Primitive people do not pounce upon their visitors. They let them into the encampment, then leave them alone to acclimatise before attempting any form of verbal intercourse. But I have been civilised in the petit-bourgeois mould. Somebody comes in and I twitter myself stupid all over my own territory. It's you! Come in! Sit there! Have a drink! How are you! Look at my garden! The cat's name's Brian! All code, I dare say, for, "I know you think I'm a stupid cow." I'll forgive myself in a minute, but this is Irvine Welsh, acclaimed novelist and horned arch-enemy of the lower middle classes. A person of primitive instincts.
I only meant look at my garden through the window. But primitive people know how to look after themselves. He takes himself out of the babble, into the garden, and walks slowly and silently through every inch of it, returning to set about acclimatising me to his presence in my space. It is, he says, a nice garden. And it was interesting to walk down my street. Because he used to live here. Four, five doors up. When it was a squat. A long time ago. I remember. I remember those lads, their bullet heads and quiet eyes, their regional accents, their pragmatic courtesy, how equably they accepted my gash china and petrol-coupon cutlery, their junkie passivity, the incurious kindness with which one of them helped me break into my house when I'd locked myself out. I don't remember Irvine Welsh, my former neighbour. Nor does he remember me. We are not exactly strangers, though. Well, not geographically.
It had not been easy for me to read his books. Initially it felt like being led down a dark alley and assaulted by demented aliens with no faces, which problem turned out to be more one of aural failure on my part. In the ordinary way I must tune in laboriously to heavy Celtic accents, and when they're written down the effort to comprehend is doubled because I have to translate the spelling into voices that I can hear in my head. Get past that one and you find there are more voices, different voices, as many voices as there are characters, layer upon layer, by-passing, interlocking, each as ruthlessly individual as the next. As though life wasn't hard enough.
I say something along these lines to Welsh; code for look at me, I've done my homework. The last thing I expect is empathy. He says he has a similar problem, which he solves by not reading what he's written. Not for pleasure, anyway. Of course, he does have to read his proofs, when he has to filter the spellings back through his mind for the sounds that live there in the first place; the language of his childhood, much of which doesn't directly relate to the Scottish language "as such". It's more lowlands Scots with Gypsy stuff thrown in. This is because he grew up in a north-west Edinburgh housing estate, and in Edinburgh they always built such estates next to Gypsy encampments. He doesn't know why. Because it's cheap land nobody wants? Because it's a way of keeping everyone they don't want in the city out of the city? Anyway, all these families who'd lived in the old, condemned tenements where he was born were moved into prefabs and from prefabs into these new estates of what they called "maisonettes". There was nothing wrong with them. The walls were a bit thin and it was a bit out of the way, but at the time everyone thought they were sort of futuristic. There was a car park, too, a concrete square, but since nobody owned a motor car, it was where the kids congregated. Where fledgling Scots and Gypsies learned to express themselves.
Now that you can buy an Irvine Welsh novel in an airport bookshop in the section marked "Scottish literature", alongside Walter Scott and Robert Burns, earnest academicians have tried to intellectualise his language. He is sanguine about this, in a bored sort of way. He doesn't require to be legitimised by toffs and, besides, he already knew about Basil Bernstein, the Marxist linguist and sociologist who died a couple of years ago and put his two penn'orth in long before Welsh picked up a pen. Bernstein reckoned working-class kids have two distinct vocabularies, the restricted and the elaborated. The restricted is the one they're taught, the one they're supposed to have; the elaborated is the one they make up, the one they evolve in the course of their own social lives. And that is all it is; if you want to be posh about it, it's his street-life language. The elaborated one.
Now that his books are in the process of being translated into (at last count) 33 languages, things can get complicated. The poor sods come to him asking for explanations. "What does it mean, 'A bairns airm wie an eeple'?" And he has to explain that he's trying to describe some fellow's erection. It got fairly knackering, recently, when he'd gone on a trip to America with a couple of mates from the estate, being shadowed by a reporter from the New Yorker. He'd had to use one language for his mates, another for the New Yorker guy, and it all got pretty confusing, what with him being up all night and being highly intoxicated into the bargain.
