Britain, the 1980s. Thatcher. Black Monday. Riots. Strikes. Racism. In 1984 George Orwell’s 1984 became a bestseller again, slotting right into the nightmarish dystopia it had predicted. As unemployment figures soared, heroin addiction spread, as did HIV and AIDS. It was bloody miserable.
Then: 1988. Ecstasy, a drug promoting love and togetherness, arrived in the U.K., brought back from Ibiza — legend has it — by members of the Mancunian rock band New Order. The Second Summer of Love began. Two years later Thatcher’s 15-year prime ministerial reign was over. Britpop happened. Suede. Pulp. Blur. Oasis and the Spice Girls. Four Weddings. Trainspotting. Damien Hirst. Alexander McQueen. Tony Blair! In 1996 Ben & Jerry’s released a new flavor of ice cream called Cool Britannia. Newsweek declared London “the coolest city on the planet.” It was bloody brilliant.
It’s at the intersection of these two eras that Irvine Welsh’s new novel Men in Love takes place. On an uncomfortably hot day in summer 2025 he sits upstairs in the Parakeet, a charming pub in Camden, the hip London borough that was once home to Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty and the like. Smudged tattoos peering out from beneath the sleeves of his t-shirt, Welsh discusses Men in Love and its accompanying album, nine loved-up disco tunes composed in companion to the novel. We’re in a private room. Or so we thought. Suddenly the door from downstairs flies open.
“Scotland’s finest! In ma pub!” exclaims a Scottish voice, belonging to a man staring awestruck at my interviewee. Welsh looks up from his zero-percent Guinness.
“Is this your pub?” he asks, tones friendly. “I’m Irvine.”
“I know who ye are!” says the man. “I’m the manager here. This is surreal.”
“I live round the corner,” says Welsh. “I’ve come in here for a beer a few times.”
“I’ll send ye a pint next time yir here,” the manager tells him, before pausing, lowering his eyebrows and raising a finger. “Jist the one though.”
Editor’s picks
He adds this caveat perhaps to guard against the possibility that Welsh might overdo it on free beer and drop an empty pint glass off the balcony onto an unsuspecting punter below, as one character does in his debut novel Trainspotting, published in 1993 and turned into a hugely successful film by director Danny Boyle three years later. Written in a phonetically rendered Scottish accent, Trainspotting painted a visceral, hilarious but bleak image of Edinburgh in the 1980s, a time defined by unemployment, addiction, crime and misdemeanor, following characters like Mark “Rent Boy” Renton, Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson, glass-throwing nutcase Begbie and hopeless junkie Spud as they steal books from bookshops and fish drugs from overflowing toilets.
Although the novel was set in the Eighties, the film came to symbolize British culture in the 1990s, with an iconic catchphrase — CHOOSE LIFE — that, although it was originally delivered with irony, became synonymous with the vivacity of Britain at the time. Welsh has already written two sequels, as well as a prequel and a spinoff based in the same universe, but Men in Love begins moments after Trainspotting finished, with Renton having just betrayed his friends and fled to Amsterdam with a bag of cash that they hustled for together. In the new novel, Renton and co grapple with varying understandings of love, brushing with prison, politics and the porn industry along the way.
Trainspotting the film is as famous for its soundtrack as anything else, and Welsh has helped run the extremely credible dance label Jack Said What for some time, so his foray into music making should not come as a surprise. But think Trainspotting and you might think Iggy Pop, Underworld or Lou Reed. And Men in Love is set at the moment acid house and rave culture exploded in Britain.
Related Content
So why a disco album? “In uncertain times, dominated by the ascendancy of soul dead oligarchs, their corrosive technology and looting economics, the great positive constant for humanity remains our infinite capacity for love,” reads a typically poetic note from Welsh in the album’s liner notes. “Music is still the medium by which we bypass their reductive, low frequency world … One of the greatest musical forms in delivering that ecstasy has been discotheque music … So don’t diss the disco, let’s dance away the heartache or die trying, because nothing else makes any sense.”
