“Kidnap, owners of
the oil wells
Kidnap,
Rockefeller wives and kids
People's
trial for what their husbands did
Kidnap,
Stig pig and John Travolta
Make them
watch their flicks revolt-a
Soon
they'll go into convulsions
O.D. on plastic
revulsion!” – Kidnap (unreleased Dead Kennedys song, 1978)
Well, I recently had a schadenfreude-drenched laugh, along with a couple of
pals, over the snotty demise of Trainspotting The Musical. I had been genuinely
disgusted and offended by its mere existence when I first heard of it coming
down the track(mark)s a while back, thinking it sounded like one of the most
utterly ludicrous things I had ever heard of. After all, let’s face it, a
33-years-old scatological book-cum-play-cum-film about Edinburgh drug addicts
is hardly the stuff plummy middle class West End boards-treading is made of. I
couldn’t see the sniffy prissy RADA types stampeding to play unhealthy Scottish
lowlifes.
Turns out I was not the only one.
https://www.whatsonstage.com/news/trainspotting-the-musical-cancels-tour_1728521/
Sales for the show tanked spectacularly, garnering grave reviews, and a planned
run beyond London, including into Scotland, crashed and burned. Irvine Welsh,
who had written the play himself, as well as doing music with English
musician Stephen McGuinness, with whom he part-owns a record label, seemed to
be brimming over with excitement about the show before it opened, saying:
“This
musical has a bigger, loudly beating human heart than either the book or the
film. The various stage adaptations of Trainspotting have become acclaimed and
moving theatrical experiences and the soundtrack to the movie is obviously
iconic. So it made sense to put the music and words together to create an
explosive, provocative and entertaining show.”
Of course, he would spout that kind of bloated carnivalesque hypespeak,
wouldn’t he? Trainspotting The Musical: to boldly go where no iteration of the
source material has gone before. And where nobody else wanted to go, either, as
ticket sales showed. As a cast member put it: “If Edinburgh of all places is stuck on 19% sales - you know you're fucked!” And when you can’t pimp poverty porn pish to a simpering
London audience eager to see the dancing singing sweaty sock monkeys making
fools of themselves in the West End, you know you’re on a sticky wicket, dahlink.
The material
from this particular show nag has no more flesh to be flayed from its ragged bony
equestrian corpse. It has overdosed. This junkie tale is no more! It has
ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to
meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life,
it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed
it to the stage it’d be pushing up the
daisies! Its metabolic processes are now
history! It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, its shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible!! THIS
IS AN EX-JUNKIE!!
As I have documented elsewhere, I was a massive fan of the book when I first read it in 1994, the year after it came out. I followed Welsh’s career for around 11 years, but haven’t bought a book of his that I recall since the risible Porno in 2005. I have still read books of his here and there, though, gotten out of the library. There is still a great deal of his work I have never read, and never will. Probably because I’m just too old to read poverty porn pish, as is the novelist to write it. He’s still trying to wring pounds dollars roubles euros rands out of the Trainspotting grue crew, and is going to bring out yet another book about them. Let him get on with it. This is not 1993, and we all change, and we all grow, and we all move on. But some things change the more they stay the same, to quote Alphonse Karr’s famous cynical self-negating phrase.
See, that’s the problem here. I am decades older than I was when I first read the book as a 24-year-old easily-impressed, impressionable, starry-eyed gestating writer. Like everybody else, I have had a lot of life since then, much of it painful. Not complaining about it, there’s nothing more risible and nauseating than a self-pitying person. But it’s an incontrovertible inalienable truth that what once interested you when you were young and much less shaped can now bore or annoy or nauseate or anger you. That’s life. Each to their own.
But
that’s the problem with this utterly fucking disgusting cash cow play pissing
out curdled milk from its over-stretched udders. There have been over
three decades of Scottish social history since that epochal book came out. And
they have not been pleasant ones for the country, or personally – Hell, for a
great many people everywhere, let’s face it. The world is in a nightmare state.
People from my own extended family who were happy and healthy and sane back in
the early 90s are now long gone either mentally or emotionally or physically,
gotten heavily into drugs and ended up in prisons, a slideshow of coke snorting
and heroin shooting and sweaty overdoses and black humour and wife-ruined-life pain
self-medication. And hey, on and on – why not write some crap poetry about it?
