song playing is Temptation by Heaven 17, who took their name from the fake band in Anthony Burgess’s novel.
21 A PROSTHETIC arm was used for the graphic close-ups of injections, which featured a blood-filled pipe that would bleed when the needle was inserted. Chocolate mousse was used to make ‘the worst toilet in Scotland’ scene as realistic as possible. Boyle used a similar ploy to create a vile toilet in his Oscarwinner Slumdog Millionaire.
22 THE soundtrack – featuring Underworld, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed – is almost as famous as the movie but Britpop kings Oasis turned down a chance to feature after they took the name too literally. Noel Gallagher admitted: ‘I would have done something but honestly I thought it was about trainspotters. I didn’t know.’
23 RENTON’s famous pro-drugs Choose Life speech was inspired by the Reagan-era anti-drugs campaign, which ran under the slogan ‘Just say No’.
24 THE film poster is considered one of the most iconic of all time. But one of the central characters, Tommy MacKenzie, is absent because the actor, Kevin McKidd, was on holiday when the publicity material was shot.
25 WHEN the stars reunited for T2, released in 2017, it was 55-year-old Carlyle who had to go to extreme dietary lengths, eating 1,000 extra calories a day to look like ex-convict Begbie after 20 years on stodgy prison food. ‘I quite enjoyed it because I’ve been a skinny wee guy all my life. Now I’m back to being a skinny wee guy again,’ said the actor.