“Music hits spots that literature can’t,” Welsh adds now, nursing his boozeless beer. He explains that if pages of a book are like tiles on a wall, music is the grout that holds it together. It’s a neat paean to his career as a writer, every stage of which has pulsated to the beat of some kind of music. If there’s one thing I want to probe, it’s how much he thinks music, literature, art and culture can truly help us, more than simply providing a soundtrack, a backdrop to a world in chaos, chaos that has only intensified since the birth of disco, the publication of Trainspotting, the rise and fall of rave and all that has happened since. As he always seems to do, he provides a fountain of streetwise wisdom, talking warmly and engagingly on anything that’s put in front of him. Especially music.
Welsh was born in Leith, Edinburgh, where most of Trainspotting takes place. His father was a dockworker, his mother a waitress whose cooking Welsh once compared to waterboarding. He says he remembers dancing to the Beatles’ debut single “Love Me Do” as a child in 1963. When he was old enough he discovered Bowie, Iggy and Lou Reed. Intrigued by the rebellious image outlined in the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” he and a friend tried the drug in the early 1980s. He remained addicted for about a year, then kicked the habit, moved to London and found a respectable job working for the local council. He played in various punk bands with friends, writing stories and turning them into long ballads. “We’re a punk band,” his bandmates told him. “We don’t want fucking 12 verses explaining this big fucking long story.”
When ecstasy swept the U.K., Welsh was not an immediate convert. “I was very gun-shy about trying ecstasy,” he says. “Because I’d had this heroin experience and I thought: ‘I’m done with drugs, I’m not going anywhere near them.’” In the late Eighties he made a tentative step inside legendary DJ Danny Rampling’s south-London nightclub Shoom, designed to bring Ibiza nightlife to Britain. “Do you remember that scene in Basic Instinct, [with] Michael Douglas?” asks Welsh. “When everybody’s dressed in this mad fucking leather and bondage gear and all that, and he’s got this v-neck sweater on and he’s doing this stiff-arse dance? That’s what I was like.”
A year later he was at a Christmas party in Edinburgh and his friend Susan told him: “You’re taking an eckie and you’re coming raving with us.” He ended up in the UFO Club and, once the pill hit, it was like he’d invented acid house himself. “I was like: Where’s the next rave?” He went to the Republic in Sheffield, Back to Basics in Leeds, the Hacienda in Manchester, and started living for the weekend while working his 9-to-5 job. “I was like: ‘Oh God, I can’t do this,’” he says. “I’ve got to do something… artistic, for want of a better word. And that’s when I started seriously writing Trainspotting. It gave me the impetus to do that. I’d be raving all night and in the morning I’d be sitting there, can’t go to bed, head still buzzing, just smashing out pages.”
In interviews ever since its publication Welsh has said Trainspotting was his attempt to get the energy of acid house — 4/4 rhythm and all — into a book. Music thrums throughout the novel. In one chapter Iggy Pop comes to play in Edinburgh, in the same month as the girlfriend of local lad Tommy is celebrating her birthday: “It was the ticket or a present for her. Nae contest. This was Iggy Pop. Ah thought she’d understand.” When the film hit screens in 1996, it opened to the sound of Iggy’s “Lust for Life,” iconically soundtracking a chase scene as Ewan McGregor legged it down an Edinburgh high street tailed by two police officers. Years later Welsh moved to Miami, where Iggy became his friend and neighbor.
Welsh kept up his routine — work, rave, write, repeat — until he’d written his second book, the short story collection The Acid House, which was finished before Trainspotting even reached the shelves. By ’96 he’d written four books, including another short story collection called Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance, which bears the strongest resemblance to Men in Love of the 22 other books in his bibliography. In the third of Ecstasy’s stories, a pill-popping DJ called Woodsy confronts an outraged priest, holding a bag full of drugs and declaring: “There’s nae medium between man and god except MDMA!”
As if to echo the line, on the Men in Love track “Saviour,” soul powerhouse and former West End Mustafa Shaun Escoffery belts out the lyrics — written by Welsh — “Gonna tell you right, gonna tell you now, a saviour is coming.” Whether that saviour is God, love or MDMA is left unsaid, but it offers a certain spirituality that Welsh says is missing from a culture now dominated by unromantic tech nerds incapable of talking to the opposite sex.
“The Internet was set up for guys that couldn’t pull,” he says. “So they set up this whole stalker network. We’ve all bought into that and it’s spiritually barren.” He says this motivated him to include fragments of poetry and prose by the Romantic greats of English literature — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake — at the beginning of every chapter in Men in Love.