Then there is the vexed question of the filthy language. This is all quite mystifying to Welsh. One critic, apparently, opined that he overused swearwords, thus destroying the effect of a more sparing usage. If he has to think about it - and he does, briefly - Welsh counts himself as a man who is against swearwords. Yes. You've got to accept, he says with the air of a man who is convinced but quite happy for you to please yourself, that the meaning of words changes through use and abuse, and becomes something else. For instance, so far as he is concerned, fuck and cunt are not swearwords. Should he say,"What a fucking lovely day", he is merely emphasising the loveliness of the weather. Similarly, if he says, "I got completely cunted in the pub last night", it means he got plastered rather emphatically. The point is, where he comes from it would be offensive to use the term to mean female genitalia. Apart from that, it's a good, blunt word, a cosh of a word. Unlike prick, which is so insubstantial, it flies away in the air. But none of these words is used to shock. They're just emphatics, nothing to get alarmed about. Just another way of saying "very". Not that he'd stand at, say, a theatre bar effing and blinding at the top of his voice, because that wouldn't be appropriate. Nor has he employed any beefy synonyms for "very" in our conversation so far. "Words should have the power to inform and to move, not the power to send people scurrying away," he says. "But if you attach that much emotional energy to a word, it gives people the power to hurt each other."
He understands that middle-class people find it difficult to deal with working-class anger. They have no way of understanding how ordinary it is, how banal, to be able to see another world out there that is impossible for them to access. The working classes see they are denied the educational and social tools to get out of their poverty trap. There's not even any point setting themselves goals because they already know they are going to be frustrated. That's their normality. Anger and frustration. That's their lot.
And it has been Welsh's lot, over the past decade, to chronicle the coping mechanisms of the culture that spawned him, and by so doing incur the fear and loathing of those who would famously prefer to "just say no". As though drugs were merely illegal banes indulged in by the wicked and foolish, rather than cheap prescriptions for altering the parameters of repressed consciousness and escaping into some kind of recreative joy. What is so disturbing about Welsh's accounts of drug culture, it seems, is that from time to time his protagonists do realise themselves through illegal banes, do manage to excavate the buried treasure of their own spirit from beneath the rubble of conformity that has flattened their integrity, do manage to fly. Does this glorify the drug culture? Hardly, since it is set against the downside construct of the scene in Trainspotting where our hero dives into a sewer for a nub end of skunk or some fine thing. Welsh is nothing if not balanced.
For instance, I have a couple of bottles of a rather pleasant Sancerre in the fridge. But Mr Welsh does not want a drink. He's not the sort of man who has "a drink". He's the sort of man who decides to go to the pub for lots of drinks, then on to a club for more drinks, then get some drugs and go back to his place and go on all night and the next day and the next night, until he's either off his face or recovering from being off his face for a fortnight. He binges. He abstains. That's the balance. He can't go out for a few drinks and get up next morning with a bit of a hangover and get on with his work. He's an all or nothing man. An addictive personality, if you like. Only now, he's addicted to writing. Once something kicks in, he has to carry on to the bitter end. All his life, he says, he's been good at wasting time; now he writes, and discovers that nothing is wasted. Every good thing he's ever done, every stupid thing, every fucked-up thing can be reproduced in some way. He can stare into space and call it research. He thinks of all the crap jobs he's had, laying paving slabs, shuffling papers in a council office, and wanting, trying, to do something creative. Mucking around in rock'n'roll bands, hoping to find some way of making his hobbies pay. That was the quest, if you like. He's not letting go of it now.
At first, when the hobby started to pay, he came off the drugs, came off everything. He got himself fit as a butcher's dog, ran the London marathon, went to the gym, went to the park and did that oriental posturing thing to balance his karma. Then he sort of came off coming off and, well, he did the marathon again this year and finished 40 minutes slower. Which goes to show... Giving up is hard. Every time he finishes a book, he makes a song and dance about being fed up with it, making all these protestations about never writing another book. But then there's the money. He wouldn't want to give up being able to jump on a plane and vanish, or just sit still working something out in his head. Had he been more careful with his finances, he'd never have to work again, but he knows himself, knows everything he's ever had has been what he calls "squanderable".
"Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground. You want to be the first person to find something, then the first person to say it's shit."
Take the footie. Welsh is a Hibernian supporter. This is a good thing; an old industrial activity. All week you work your bollocks off at some humiliatingly crap job, then it's Saturday and you go to the footie and release your frustrations. It's a great thing to do. You basically shout at the players and at the opposing supporters. It's an accomplishable task. Then, after it's over and the Hibs have won or lost, you want to keep it going.
"We want to feel hyper-alive, and it's like the more cartoonish and grotesque the level we can operate at, the better. It's like the world we live in has become quite safe in a lot of ways, and it has become harder to genuinely transgress. But the desire to transgress is a real feeling. Where you've got a lot of people conforming, you also have people who are positioned in this kind of transgressive mode who, like Bruce Willis, suddenly start playing the game by their own rules. Yet they're still conformists. So, for real people to try to become transgressive means their behaviour is going to be almost more brutish and antisocial than ever. Here we are, grasping for the full loutishness and not being able quite to get it in the last struggle to break away from the banality of everyday life. And that becomes a banality in itself."
Welsh's strong association with his favourite rock band, Primal Scream, Glaswegian, post-punk, all Che Guevara T-shirts and leftwing political correctness, who stayed up later and took more drugs than anyone else, doubtless puts him in precisely this bind. In 1995, Primal Scream wrote music for the film version of Trainspotting. The next year they released a single in support of Scotland's footie team in Euro '96, billed as "Primal Scream, Irvine Welsh and On-U Sound present The Big Man And The Scream Team Meet The Barmy Army Uptown". The following year, Welsh scripted the Primal Scream video of If They Move, Kill 'Em, featuring Bobby Gillespie being murdered by Kate Moss. This was swiftly followed by the publication of Welsh's trilogy, Ecstasy, and the CD Anthems For The Chemical Generation, for which Welsh wrote the somewhat paradigmatic blurb: "Music is the best drug. Music is the ecstasy and the rapture. Always..."
Well, perhaps not quite always. But it was a good idea at the time. Jigging about all night to the tirelessly pulsating rhythms made possible by the invention of the drum machine and the sequencer, usually with the assistance of artificial stimulants, can induce ecstatic, trance-like states and spiritual reawakening, maaaaan, much as music has done in the past for neolithic shamans, whirling dervishes and so on. If you hadn't tried it, you'd be a fool to knock it. The world and his sibling discovered that they, too, could simulate the sounds of soul-frenzy in their own back rooms. Hence what was once so esoteric became mainstream, standardised, commercialised, banalised, and if you fancied yourself at the cutting edge circa 1993, you'd have to be the first to say it was shit. Time to move on to the next thing.
Pornography, it seems, became the new rock'n'roll while Welsh wasn't looking. "It's massive," he says, then, lest he has understated the massive massiveness of massive, adds, "Fucking massive." First he knew of it, he sauntered into one of the old Edinburgh dives to see a few old mates, expecting to find the place as he'd left it, the punters all popping Es and bopping around in a sweat haze, and found himself the only man with his clothes on in the middle of some kind of huge, gonzo sex orgy. It seemed that while his back was turned, everyone he knew had gone through a process of disinhibition that had passed him by. All the old clubs are now sex clubs. You don't go back to your place for more drugs and loud noises any more, you go back to your place to get your kit off, shag everyone in sight, film everyone shagging everyone in sight, then sit about watching the film of you shagging everyone in sight from your last night out. You can buy a knock-off digital camera for a few hundred quid and make your own porn. And they do. They even get quite precious about it, talking about proper scripts and storylines and production values... "I know this is a voyeuristic culture," Welsh says, faintly puzzled, "but people have become sex-mad at a grassroots level."
