Irvine Welsh, Fringe by the Sea, North Berwick review: 'a sweary lovefest'
At this Fringe by the Sea appearance Irvine Welsh offered his views on Instagram culture, sentimental Christmas movies and the enduring appeal of the Trainspotting crew. Review by Mike Wade
Irvine Welsh, Big Top, North Berwick ★★★★
Renton. Sick Boy. Spud. Begbie. Readers and moviegoers familiar with the drugged up ne'er-do-wells of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting will know he has brought them back to life in Men in Love, the literary sequel (another one) to his thumping 1993 debut.
Readers love these lads, Welsh told his crowd in North Berwick, because they're archetypes: the cynical intellectual, the “manipulative fanny merchant”; the loveable loser; and the short-fused psycho. "It's nice to read about people who’re more f***ed up than you,” he reckoned.
This event was the kind of sweary lovefest you get when a 66-year-old bad-boy author appears before a 1,500-strong Fringe audience old enough to recall the Stranglers when all band members were still alive.
Ostensibly a discussion about music and films, Welsh drew sighs of delight from the Big Top audience when he revealed that watching White Christmas every year was his guilty pleasure.
“I always greet my eyes out when Big Crosby gets back together with Rosemary Clooney,” he confessed. “I get very sentimental [over] emotional love scenes. Anything violent I just laugh my head off.”
Less surprising, perhaps, was the scale of the bender he went on after his beloved Hibs won the Scottish Cup. “It’s probably lasted until about now,” he confessed. Nine years then.
His bugbear is social media where “everybody is like a mentally ill, Nazi, incel nonce.” Welsh said people were in thrall to their small screens, and their obsession inevitably hands power to the “tech bros” and the corporations who “tell us what to do.”
It wasn’t like that in the 1970s when his white-haired audience were under-nourished punks and “making a fool of yourself” was fun. Now “Instagram culture” and the need to conform means “young people have stopped making absolute c***s of themselves.” It’s a matter of regret, for Welsh and his devotees.
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