The Invisible Intellectual

FOR some, he speaks heresy. For others he talks softly of sociology, culture and working class politics, sprinkled with bits of chaos theory and new age mysticism. Still, people have been shot for less and, if you add to the picture some scenes of unhealthy devotion, a scramble for tickets and an approaching storm, you begin to get some idea of how fortunate was The Irish Times to be sitting in the right place at the right time when Irvine Welsh leaned over to beckon us in to the corner for a chat.

Like it or not though, Welsh has created some bother. For starters, he has given the academic world something it said contemporary youth culture could never really possess a literature. That such a literature, however, could have placed its finger so firmly on the pulse of a lost generation is something nobody could have predicted, and Welsh's rise to being what he calls best selling internationally acclaimed bastard in the space of five minutes' is a mystery that baffled even him. If sales of his work to date are any kind of social indicator then for worried parents everywhere these days, the only good news is that whatever else their kids are up to the likelihood is they're probably reading as well.

The issues, in case you don't know, are drugs and drug culture and his response to the hullabaloo has been a two fingered salute to the establishment. In a gesture worthy of his political origins in punk he has provocatively titled his next book Ecstasy: A Chemical Romance. It's a collection of three novellas in which he sets out to explore the culture of ecstasy, the different relationships people have with the drug and its social and political ramifications.

Growing up as he did in Edinburgh - first Leith, then Muirhouse, then Leith again - Welsh has a survivor's inside knowledge of that city's long and notorious relationship with drugs. It's an environment which, as he acknowledges in Trainspotting, his vaguely autobiographical diary of the life of a smack head - he was grateful to survive. Like Dublin, working class Edinburgh in the mid-1980s was decimated by an influx of cheap heroin. It brought with it a scourge of HIV which even today gives the city an unenviable name as one of the worst blackspots in Europe for the disease. For those who survived, grew up and grew out of that subculture, the next logical step was ecstasy. But for growing numbers, ecstasy, the drug of choice, was no longer simply a recreational tool, but a political one as well.

"It's always been a chemical society," argues Welsh, "a recreational chemical society. All that's happened is that people have changed the types of chemicals that they've been using illegal rather than legal chemical's. Drugs like heroin, crack, cocaine and tobacco are different because they're addictive drugs, so you canna walk away from them. The idea of choice becomes negated. For other drugs like acid, speed, hash, ecstasy all these kinda drugs, I think once they get established in the culture they'll always be there: just look at alcohol and Prohibition. You've got all these notices about ecstasy and sayin no and all that kinda stuff but it's just ridiculous to take that approach once it's in the culture. Once it's there it's just there."

You can socialise people into using the drug, he believes, but you'll never get rid of it: "People will always abuse it just like they abuse alcohol. The statistics are there."

For Welsh, the issues run deeper than the simple choice of how best to get out of your head on a Friday night. It's about, freedom from poverty and the distinctions of class, the freedom to make choices about lifestyle, clothes, musical tastes and attitudes and the fundamental right to a life of dignity. It's a working class agenda that has remained unchanged for generations.

"It's like the sort of thing we were talking about earlier," he says, "the intellectual student who does the occasional ecstasy going into some soul club, or the yuppie who goes to a cheese and wine get together. Drugs are never a problem for them because they've got opportunities, they've got prospects, they've got some kind of relationship with the people that are sponsoring society. But for people that are marginalised and out of that and pushed to the fringes of society, then drugs can become more of a problem for them."

LIKE any mass movement, the rave scene contains many disparate and fragmented elements all united (by those outside it) under the shadow of the recreational chemical of choice they happen to share. Within that sub culture, however, it is the very fluidity of agendas that allows the culture to grow and replenish itself. And it's a culture that has learned the bitter lesson of the past about the nature of the establishment.

"If you think about it," Welsh points out, "punk was an overtly political movement, but punk never had a Criminal Justice Bill, it never had that kind of reaction - from the establishment. The establishment sucked punk in. It was like the United Colors of Benetton: shock us and you can do our advertising. Punk was always like one long job interview I thought.

"House was a different effort. It was much more underground - move faster than the market don't get absorbed, keep it goin' keep it movin', keep it underground. It's always waves and waves and waves. People now know that the one thing that moves faster than the market is culture."

What of his own future? Will Irvine Welsh be able to stay ahead of the market and remain at the cutting edge of culture? He's not sure.

"It's happened so quickly that I haven't had time to reflect on the ironies of it and what I want to do. The next couple of years are gonna be the real test of all my f**kin' bollocks. We'll see if I take the money and run or if I'm going to reinvest it in the whole cultural movement in some way. I really don't know right now - there's a great temptation to do both."