In much the way Men in Love the novel places Welsh’s own writing in dialogue with the wordsmiths of history, the Men in Love album offers a conversation between two lovers. “What’s a man in love to do?!” cries Escoffery on track one. “You gotta be stronger to play this game, love’s more than a weekend tease,” replies Louise Marshall, onetime David Gilmour’s backing singer, on track two. Both singers have immensely powerful voices, chosen in deliberate contrast to the pop sound of today. Welsh, ever the provocateur, explains why in characteristically inflammatory terms. “If you listen to mainstream commercial music, everybody’s got that kind of sub-Sean Paul, fake Jamaican, adenoidal sex-offender whine and lyrics like ‘Baby, I want to feel your body next to mine…’” he says. “And the women have got that shrieking, Minnie Mouse-type, sex-offender-victim voice. Whereas this is like proper men, proper women, booming out songs of love and redemption and pain and hurt, which love is all about.”
As well as writing all the lyrics, Welsh made the album with unsung U.K. club legend Steve Mac, his co-label head at Jack Said What records. Mac says they first met about a decade ago at Amsterdam Dance Event when “both a bit pissed” on local booze. They started working together on the forthcoming Trainspotting musical. “That was a real turning point,” Mac says. “I saw Irvine as a really, really good songwriter. It was unbelievable.”
“I’ve got no keyboarding or fretboarding skills,” says Welsh. “But I’ve got an array of tunes in my head all the time.” He began visiting Mac at his studio in Brighton and explaining his ideas for songs, “and suddenly he’s ripped down the bassline, we’re working on the basic melody…” and it all came together. Disco’s hallelujastic mood fit Welsh’s relationship with Mac. “My books are quite dark,” Welsh adds. “But when we get together, it’s a different energy. It’s a whole joyous experience. So we thought: ‘Let’s do a disco album.’”
In the late Eighties, after disco morphed into house and then acid house, the Second Summer of Love filled everyone it touched with ecstasy and optimism. “I think it’s time to fall in love!” announces narrator Lloyd in Ecstasy, off his tits on a dancefloor having just delivered an impassioned eulogy on the power of pills. In Men in Love, the frontman of a struggling fictional rock band called Big Tobacco stands in a sweaty nightclub as ecstasy and kick drums pulsate through his veins. “My God, this acid house,” he thinks. “It feels like everyone in the world is full of love. I can’t think of a single person in our generation this revolution could possibly pass by.”
The revolution did pass by, with the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 making events “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” illegal in the U.K. and cutting the rave movement short. But ecstasy spread to the United States and beyond. Welsh thinks its legacy remains evident. “When I grew up in Scotland, it was like a kind of sexual apartheid,” he says. “You’d go to the discotheque and the girls would dance around their handbags. The guys would sit and drink, then stagger onto the floor for the last dance and hopefully go home with one of them. Ecstasy and acid house changed that completely.” He remembers sitting in a pub in Leith, in Scotland, shortly after taking his first E, taking an interest in his mates’ girlfriends for the first time. “Suddenly you think: They’re far more interesting than my mates! It opened up a whole new dimension. I think I see that still existing.”
Trainspotting the novel sold millions of copies and the film became a cult classic. But the British utopia of the 1990s came and went. Tony Blair’s Labour Party won power in 1997, complete with an Oasis campaign song, but six years later Blair took Britain to war in Iraq despite protests from millions around the country. Less than four years after 9/11, the 7/7 terror attacks devastated London. The 2008 financial crash happened. Oasis split up. Could a period as positive and optimistic as the 1990s ever happen again?
“I think it’s very difficult with the internet, because things can’t incubate on the streets,” says Welsh. “But I think there’ll be a reaction against it, not against the internet as a concept, this library that opens up to the world; against the corporations of the state farming, basically controlling you, telling you what to do. I’m hoping there will be some kind of renaissance, whereby we get back out into the streets. Sometimes you see the embers of it. Think about Brat summer. It was all like young women who were basically locked up for a couple of years under COVID.” He even thinks the sea of cameraphones that dominate concert crowds might die out, citing clips of fans at a recent Iggy show being shouted down for watching the whole thing through their phone screens and comparing the reaction to that of someone fed up with having cigarette smoke blown in their face by a stranger.
