Trainspotting <\/em>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 \u201cRent Boy\u201d Renton, Simon \u201cSick Boy\u201d Williamson, glass-throwing nutcase Begbie and hopeless junkie Spud as they steal books from bookshops and fish drugs from overflowing toilets.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tAlthough the novel was set in the Eighties, the film came to symbolize British culture in the 1990s, with an iconic catchphrase \u2014 CHOOSE LIFE \u2014 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 <\/em>begins moments after Trainspotting<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\tTrainspotting <\/em>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 <\/em>making should not come as a surprise. But think Trainspotting<\/em> and you might think Iggy Pop, Underworld or Lou Reed. And Men in Love<\/em> is set at the moment acid house and rave culture exploded in Britain.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n
\n\tSo why a disco album? \u201cIn 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,\u201d reads a typically poetic note from Welsh in the album\u2019s liner notes. \u201cMusic is still the medium by which we bypass their reductive, low frequency world \u2026 One of the greatest musical forms in delivering that ecstasy has been discotheque music \u2026 So don\u2019t diss the disco, let\u2019s dance away the heartache or die trying, because nothing else makes any sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cMusic hits spots that literature can\u2019t,\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s one thing I want to probe, it\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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\u2019s put in front of him. Especially music.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tWelsh was born in Leith, Edinburgh, where most of Trainspotting <\/em>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\u2019 debut single \u201cLove Me Do\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cHeroin,\u201d 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. \u201cWe\u2019re a punk band,\u201d his bandmates told him. \u201cWe don\u2019t want fucking 12 verses explaining this big fucking long story.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tWhen ecstasy swept the U.K., Welsh was not an immediate convert. \u201cI was very gun-shy about trying ecstasy,\u201d he says. \u201cBecause I\u2019d had this heroin experience and I thought: \u2018I\u2019m done with drugs, I\u2019m not going anywhere near them.\u2019\u201d In the late Eighties he made a tentative step inside legendary DJ Danny Rampling\u2019s south-London nightclub Shoom, designed to bring Ibiza nightlife to Britain. \u201cDo you remember that scene in Basic Instinct<\/em>, [with] Michael Douglas?\u201d asks Welsh. \u201cWhen everybody\u2019s dressed in this mad fucking leather and bondage gear and all that, and he\u2019s got this v-neck sweater on and he\u2019s doing this stiff-arse dance? That\u2019s what I was like.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tA year later he was at a Christmas party in Edinburgh and his friend Susan told him: \u201cYou\u2019re taking an eckie and you\u2019re coming raving with us.\u201d He ended up in the UFO Club and, once the pill hit, it was like he\u2019d invented acid house himself. \u201cI was like: Where\u2019s the next rave?\u201d 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. \u201cI was like: \u2018Oh God, I can\u2019t do this,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve got to do something\u2026 artistic, for want of a better word. And that\u2019s when I started seriously writing Trainspotting<\/em>. It gave me the impetus to do that. I\u2019d be raving all night and in the morning I\u2019d be sitting there, can\u2019t go to bed, head still buzzing, just smashing out pages.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tIn interviews ever since its publication Welsh has said Trainspotting <\/em>was his attempt to get the energy of acid house \u2014 4\/4 rhythm and all \u2014 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: \u201cIt was the ticket or a present for her. Nae contest. This was Iggy Pop. Ah thought she\u2019d understand.\u201d When the film hit screens in 1996, it opened to the sound of Iggy\u2019s \u201cLust for Life,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\tWelsh kept up his routine \u2014 work, rave, write, repeat \u2014 until he\u2019d written his second book, the short story collection The Acid House<\/em>, which was finished before Trainspotting<\/em> even reached the shelves. By \u201996 he\u2019d written four books, including another short story collection called Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance<\/em>, which bears the strongest resemblance to Men in Love <\/em>of the 22 other books in his bibliography. In the third of Ecstasy<\/em>\u2019s stories, a pill-popping DJ called Woodsy confronts an outraged priest, holding a bag full of drugs and declaring: \u201cThere\u2019s nae medium between man and god except MDMA!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tAs if to echo the line, on the Men in Love <\/em>track \u201cSaviour,\u201d soul powerhouse and former West End Mustafa Shaun Escoffery belts out the lyrics \u2014 written by Welsh \u2014 \u201cGonna tell you right, gonna tell you now, a saviour is coming.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\t\u201cThe Internet was set up for guys that couldn\u2019t pull,\u201d he says. \u201cSo they set up this whole stalker network. We\u2019ve all bought into that and it\u2019s spiritually barren.\u201d He says this motivated him to include fragments of poetry and prose by the Romantic greats of English literature \u2014 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake \u2014 at the beginning of every chapter in Men in Love<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\tIn much the way Men in Love<\/em> the novel places Welsh\u2019s own writing in dialogue with the wordsmiths of history, the Men in Love album offers a conversation between two lovers. \u201cWhat\u2019s a man in love to do?!\u201d cries Escoffery on track one. \u201cYou gotta be stronger to play this game, love\u2019s more than a weekend tease,\u201d replies Louise Marshall, onetime David Gilmour\u2019s 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. \u201cIf you listen to mainstream commercial music, everybody\u2019s got that kind of sub-Sean Paul, fake Jamaican, adenoidal sex-offender whine and lyrics like \u2018Baby, I want to feel your body next to mine\u2026\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n