Since then, Welsh has tried to work out how he feels about pornography. Initially, he had himself down as a don't know. He tried to define pornography and couldn't. He argued with himself that perhaps a crude porn movie is more honest than an art-house film with porn in it, since the one offers to engage your pornographic imagination while the other tries to exploit or subvert. They call it "eroticism", he thinks, to make the middle classes feel better about porn. His ambivalence about the matter remained in free-float.
He can remember being a kid, looking at open-beaver shots in his friend's dad's Penthouse magazine. He thought that was pretty good on the whole. At least it taught him what female genitalia looked like, which was a sight more demystifying than the wall charts of human plumbing they gave them at school by way of sex education. Then, when he grew up, pornography seemed somehow remote, boring, repetitive, turn off-making, designed, he felt, for saddos who probably do no harm and are welcome to such consolation as they can find.
His stance remains ambivalent, though more puzzled. When the opportunity arose, he found he'd as soon shag someone in the same room as his best friend as he would in front of his mother. And he had certainly never felt the need to sit in a pub watching his own spotty arse going up and down on a screen. He has to concede, however, that this disinclination puts him in a minority of roughly one. Back there among the underemployed and unemployed working class, they can't get enough of it. They want to see themselves framed, love handles, beer guts, hairy backs, immortalised for ever in the act of copulation. And, after that, they want everyone else to see them. "When pornography sneezes," they say, "culture catches a cold." Welsh thinks they might be right. Think, he says, of Big Brother.
Porn, he says, is like karaoke. When it's karaoke night down at the pub, nobody wants to get up first. Then, when it gets going, you're fighting for a turn. This is something he understands only too well. Apparently, the reports of how he smashed up an entire bar, the karaoke machine, the pub piano and anyone who stood in his way were not exaggerated. It's quite simple. He desperately wanted to sing a song. He doesn't know why. Maybe it was just a kind of control thing, having hold of the microphone. He had to do it. When a man's gotta sing For Your Eyes Only, a man's gotta sing For Your Eyes Only. There just comes a time when you want to expose yourself in some way, to stand up and say, this is me. Up here. "There's nothing wrong with that, but should our entire social and cultural life be quite so devoted to it? Isn't it a disease, all part of this thing of wanting to be on television?"
The other day he was slogging it out on the treadmill down at the gym where they always have the television on to stop the keep-fitters dying from boredom. His headphones were broken, so he found himself trotting along in front of Kilroy with the sound off. The little subhead in the corner of the box said, "I don't like my looks" and there on the screen he saw an ordinary, middle-aged woman with tears streaming down her face, tormented with grief and anger because she's put on a bit of weight and thinks she's ugly. For all the world to see. What struck him in that small, dumb-show moment was the intensity of passion people put into exposing themselves. "It's as though the only way they can feel real, actualised, is on screen. Television has become the government, priest, psychotherapist, the legitimiser of our egos. Kilroy was here, therefore I am."
He thinks of all the tens of thousands of people who turn out in the pissing rain for royal funerals, hot-footing it to Trafalgar Square to find a camera to blub in front of. What's it all about, eh, this voracious appetite we have for vicarious reality TV? The really horrible thing, he says, is how much we like to see people getting fucked up, literally and metaphorically. Like we're in the grip of some kind of universal schadenfreude. We desperately want to see people come through and we desperately want to see them fuck up. We want to see humiliation. We want it so badly that we feel it's our human duty to humiliate ourselves. What's going on, eh? "People have had too much pain in their lives. And also not enough pain."
Welsh's new novel, Porno, is not for the squeamish, but then neither is reality. He doesn't let you suspend belief. You can catch up with all the old rogues and vagabonds who have trailed their sorry selves from Trainspotting through Glue, The Acid House, Filth and so on, but that's as much light relief as you'll find. Because Porno is relentless in its sociological efficacy. From the outset, you get this queasy feeling that he's not making it up, that he's some kind of filthy fly on the wall of hell's inner chamber and he's got you in there with the unredeemed. Then, worse, he makes you laugh like a suddenly unclogged drain and you're staring into the black hole of your own pornographic imagination. Trouble is, he loves these people and, if you're not careful, he makes you love them, too.
