Trainpotting writer Irwin Welsh says AI has made us machines below

Irwin Welsh is pointing to the second floor of a gray stone building in the port district of Edinburgh.

As he gets ready to publish the sequel to his 1993 Panth novel trainpotting, the author is showing me the window of the room with his scene on a local park, where he wrote the first book that later became a hit film starring Ivan McGregor and Johnny Li Miller.

A Lath Dokar and the son of a waitress – who did a course in electrical engineering, spent time in a punk band and was accustomed to heroin as a small man – Welsh went back from London to Lath’s house and “bus typing”. He tells me that before writing a trainPotting, he decided “This is my last chance to do something creative”.

The trainpotting follows the life of a group of heroin-aidi friends in Edinburgh. Violent, often shocking and darkly funny, the book is a picture of social decay arising out of the disintegration of the industrial hearts of Britain. It was Welsh’s first novel and sold more than a million copies in Britain alone.

But when he was typing back in the early 90s, he did not know that it would be good. “I just wanted to complete it,” they explain. This definitely paid.

The book and the film touched a cultural zeghetist so successfully that in more than 30 years, you can still book an official trainpotting tour in Lith. But on a banging Scottish Summer Day, I myself am receiving a Bespok from the author, visiting some major predators who inspired him.

We are head of the so -called banana flats, the curved building is officially called the cables wind house that dominates the Lith Skyline and where his character is a sick boy (starred by Miller in the film).

We visit the Lath Doors Club, where Renton (played by McGragger) goes with her mother and father and where Welsh recalls “sitting there as a child and sitting there with lemonade and crisp” and “really feeling resentment”, while the other were getting drunk.

Welsh’s latest return to his characters is called Men in Love. He has already written a prequel about follow-up books and trainpotting gangs (he can not clearly find enough of them), but this new novel has been set immediately after the first one ends, when Renton has participated with the money that he and his friends have created from a big drug deal.

This time, Welsh is finding out when young people fall in love and what happens to relationships. He was partially motivated to write it, he says, because “we are living in a world that seems full of hatred and poison … I think it’s time when we have focused more on love, which is a kind of firefight for all of that”.

But don’t expect the sacred stories of romance – this is Welsh, after all. Cheating, lying, manipulating – and many times, frightening – some of his characters are still very high in evidence.

Even the book finally has a disgrace that explaining that the novel is set in the 1980s, many characters “express themselves in ways that we now consider aggressive and discriminatory”.

Welsh says that the publishers emphasized this. “They felt that we live in such a sensitive time that we need to make that point.

“We live a lot of sensors in the atmosphere,” he continues. While he admits that the terms of misunderstanding in the book, including “Fat Lassi”, are hurt and “a good reason why we don’t call them”, he worries that if the state starts saying “You can’t talk about it, you can’t talk about it, I think we are on a dangerous road”.

Men spread in the love story in the early 90s. It is being published at a time when Britain is indulging in one of the 90s indifference, in which the glansbury is being reviewed with a surprise set of pulp in oasis and glastonebury on the tour.

Welsh tells me that he “never left” that era, but says that the younger generation also feels an apathy for it because “people lived then”.

He pins some defects for cultural changes on the Internet and social media that has become “a controlled instead of a competent force”.

As a person who understands addiction, Welsh hopes that we will be “more prudent” about using social media in the future. The way he points to the way people point to the “their phone stuck on their face”, while they are moving around.

“If we survive for the next 50 years, it looks as strange in the film as the people’s chain smoking cigarettes returned in the 80s.”

He also thinks that the Internet is making us more stupid. “When you think of machines for you, your brain just atrophis.” They fear that we are “moving towards a democratic, post-art, post-culture society, where we have got artificial intelligence on one side and we have a kind of natural foolishness on the other side, we just become these dumb down machines that are taking instructions”.

The success of trainpotting came at the time when he says at a time when people were ready to read more challenging, low formula books. And as the money rolled, he gave him freedom to write.

He is also a DJ and is releasing an album with science-fi-sol orchestra to go with his new book. The disco tracks belong to the novel’s characters, story and “emotional landscape”.

Music is “original” for his writing and “he is looking for four beats at all times while typing”.

He creates a playlist in his head for every character and subject.

Renton iggi pop, heat reed, velvet underground. The sick boy also likes Marwin Gay, Bob Dylan, New Order.

Aggressive and violent begby “Rod Stewart and Power Bailads are basically liked”.

The singer recently told The Times that the public should give a chance to UK leader Nigel Faraj. I wondered if Irwin Welsh feels that his trainpotting characters would support that party if he was now growing up.

He tells the Scottish working sections, “still a radical kind of soul. They are not really some public schools stools”.

However later he adds “people are so frustrated that they will go with anyone who has the rhetoric of change”.

Welsh has always been political and, as we wandered in the region where he grew up, he explains how Margaret Thatcher ended the centuries of shipbuilding “in a stroke” in Lith. They say that five thousand doctors did not become.

Trainpotting also echoes, he thinks, as it “begins adjustment for people living in a world without paying without paying. And now we are all in that position”.

Their argument is that the UK’s class system is changing the concentration of rich “due to this huge concentration of money.

The working classes already have no money and now the middle classes are being drawn into greater loans and are able to reduce their property that makes life unsafe.

“We are all former members, basically. We do not know how long we have done, and we do not know how long it will last because our economy, our society is in a long -term revolutionary change.”

In my time in Welsh’s company, we have not just visited Lith, there is an insight on my mind, everything from our dystopian future has exploded with opinion on why the best music was created in the analog era and even if he was offered a nighthud (it is not one, then).

When it is time for our time, he goes to the Doors Club to see a friend in the bar who was first found in a primary school 60 years ago. His old sail jokes me that he is a plumber while Welsh is a millionaire writer. You can see the affection between them.

Trainpotting may have completely changed Welsh’s life. But he is still plugged into the community that gave him shape, and let him be so brilliantly turned into imagination.

Purush in love is published on 24 July 2025