'Edinburgh still influences me': Irvine Welsh on the new documentary looking at his creative life

“I was DJing at the Leith Social Club, in the old Tam O’ Shanter place, it was just such a great vibe, you know. There’s so many of my old crew, but also the young team are. It was just fabulous,” Welsh said. “So I think that it would still be very influential.”

The city that has provided the backdrop for so many of Welsh’s novels has dramatically changed in the intervening years, but those early years in the city have left their indelible mark on him.

“Writers are, just like anybody else, formed by your childhood, your teens and your early adulthood. So I would still be as influenced by it, whether or not I'd be able to write in the same way,” he said.

Welsh’s first novel was published in 1993 and was a smash hit. It spawned one of the great Scottish films, and an equally good soundtrack. It could be quite possible to ask any Scot what their favourite book, film and album was and receive the same answer for all three.

He followed Trainspotting with short story collection The Acid House and then 1998's Filth - also turned into a film. He has published a further 13 novels since Filth, including six novels in the Trainspotting series - the latest of which, Men In Love, was released in 2025.

In that time the industry in which he made his name has also changed. "Now it’s much more of an entertainment industry,” Welsh tells me.

He said: “I think every five years, things get a bit harder, because we've become much more of an online society, rather than a street kind of culture.”

Irvine Welsh photo by Zoe Law

He believes that authors like Graeme Armstrong, who released Young Team in 2020, is the last of a generation of authors portraying a certain type of culture in Scotland.

He said: “Somebody like, say, Graeme Armstrong, sort of liberated from that next kind of generation. I think it's like they might have been the very last to that kind of breed, in a way, you know, it's like somebody to, you know, somebody know, again, to come into that, I think it'd be very hard. It gets harder and harder all the time.”

Creativity is at the heart of Welsh’s most recent project. Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival this week, and presents a portrait of Welsh, the influences that turned him into a multi-million selling author and what comes next as he finds himself, at 66, at a point of reflection in his life.

The film, directed by Paul Sng, shows the battle of wills between what has been and what will be. At its centre point is Welsh’s decision to take DMT in an effort to explore the bounds of consciousness and creativity.

DMT is a naturally occurring psychedelic drug that produces incredibly potent hallucinogenic effects.

A trip to the cinema to see Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground saw the two friends feeling each other about doing the documentary. For a project like this, Welsh needed trust.

“Paul was a good friend prior to us doing the documentary. And I think it was an element of trust, basically,” Welsh explained. “We talked about what we wanted, what we probably wouldn't want. We wouldn't want a talking heads kind of thing.”

Director Sng said: “Irvine’s DMT trip is our way into his personal reflections on mortality, place and belonging, hedonism, class and politics, creativity, love and family.”

The documentary's subject matter, both author and the use of DMT, allows Sng to produce a work that is cinematic, whilst carefully examining Welsh’s vulnerabilities and a side to the hedonistic author that many may not well have seen.

“Paul said, ‘I want to do something that's really about you, because you have the cliched sort of pieces all about Trainspotting and drugs and schemes and all that. Every feature is always like that, it's not the guy I know who's my friend’. I want people to know you're very romantic and you're very kind of good with your pals and I want to show that sort of side of you’,” Welsh explained.

The documentary shows Welsh spending time with his Edinburgh friends, playing football with them and drinking in the pub. Whilst the headline of the documentary may well be the exploration of consciousness through psychedelics. What comes away from it just as much are those relationships with the people who knew Welsh before those hedonistic days.

Welsh returns to the theme of Edinburgh and how his early years fostered a creativity in him that would one day prove so fruitful.

“I remember when first we were from the prefabs in the Muirhouse. Everything was new, you know, the buildings were all new and different. And we thought we were moving on to a spaceship almost,” Welsh said. “That's what it was like. You realize it's just a piece of concrete, and then you fantasise about there being an underground city underneath the block of flats we lived in. There's more levels to it and all that. And probably inspired by nightmares that you've had, films that you've watched, but that idea that the material reality of life as it's presented is very limiting, you know, and that your imagination is something that's kind of constantly breaking out of that. That is something that always stayed with me.”