Britain, the 2020s. Brat Summer. Oasis back together. Pulp touring again. Olivia Rodrigo in Union Jack hot pants. Skepta on Playboi Carti’s new album. British actors playing Batman and Spider-Man. The Labour Party in power again. “Cool Britannia is back!” British magazine Tatler declared on its cover this month.
“I’m putting a lot of hope in the Oasis comeback,” Welsh says. “Because 17 million people — that’s about a third of the population — wanted to get tickets. Clearly something bigger is happening than just a band here.”
When Danny Boyle was making Trainspotting, he asked Oasis to feature on the soundtrack, but Noel Gallagher turned it down because he reportedly thought the film was actually about trains. He later praised both Welsh and Boyle because they “didn’t care about what anyone else thought. That’s how great art is created.” He and Welsh are now friends and Welsh says he expects to see Oasis in Edinburgh next month, even if the local council is worried about “rowdy” and “middle-aged fans” who will all be drunk (claims to which Liam Gallagher responded by tweeting: “quite frankly your attitude fucking stinks I’d leave town that day if I was any of you lot.”)
You can see actors playing a young Oasis in Creation Stories, a biopic about the man who signed the band with a screenplay written by Welsh. Since those punkish beginnings Oasis have become one of the biggest bands ever, and the new tour includes. Since those punkish beginnings Oasis have become one of the biggest bands ever, with fans paying hundreds for “dynamically priced” tickets to the reunion shows and well-publicized partnerships with Levi’s, Burberry and Adidas (incidentally, you’ll see the Adidas logo quite a few times in T2: Trainspotting, Boyle’s 2017 sequel).
“You need to choose cash in order to choose life,” says Renton in Men in Love, capturing something about the archetypal arc of a rockstar career: start with a punk spirit, make it big, then eventually give up trying to save the world in favour of simply earning as much money as you can. Is Welsh himself an exception to that archetype?
“Yes,” he smiles. “Mainly through incompetence.” He adds that if he’d been strategic enough he could have spun Trainspotting into a proper franchise, written in chronological order with one central character and a lucrative run of spinoff TV shows, brand-partnered merch and a theme park. He’s been an outspoken political voice throughout his 30-year career, critical of both Trump and Harris before the last election and recently declaring that the U.K.’s current Labour government are “all a bunch of fucking wankers.” But he’s conscious of not wanting to become “that guy who can’t shut up about this issue and all that.”
“I’m quite cynical about artists,” he says. “I’m quite cynical about myself. Whenever I say something about a worthy cause, whether it’s climate change or Palestine, I think to myself: Am I just playing to some kind of gallery here? Is there a Machiavellian part of me that’s trying to sell books and albums? And there probably is. So I don’t trust myself to constantly be this standard bearer.”
He is, however, a fan of a certain Irish rap trio. “More power to Kneecap,” Welsh wrote in a recent op-ed for the Face magazine, defending the band’s vocal support for Palestine during performances at Coachella and Glastonbury this year amid prosecution by the U.K. government and calls for their U.S. visas to be revoked. “When all the British state can do in response is persecute a band for this – to try to stop them from playing music and from touring internationally with these ridiculous, nonsensical charges – it really is just an embarrassment to us all,” he wrote.
Trending Stories
He says he watched Kneecap’s recent show in north London with Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. “The show was just unbelievably good,” Welsh says. Perhaps Kneecap are proof that music can be more than just a soundtrack to the atrocities that engulf our world. Perhaps one day they’ll cash in on a multimillion-pound reunion tour complete with branded sponsorship deals and dynamic ticket prices.
Ecstasy and acid house never saved the world. But Irvine Welsh still goes raving. He DJ’d at a club in Ibiza earlier this month. Like the rave, like Kneecap, like Trainspotting and Men in Love, perhaps all music can do is provide an alternative to the atrocities. “It’s all we’ve got,” Welsh says. “We don’t have politicians. We don’t have institutions. They’re all lined up on the side of the billionaire class. We don’t really have anything other than the fact that we can enjoy life. Living well is the best revenge, basically.”