Or write a musical about it to try and remain relevant in the modern
post-net era.
The
film of Trainspotting was a generational moment in 1996, alongside Britpop and all that retro-jingoistic English drivel. I remember going to
see the film (which I have to admit I thought was shite – John Hodge is a
terrible writer) with Arab Strap (I used to drive them on tour) in the
pictures in Falkirk at the now-defunct ABC Cinema. They were a great wee band
who rode that wave of post-Trainspotting chic to indie prominence. The lo-fi
booze-and-drug-fuelled mumblings of that band’s inaugural single, The First Big
Weekend, wowed everybody back then, broadcast on powerful Radio 1 waves of
career-making time capsule influence. The Strap are still going strong and
recently put out a new album, go check them out.
What was I when was I where was I…oh aye.
Reading a book when you’re 24 is one thing. But when it’s about a subject that was the harbinger of a life-and-country-changing tormented existential slump in Scotland’s (mis)fortunes, partly helping to bring them about by glamourising drug (ab)use in the middle class English poverty porn film…your views change with experience, harden, grow colder and angrier.
Let me give you a brief scenario. In the early 2000s, I had somebody I cared about very deeply, just out of prison for drugs dealing, come to my home. He was not the man he was when we were growing up together. Though only in his mid-30s he moved and seemed older, slow and world-weary, scarred by his time in the Barl-L, with Scottish prisons, he told me, apparently being much more hard and violent than English prisons. At one point he went off, shot up in my bog, slid off the toilet, and broke the seat. I then had to stay up all night with him. He kept on lighting fag after fag, mumbling slurred gibberish, nodding in and out of consciousness, and I was scared he would burn the place down. I was not the much younger, less experienced young man I had been by then, all excited by lysergic nihilist chic poser tripe like druggie literature, of the type dealt by Rebel Inc in Edinburgh during the mid-late 90s. Experience had changed and was changing my views, as it does until we die, and my views on this self-destructive Scottish utter fucking pish were not the same as a decade before.
So now here we are, 20-odd years after the horrific, deeply painful incident above. In the early 90s, there wasn’t much heroin around in Scotland in general. The book of Trainspotting was set in Edinburgh in the late 80s, as the dated songs referenced in it indicate. The heroin then must have been centred around Edinburgh and, I would imagine, impoverished areas of Glasgow, at least in the Central Belt. The drugs in Falkirk at least, 25 miles from Edinburgh, were more recreational – back then you could have argued that booze was (and is) the most anti-social, yet socially approved, drug available everywhere in this melancholy wee country.
But then
zang, bang, boof yabastirtye, heroin exploded everywhere, an
anti-social-control mechanism sui generis, corpses dropping in anonymous
flophouses undiscovered for weeks until the flies and stench alerted the boaking
coughing neighbours, society-manipulating English and Scottish death merchants
laughing. And the tills ran over in blood money profit, Begbie laughing all the
way to the violent criminal bank, Hollywood lights camera action, Al Pacino as
Arthur Scargill, pulp friction, crime fiction pays, raining pounds and
approbation all the way to the overfilled capitalist morgue, and the millions
flowed rolled flooded tsunamied in, forecast hailstorm flashbulbs of urgent
famous drug chic illumination, red carpets and drug addict graves danced on, scars
traced and approved for mass consumption, tall tales told for an English
publisher and cowed wowed so-authentic Western public, rolling rolling rolling,
through the cash streams are swollen, keep them junkies rolling, raw hides pounded,
straw men arguments inarticulately gutter-muttered, artistic responsibilities
avoided behind coke-soaked bleary-eyed image-mongering sesh sessions. Which
will bring us back to D’OH!
