I ask Gillespie and Welsh for their thoughts on Brexit and Scottish independence. In July, Gillespie expressed concern about Brexit making life harder for musicians. Previously, he described Scottish independence as “inevitable”, while emphasising that he in no way considered himself to be a nationalist. It’s hard to talk about. It’s deep, personal stuff, I don’t want to upset his family. It was a long process … Throb was my brother, a co-songwriter, a big personality, an incredibly creative, talented man. When we were making Vanishing Point, he kind of stopped being present. He wasn’t there. He missed the whole record. When he was there, when he came up two or three times, he was on another planet, he was gone, he couldn’t play. When Andrew Weatherall passed, everything in the world just seemed to turn to shit. It was like the end of an era, for want of a better term Irvine Welsh But I don't mean to rant, it's not Welsh's fault, in fact he sums up a political thesis of sorts in the short story Smart Cunt:

The Acid House by Irvine Welsh | Waterstones

IW For me, it started with Bowie, because what he did as an artist was quite rare. Normally, people are coy about their references, everybody wants to appear highly original. Bowie was incredibly generous and shared all his sources. He was working-class art school, basically. Through him, you got into Lou Reed, Kraftwerk, electronic music, Burroughs, the Beat writers… He just threw it all out there for everyone to have a rummage around. Irvine Welsh certainly knows where to find the pulse on the underbelly of society and all those who scurry there. The author and playwright best known for Trainspotting has a rhythm of life lived on the edge and in the gutter flowing marvelously through the short stories and novella collected in Acid House, a collection of barfly fiction (or gutter lit, as a friend termed it) that is dark and grimy but also honest and without judgement. These are simply ‘ just people trying to get by,’ and Welsh brings their stories, as uncomfortable they may be, into lovingly crafted fiction. His skills as a playwright are certainly evinced in these dialogue heavy stories that often amazingly recreate the Scottish brogue and create characters that feel very present and very real. While bleak, baudy and full of violence, Acid House is a playfully experimental collection that may feel a bit one-note, but it is a note played quite well as he shows people struggling to keep their lives together while everything around them gleefully tears them apart.A través de esta serie de relato podremos ir por el mundo de las drogas, el alcohol y el fútbol europeo.

The Acid House - Irvine Welsh - Google Books

Trainspotting gained notoriety for its depiction of Edinburgh heroin culture; the novel is set at a time when Edinburgh was thought to be the ‘HIV capital of Europe’. While heroin is undoubtedly crucial to many of the narratives in Welsh’s first novel, Trainspotting draws its readers’ attention to aspects of Scottish and British culture which are perhaps even more uncomfortable. Trainspotting talks about poverty, sectarianism, racism and attitudes towards disability, above all insisting that if there is no such thing as society, there is certainly no such thing as a classless society.Welsh's writing, for all its bleakness, can give you an invigorating head-butt; The Acid House feels loveless and depressing. It's a shame, because in his more restrained moments, former documentarist McGuigan has a real eye for images: watch the closing shot of A Soft Touch, which tells you everything about Johnny's situation in one stark snapshot. To express his hatred for Boab, as well as his own self-loathing, God dooms Boab by turning him into a common housefly. Now an airborne insect, Boab puts a literal twist to the expression, "a fly on the wall." Spying on his family and friends' sleazy private lives, Boab discovers the depth of their secret perversions, before exacting revenge upon several tormentors.

Acid House by Irvine Welsh | Goodreads The Acid House by Irvine Welsh | Goodreads

For Glue (2001), Irvine Welsh returned to the polyphonic style he employed in Trainspotting. Glue is Welsh’s longest book to date and also his most ambitious in scope. For the first time in an Irvine Welsh novel he takes us through three decades of his characters’ lives, from the 1970s to the early years of the new millennium. This allows Welsh to explore his four principal characters, Terry Lawson, Carl Ewart, Billy Birrell and Andrew Galloway, as they develop and change over time, charting their reactions to the changing world around them. Another wee collection of short stories! I'm really getting through these this year. I realised two stories into this that I had already read it as a teenager, but I'd forgotten almost everything that happened in the stories, so it wasn't a great loss.So ye hud they powers, ye jist couldnae be bothered usin thum. That's why ah'm interested in ye Boab. You're jist like me. A lazy, apathetic, slovenly cunt. Now ah hate bein like this, n bein immortal, ah canny punish masel. Ah kin punish you though, mate. That's whit ah intend tae dae.” The other half of the book is the novella - "A Smart Cunt," in which Irvine Welsh is in his old coat - writing about a smart person trying to go through life with enormous emotional baggage - drugs help a lot. BG Brexit is an English and Welsh thing. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain. I don’t want to bring nationalist politics into this, that’s not my thing. I guess all nationalism is exclusive, not just English nationalism… When it happened, I thought, well, maybe this is English nationalism, which is, for me, frightening.