Irvine Welsh is at the top of his game. so why does he crave obscurity?

There is a perfect Welshian apercu; swearily iconoclastic – even when the icon in question in this instance is himself.

So, he’s not wanting a statue somewhere in Leith, then? Not even a plaque in Muirhouse saying, “The author of Trainspotting lived here”?

“No, I don’t want anything like that. I don’t want any recognition. I like to move silently through the world. That’s what I thought being a writer was. And I suddenly became this pop star in the nineties. I’m a writer. The whole reason I wanted to be successful was I didn’t want my face everywhere. I just wanted a little photo on a dust jacket. It never worked out that way.”

That’s an understatement. Is there a more famous writer/screenwriter/musician/DJ/former addict/cultural heavyweight in the country?

But how rude to begin here with thoughts of the author’s hopefully far-distant demise. Because, right now, in 2022, Irvine Welsh is as alive as he’s ever been. Newly married (for a third time), loved up and working like a Trojan. New book, new TV series, he’s also currently the subject of not one but two documentary film-makers. “I keep looking over my shoulder wondering if they’re here,” he says, checking behind him.

Oh, and he’s written a musical version of his breakthrough novel too. You’d think books aren’t good enough any more, Irvine.

“I love writing novels but I’ve never found it enough. I’ve always been involved with music. When Trainspotting took off I got right into film because the opportunity came up and now it’s TV.

“It seems a bit dilettante but I think if you’re a storyteller you can operate in these different environments. I’ve realised I’m more of a generic storyteller than a novelist as such. I’ve embraced that a little bit. It’s been good for me to own up to that.”

It is the last Monday morning in August and we are sitting on a bench in the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. Welsh is eating a date slice. He looks great;

whippet-thin in a Fred Perry jacket. He recently told the Observer that he exercises every day except Sunday and the results are evident.

“You want to look decent with your clothes off,” he tells me. To do otherwise is, he suggests, “disrespectful to your lover.”

And, he adds, working out makes it easier to move around. “We get older and we get slower and we get stiffer and our bodies slow down. But I think you just have to up your game a little bit and keep yourself active and busy.

“I know if I’m out in the tracksuit running or if I’m sparring or on the pads or in the gym lifting weights or on the treadmill I just feel so much better.”

It’s not that he’s given up bad habits. It’s just that they have less appeal. “With drink and drugs you feel like you are just replaying previous narratives. You think, ‘I’ve done all this before.’ When you take drink and drugs now, you just talk about the last time you got f***** up. It’s diminishing returns.”

Is exercise itself a form of addiction, though? “Yeah, it certainly is. It’s the endorphins, the sporting high and the buzz that you get that carries you through the day. But it’s a good one. It’s a less harmful one. If you’re going to have addictions, have one that benefits you.”

In short, for Welsh, life is good right now. “Yes. I’m madly in love and I’m productive in work and art. And that’s as good a place as I could possibly be.”

Earlier this month he married actor and bar owner Emma Currie. They met when he was spending more time in Scotland during the pandemic to support his 93-year-old mother.

“We had known each other vaguely because I used to go into her pub. There was nothing to do, so we started doing these walks together and a romance developed. It was nice. A really lovely time.”

Basically, the coronavirus pandemic was perversely good for him. He also got a lot of work done. The reason he’s talking to me, after all, is his new novel, The Long Knives, a sequel to his 2008 novel Crime, which was the basis of last year’s TV series starring Dougray Scott. The new novel will be the basis of the second series. Things are moving a little quicker this time around. Filming on the TV version of The Long Knives starts the day we meet. The novel was published the previous Thursday. “It’s just nuts,” Welsh admits. “It usually takes 15 years. It’s taken three days.”

The Long Knives is Welsh’s 13th novel and unsurprisingly it is a very Welshian brew of extreme violence (the book begins with the castration and murder of a racist politician), extreme psychologies (wannabe avenging angel DI Ray Lennox remains just a tad messed up) and extreme humour. (One wonders how they are going to film the reappearance of the dead politician’s genitalia on a popular Edinburgh tourist spot.) I loved it, but in some ways it feels like one of Welsh’s most conventional books. He doesn’t necessarily disagree. “I think I’ve learned to write proper books in a strange way,” he suggests. “I’ve still managed to keep my own interests, but I do them much more in the context of a proper novel now. Most of my books now, there is at least a semblance of plot and structure in them.”

But as anyone who watched the first series of Crime will know, what begins as straightforward police procedural doesn’t keep to its lane. “That’s the whole idea. You give them what they are used to and then you move it on to darker terrain. You earn the right to take people there. You start off as The Bill and end up as True Detective, basically. That was my ambition for it. And it still is.”

In The Long Knives, Welsh explores the moment we are living in now. “I wanted to get to the idea that we’re all confused about what’s happening in the world because all the markers that identified us – capitalism, industrialisation, the division of labour, sex and gender, identity roles, all that stuff – are breaking down, all these markers have gone. So, we’re all adrift. The whole life that we had is disintegrating around us.”

The book’s hot-button topic is likely to be its exploration of trans issues. Welsh had a trans sensitivity reader work on the manuscript. Why did he feel he needed that?

“I didn’t. I didn’t even know there were such things. The publisher said, ‘Well, we’ve had the trans sensitivity reader read it.’ I was like, ‘F***, this is going to be extreme censorship. What’s going on here?’”

