How the Trainspotting soundtrack changed the world

I recently finished reading Scottish author Irvine Welsh’s new novel Men in Love, a sequel to his 1993 debut Trainspotting – the all-time classic tale of youth, poverty, addiction, the working class and the search for transcendence in the mean streets of 1980s Edinburgh that inspired Danny Boyle’s era-defining 1996 film of the same name.

Welsh’s latest among many assorted continuations of the adventures of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, Begbie and other Leith lowlifes is arguably his best yet. It picks up where Trainspotting ended (one robbing the others in a drug deal then disappearing) and sends them careering off on assorted doomed quests. This time not for heroin, but love, in its many forms: romantic, seedy, squalid, experimental, manipulative and ultimately tragic. 

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I loved a lot of things about the book, not least Welsh’s many clever and authentic music references and riffs. Standard fare from a man who started his creative life playing in punk bands in 70s London, before going on to befriend many a rock ’n’ roll star. Welsh recently said that when he types, he is always looking for “that four-four beat”.

Where Trainspotting was set against a backdrop of punk and glam, Men in Love follows Renton’s migration into the acid house scene, as it emerged in the mid-to-late 1980s with seismic consequences for youth culture. A great running gag about aggressively heterosexual psychopath Begbie’s love of Rod Stewart feels all the funnier after the unreconstructed octogenarian horn dog’s unashamedly regressive legends slot performance at Glastonbury this summer, replete with leggy blonde backing singers in tight Celtic shirts. (Begbie would surely have approved, even if he’d have preferred it was Hibs tops they were wearing.) 

I was intrigued, then, to discover that Welsh is releasing an album of the same name in connection with the book, under the moniker Irvine Welsh and The Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra. An “official sonic companion album” to Men in Love, so the blurb says, featuring lyrics penned by Welsh and performed by professional musicians and vocalists. “A journey,” the blurb continues, “through classic Motown, soul, and disco influences, reimagined and supercharged with modern electronic production”.

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Listening to this record after finishing the novel, I can’t really say that its shiny, slickly polished third-hand Chic-isms were the sort of music I had in mind as a soundtrack to such gritty episodes as, say, Begbie stabbing a guy in the hand, or Sick Boy shooting porn movies.

I think I might have preferred listening to the driving four-four beat of Welsh’s laptop keys than I would the naff lyrics in “You Gotta Be Strong” about how “love makes a heart just freeze”. But it’s an imaginative way of trying to help lift the book off the page. And if nothing else, a good excuse to hail the highly formative influence Welsh has had on a whole generation’s love of music, perhaps as much as their love of literature.

The soundtrack for Trainspotting, co-curated by Welsh and Boyle, went on to become almost as much of a pop culture phenomenon as the film. Some selections came straight from the pages of the novel, including Iggy Pop with “Lust for Life” – the drum intro to which I can’t walk down Edinburgh’s Princes Street without hearing thundering in my head.

Others, such as cuts from emergent Britpoppers Blur, Pulp and Elastica and thumping club anthems like Underworld’s “Born Slippy NUXX”, didn’t merely bottle the mid-90s zeitgeist in a wildly eclectic way, but spoke to the growing pains of Gen-Xers on the cusp of an uncertain future. 

Welsh’s first feature credit on a record to the best of my knowledge is 1996’s wordily titled “The Big Man and the Scream Team Meet the Barmy Army Uptown”. A heavily under-the-influence collaboration between Primal Scream, dub producer Adrian Sherwood and Welsh, loosely connected to the Euro ’96 football championships in England.

It features an array of expletive-filled stream-of-consciousness spoken word mumblings from Welsh about a time in 1979 when he went to Wembley to watch Scotland vs England and ended up drinking so much that he soiled himself. The FA tried to ban the track, but it still defiantly got to number 17 in the charts. Think something akin to Renton’s iconic “it’s shite being Scottish rant” in musical form.

Fast forward nearly 30 years and the stars would appear to have aligned, with the publication of Men in Love coming at the moment Welsh’s great mates Oasis are touring. Oasis famously missed out on featuring on the Trainspotting soundtrack because Noel Gallagher thought it was a film about men looking at trains.

In author Daniel Rachel’s superb 2019 oral history of Cool Britannia, Don’t Look Back In Anger, Welsh recalls championing Oasis from an early stage in the 90s through his writing for Loaded magazine, when he presciently hailed them as “the rock ’n’ roll band ravers love”. 

In more recent years, Welsh has been steadily banging the drum for Irish rappers Kneecap, in spite of the establishment’s best efforts to drag them down. In their authenticity and rebellious underdog spirit, Welsh might well recognise a little of his younger self. “Let’s be inspired by people like Kneecap,” he wrote in an opinion piece for a magazine earlier this year, hailing the band’s fight to bring attention to Gaza.

“Let’s be inspired by people who are speaking up in their own voices, from their own culture, from their own places, and saying: No.”

The album Men in Love by Irvine Welsh & The Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra is out now; the book Men in Love is out now (Vintage, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops. 

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