OVERDOSING TRAINSPOTTING (Part 2)

(This has a few expletives in it, and talks about drugs. Of course, with me being Scottish, this is all expected of me anyway. You're warned.)

The absolute fucking belter best bullshit quote from that puff piece comes from Frankie O’Connor, who plays Begbie, at 5:16:

“Why did Trainspotting achieve its cult status? Well, for me it gave Scotland an identity when it probably needed one the most.”

Did it really, wee man, aye? That is one of the most disgusting, disturbing, clueless and utterly ridiculous things I have ever heard, from somebody who was probably only a few years old when the film came out. Is that honestly how he has lived his life, looking a tit (sorry, at it) through an empty-syringe lens? Trainspotting contains nothing whatsoever that should make anybody feel proud to be Scottish, at least at that tragic, broken, diseased level of society, and its ‘identity’ covers only a tiny minority of Scottish people. That kind of shite-stinking thinking is what has led to the proliferation of halfwits spewing excessive swearing in videos online thinking this is what you ‘do’ as a Scottish person wanting attention. It’s grim, depressing, horrifying, and disturbing, and I’ll be wasting some time examining it on this site soon enough.

Trainspotting as Scotland’s ‘identity’? For fuck’s sake! Who the Hell would want an identity like…that? It’s not about the normal, average people of a country; it’s about hollow, tragic, broken, abused, dying people, symptoms of a high burn nation, the AIDS-infected, the obsolete human residue of Thatcher’s inhuman industry-killing machinations of the 80s. If you want to regard your identity as that of being nothing more than a crippled amber-trapped caricature of a human being, dancing on a stage for the abuse-wanking amusement of a loving-it poverty porn grazers…you go right ahead. But of course you won’t, can’t, didn’t even know what the Hell you were saying with that ridiculous quote. Could say more about it, but will move on. No point in wasting any more words. He’ll either get it eventually…or he won’t. Simple and complex as that.

Still, at least the cast is Scottish, eh? Such artistic veracity! Makes a change in the Scottish arts, to be honest, which are chock full of middle class English settler types. You know, the types who complain bitterly about the costs of putting on some post-Oxbridge footlights fawfaw show at the utterly worthless Edinburgh Fringe (on right now), but still come here anyway on Bank of Daddy interest-free credit to stage an utterly unheeded money-haemorrhaging show. Hard knock life, Tarquins and Tarquinettas, bland mannequins electroshocked into empirical comprehension, and real exposure to the uncaring world can be a freezing water bucket to the face.

You know, I wasn’t even going to write this piece. I thought about it in the abstract when the play first opened, but didn’t have time, due to other life commitments, to do so before the musical circus shut down. But this piece from last week made me pick it up and actually vomit it out:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/music/irvine-welsh-hopes-trainspotting-musical-will-return-after-uk-tour-cancelled/ar-AA2af9Z1

So Irvine Welsh reckons the play might come back. He hasn’t taken a hint, full of excuses about its thespian-crushing bellyflop; ticket prices too high for the average punter, tour prices too high, etbletheringcetera. Surely, with the finest West End experienced heads in his corner, he would easily enough have been able to ascertain beforehand the costs of taking the production on the road? This is hardly virgin territory, breaking new theatre-touring ground. No, Irvine, nobody wants to see the musical because:

It never was a good idea in the first place.

Let’s face it, there is nothing more to it than that, really. It was just another desperate, obnoxious way to try and stay relevant, to make yet more cash from an established safe ‘edgy’ brand that long ago ceased to be relevant or interesting. See the modified Dead Parrot sketch text above. This is just the artistic noodlings of a bored rich man casting about for something to do for more cash, trying to challenge himself by expanding into another arena. I suppose when you have more than you can spent in several self-described “upper class” lifetimes you need to keep yourself occupied somehow. But how divorced from reality do you have to be to reckon that scumslut subject matter will be sloppily lapped up by even the middle class trauma voyeurs who comprise pearl-clutching, clit-rubbing West End audiences?