But when he read the three-page report the reader provided he changed his mind. “I read it and it was absolutely beautiful. It was really helpful and supportive and informed and very educational for me.

“We catastrophise a lot of those things. We pick extreme examples and we make them into some kind of threat when they’re not really a threat at all. It’s actually helpful to look at different people who have taken different routes to find the essence of their humanity.

“We all want to be the best versions of ourselves that we can possibly be. And some people are taking very radical routes to doing that and very brave routes in some way.

“There is no archetypal person, there is certainly no archetypal trans person, no archetypal trans experience. That’s why it’s very hard to depict in literature because it’s not established enough to have archetypes. It’s a very small minority. so you have to be sensitive.”

What then has he learned about the trans experience? “I think the diversity of that experience was the thing. Everybody has different goals and comes from different backgrounds.”

It’s about the extreme personal journeys of people who believe that they are locked into a sex or gender that isn’t theirs, he says, and who will go to radical ends to make themselves “congruent and complete”.

But, he adds, it can also be about young people who are playing with the idea in the same way his generation experimented with make-up and clothing because of the example of David Bowie.

“You have all these different entry points,” Welsh says. “And I think for a lot of people who have been through a radical trans experience there is an exhaustion. ‘We’ve had to fight all these battles, both with the world, but also internally, to get to this point. We just don’t want to f****** talk about it any more in our lives.’

“And because of that you do get a lot of shouty advocates on their behalf, or supposedly on their behalf, who are not really as invested in this as they think. That becomes a narcissistic attention-seeking thing on social media as well.”

I bring up the cases of JK Rowling and Joanne Harris, two writers who have been lauded and lambasted on social media for taking positions on the subject.

“How can anybody dislike these two women? “ Welsh asks. “They are both lovely. They are put up on a stake as these modern witches on the internet.

“If you talk to both of them – I can’t put words in their mouths, they can speak for themselves – but my understanding, having spoken to them both, is they’re both feminists and they both believe in trans rights and these two things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

“You can’t make people like that into demonic forces. And what they have in common is that they’re both women. Why is it that we have to do this to any woman who is successful and makes an opinion? Why do they have to be denigrated to that extent?”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Welsh, like his character Lennox, has a low opinion of our political classes.

“Nobody seems to have a high opinion of them now. Really, what is their role? Is it to take the resources of the country and give it to a trans-national elite and skim off some stuff on the way for their friends and cronies? That’s what we expect of politicians. We don’t really expect them to do anything for us.

“We look to them for entertainment now, I think.”

The Tory leadership contest (still ongoing when we speak) is basically X-Factor, then? “It is. It is vectored perfectly with celebrity culture. This neo-liberal collapse of social order is vectored with celebrity culture.

“It was Dave versus Miliband, Boris versus Corbyn. They will reframe the whole thing. It will be Liz versus Starmer, the plucky goodie against the sour-faced baddie. It’s all set up from the start.”

Nothing will change then? Well maybe, when the cost of living crisis really bites, he says.

“I think people will stop paying bills. I think if we get a really hot summer next year people will be out on the streets. We’re in the process of an ongoing revolution; it’s just happening very slowly.”

In the meantime, Welsh will keep working. Next up, Trainspotting the musical. Is Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber involved in that? He smiles at the idea.

“Phil McIntyre, who does We Will Rock You, does all the big West End shows, he has been on at me for ages to do it.”

Eventually Welsh thought, why not? Teaming up with his music partner Steve Mac, “we smashed out these songs. We did it in two weeks basically. We did about 12 songs. They were blues and disco and jazz and country and western. We usually do acid techno.”

Welsh is thrilled with the result. “I think two or three of them will be iconic. They’re just f****** great songs.”

He’s not the only one who thinks so, it seems. “We had the producers coming down to the studio in Brighton from London. We were really nervous but they loved them. By the second song they said, ‘I think we’ve got a musical here.’

“The interesting thing is, the actual script is kind of darker than the book or the film. It’s the only way to go with it. It’s funnier and darker. It’s different from the book. It’s different from the film. It’s different from the original stage play.

“And that’s why we didn’t want to license the music from the film. We have licensed Lust for Life and Born Slippy to book-end it.”

He’s hoping we might see it either next year or in 2024. In the interim, Trainspotting the novel will turn 30. Does that feel like half a lifetime ago?

“It’s funny. Yes and no. People think in very different ways about time. I tend to live in the present. I don’t have any real concept of the future and only a shaky concept of the past. As soon as something is done I move on.”

His wife and some of his friends have photographic memories, he says. “I’ve one mate who can tell what we were dressed like in 1978. And I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. I can remember the date slice,” he says, pointing to the wrapper. “That’s about as far back as I can go.

“You worry now is it some kind of dementing process that’s taking place. But I realise that I’ve always been like that.”

Three decades. In that time Welsh’s circumstances have changed dramatically. These days he divides his time between Edinburgh, Miami, London and a place in Oxfordshire where he goes when he needs a bit of peace and quiet to write.

But how has he himself changed since the publication of Trainspotting? Do we ever change, Irvine?

“I don’t think we do fundamentally. We get better at concealing our f*****-up bits.”

There’s a legend to put on a plaque.

The Long Knives by Irvine Welsh, published by Jonathan Cape, is out now