When Welsh finished Porno, he thought his researches into attitudes to pornography were over. His ambivalences were still intact. He didn't think he'd have any more truck with the topic. And then he went to Afghanistan, just for the hell of it. In Kabul he met a couple of UN workers, two girls who'd gone jogging in the park in their Lycra gear and got themselves stoned by a mob of 14-year-old kids. The implications were fairly obvious. "It was like these kids had never seen any representation of the female body shape before, so they'd sublimated their sexuality with violence." This led him to appreciate that there is something to be said for some kind of sexualisation of society in order for men and women not to be murderously terrified of each other. There, where the Taliban had the peasants by their throats, women had to be effectively disappeared lest their sexuality distract men from the lives of prayer and warfare that ensures thralldom to whatever power-mania looms over them. So what's the difference between them and us? The Taliban vice'n'virtue police and our own dear selves? "The manifestations are more acute in Kabul," he says, "but the pathology is not unusual." They are pre-democracy. We are post-democracy.
All we have now, he says, is a consumers' democracy. It doesn't matter a toss who's in power because whoever gets in is there only to rubberstamp corporate strategies. "Take my mother," he says, which is something of a first, since he has always resolutely refused to talk about his family. "She has lived in Scotland all her life, voted Labour every time. And she doesn't have as much influence as Rupert Murdoch, who can't vote because he's an Australian national and an American citizen. How many voters would it take to out-influence Murdoch? What choice do we have? There's no one to vote for any more. Vote, and you're voting for business and investment, which means you're voting for low costs and low wages. I encourage people not to vote - if you've got a right to vote, you've also got a right not to. It's more important to vote for Big Brother or Pop Idol than in a parliamentary election. At least you get to choose who gets the prize or record contract, which is a lot more useful than choosing who sits in Downing Street dumping on the elderly."
From his perspective, the onset of DIY porn is neither a good nor a bad thing. Maybe, like swearwords, it is merely a way of defusing something intrinsically frightening, shedding a garish light on the shadows and taboos of sex. "When we break taboos," he says, "it doesn't mean we also break moral codes. Unless they're psychotic, people know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. Nobody's born wanting to rape and kill. People have a basic morality that comes from their humanity. We have to institutionalise some kind of moral framework only so we can all live within the same one. Nothing wrong with that."
In his books, Welsh explores what happens inside a framework where exasperation and self-assertion collide and become the natural order of things, which is what chaos means. His characters cope. He has coped. A couple of weeks ago, he was in Edinburgh on the estate that framed him and looked at the concrete square where he learned to express himself. It was empty. Where once there had been 50, 60 kids there are now a couple of cars and... nothing. Then Mr Whippy came round and the children came running out, queued for 10 minutes, then ran back inside to their PlayStations. It was like, as an awful woman once said, there is no such thing as community any more.
"It makes me feel privileged to have grown up in the 1970s," he says (he was born in 1961). "We didn't need a parent to take us swimming. We didn't worry about paedophiles. We knew how to look out for ourselves. There is so much fear now. So much fear and so much control. And the more you lose your own coping mechanisms, the more you need to be controlled."
And this, I take it, is the prospect for our post-democratic 21st century. Welsh would be quite depressed about it all if he were daft enough to imagine his future went on beyond the next two weeks. But he isn't and he doesn't. He thinks it would be arrogant of him to say it's all over, there aren't any more surprises. "I'm still optimistic," he says. "That's the perversity of life, to be optimistic in spite of all the indicators to the contrary. I haven't got the attention span to stay depressed for long."
He watches as I finish the wine he didn't want, then says, "Depression is addictive to some people. And it's contagious. Stay away from depressives."
Porno, by Irvine Welsh, is published by Jonathan Cape on August 29, priced £10 paperback and £16.99 hardback. To order a copy for the special price of £8 (or £14.99 hardback), plus p&p, call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.