Meanwhile, far from the sadding Lahndahn crowd, it goes like this:

https://smry.ai/https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/26468526.vulnerable-scots-left-limbo-alcohol-drug-service-cuts/

From the article, a quote from campaigner Maryam Tariq, of Sisters Against Cuts:

“We do have a mental health crisis at the moment. We're also Europe's drug capital as well in Glasgow, and I just think, like, at the exact moment we need these services most and poverty services most, the Scottish Government and Glasgow City Council are pulling the plug on services. We should be increasing them, not taking them out.”

That depressing, anger-making article about cuts to drug and alcohol treatment aid facilities, highlights something fundamental, something Welsh seems to have forgotten in the bored rarefied vulture’s-eye-view heights of superstardom: Scotland still has serious problems with heroin, people are still dying, still living agonised decaying lives, babies are still being born addicted to drugs, children are still living in horrifying squalor, and zerobody is singing and stomping about it in the schemes. It would cost them a week's giro to see it onstage. Not for happening.

So Trainspotting The Musical now comes off like a particularly sick way of dancing on drug death graves, on frightened blighted lives, on the broken backs of those stuck in inescapable opioid life circumstances. How much more money do you need from this book and film and play and musical? All we need now is Trainspotting On Ice to finish the exploitation quintet. Graceful wasted pirouettes and sweet syringe ice-spraying style! Torvill and Dean holograms! A mix of West Side Story (“I like to be on the heroin, OK by me on the heroin!”) and Mary (Skin) Poppins (“Just a spoonful of morphine helps the medicine go down!”) and Annie (“The scum will come down tomorrow...”) and such.

Am I taking the piss like a catheter? Absolutely? Is there a serious point to doing so? Is that point pointing in the wrong societal and artistic direction? Maybe. But there is shit-fucking-sure zero need for anything more to be based on Trainspotting in the future, and the musical – though I confess I would love to see it for trash kicks – should be left to die a painless closed-doors death. Still, there’s a lot of money no doubt tied up in it, much as Renton ties up a fix in his arm, so I suppose an attempt has got to be made to recoup it, eh? Maybe Welsh could chuck some cash at actual real-life drug addiction problems, though for all I know he may donate money to charity.

“For all the characters’ failings, Trainspotting is much loved in Scotland and a more positive reaction could have influenced the take of even the most sceptical of reviewers” – Scotsman editorial, August 4^th, 2026. ‘Much loved in Scotland?’ Fuck right off.

One thing is for sure, though: Trainspotting is an excellent late 20^th century Hellscape vision of isolated pockets of Scottish bottom-dwelling pain, a once-invaluable cultural artefact that is now like a millstone round our collective cultural and world-image necks. It’s mentioned constantly in humourous fashion online (“It’s shite being Scottish, Tommy!”), is the butt of a million Frankie Boyle-type lazy-humour jokes, and is grim and heartbreaking as a decades-long phenomenon. In 2025, there were 1,146 suspected drug deaths in this country, up on the year before. A member of my extended family said he got into heroin because the film of Trainspotting made it look glamourous. Now that may or may not be true, it may just have been an excuse for his drugtaking, but it does indicate a certain impoverished mindset in this country.

Enough is enough. 

This horrific self-destructive Scottish self-image, alongside that of us as bumbling funny drunks, needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history as the grim sociological contagion that it is. How do we do that? I don’t confess to know, but it damned well needs talked about, not sung and danced around. Whatever happened to dignity and self-respect in this country? I'm sure Irvine Welsh wouldn’t want that one book to define him, or his loved-and-hated legacy, even if he’s unwittingly helped perpetrate a pitch-black nihilistic image of this country internationally. As Finlay Paul who plays Tommy, who dies of AIDs in the book film play musical ice skating puppet show interpretive prance disaster, put it in the clip earlier:

“In what ways do we hope the musical adds to the legacy of Trainspotting? Well Irvine – and I wouldn’t want to speak for him – would probably say he hopes it doesn’t, because he’s been trying to escape Trainspotting for years.”

As this “most sceptical of reviewers,” to quote the Scotsman swill above, would put it, perhaps he hasn’t quite tried hard enough yet. It remains to be seen. Not holding my breath, or even thinking that what I wrote here makes any difference at all. Just wanted to get something off my chest for a long while. Mission accomplished.

Talk amongst your cells.


THE (NEVER) END

For GM, wherever you are. Hope you’re happy and well, Big Man.