Pause for a wee dark side of the spoon crooned choon:
Shaking my head. Artyfarty airyfairy hoitytoity theatre kid Hellish Heaven. Of course. It reminds me, credibility-wise, of this vicious and hilarious muse-sick-al classic:
Or perhaps this is closer to the energy being put out in Veinspotting The Musical:
Having obviously never seen this failed show (no interest in reading any of the reviews), I have zero idea what the songs Welsh and McGuinness wrote for it sound like, because the only clips I have seen are either straight renditions of 80s songs from the 1996 film, or reworkings of them. Clearly the show is taking its aesthetic cues from the film, because the characters in the clips all look like Danny Boyle character caricatures, the poster is the exact same, and the available tunes are all from the soundtrack. It’s a reflection of the film of a reflection of the book, a reflection of a reflection on dejected subject matter, the death of empathy done in song and dance form. 1996 is a nice to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there eternally, though I do understand the nostalgic black hole attraction.
But what of the cast for this anti-epic? Well, it’s like this:
The names of the people starring in it tell you everything you need to know: Kieran, Yana, Lewis, Finlay, Sheridan, Rebecca. Not, of course, that there is anything intrinsically wrong with these names, they’re just a telling Scottish class hierarchy marker, yooni rubrics, luvvie brands, a “…brilliant cast, just out the [Royal] Conservatoire [of Scotland] most of them,” as Welsh put it in a recent Scotsman interview. Which, of course, figures, that a middle class poser preenfest like that “dynamic international community of artists, offering courses in drama, music, dance, film, production and more” would be the clownbag factory to provide the literary canon fodder to tread the rotted caving-in-underfoot boards here. Highly fucking doubt a single one of them has any real-life experience of the subject matter under mocking discussion. It’s not so much cultural appropriation as cultural deformation. I mean, check out a quote from the clip above, at 5:28, from Lewis Kidd, who plays Renton:
“I think it was very relatable. I said this the other day, it’s like every
person you see in the film, not that, like, you know someone that’s going
through – well you might do – someone’s that’s going through drug issues, all
that kind of stuff. But every person has their own problems, and every person
has that anyway.”
Exhale long and loud and slow here in disbelief. Everybody has their own
problems, so everybody can relate to drug addiction and self-destruction. If
you watch him, it’s clear he’s probably never met a drug addict in his life,
and when he quickly says “drugs issues, all that kind of stuff,” he’s utterly
dismissive, as if the actual ‘real’ subject matter of the book and film and
play and musical is nothing but effluvia to be wiped from his squirming tongue
before getting back to the promotion of the dross on rear orifice offer.
Also:
“I think that Trainspotting lends itself to a musical because the best musicals
are all about expression, you sing where you would scream in real life. And I
think there’s so many intense moments in this show and the characters are
dealing with all of life’s biggest issues like grief and loss and poverty and
self-destruction. And it actually makes a lot of sense for these to have to
sing to express themselves because…it’s pretty intense.”
That unbelievable beezer is from Yana Harris, who plays Diane. Aye hen, that’s what junkies do when they’re in existential pain and despair or withdrawal agony, they sing showtunes to themselves! How tone-deaf and clueless can you be? Be surprised if she’d ever even heard of Trainspotting before the musical, to be honest. Though in one way, I am being a bit cruel – the actors are just young, new, out learning their craft, inexperienced in life and the material in the production. Sure they’re perfectly nice, decent, upstanding folk outside the theatre. Which is precisely what makes them pathologically unsuited to playing the now-iconic characters they play in the show. They’re young and have grown up in affluent comfortable backgrounds. Which is not necessarily to be derided, as I am sure people like the ones they are pretending to be would also rather have grown up in such cloistered, coddled circumstances. Let’s face it: who wouldn’t, given the choice, unless they were either deluded, insane, or masochistic?
But clearly none of them can ever say “I'll be staying up late/I'll be fighting off the shakes/Puking out the window/Repressing things you can never know,” to quote Off With Their Heads. And I genuinely hope for their sakes that they never have to reach that squalor-drowned, impoverished underground rut for the rest of their lives. But that lack of agony and fuck-it-all-just-kill-me streak in their untroubled spirits means that anything they do will remain a grossly insulting caricature of the life of a real drug addict. RADA is nada real, NHS morphine is shite, and never the twain shall meet.
Part two link here:
https://whorattledyourcage.blogspot.com/2026/08/overdosing-trainspotting-part-2.html
Excellent observation! You should do a musical of this blog!
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