Original subtitles

We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it.

We realise that we're all going to die

without really finding out the big answers.

We develop all these long-winded ideas

which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways,

without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge,

about the big things, the real things.

Basically, we live a short disappointing life,

and then we die.

We fill up our lives with shite,

things like careers and relationships

to delude ourselves that it isn't all totally pointless."

(HAUNTING SOUNDSCAPE FADES)

# MAGAZINE: "The Thin Air"

I wrote that 30-odd years ago.

When you're young you feel that life is trying to confine you

in some ways. You compromise more when you get older.

It's not always a good thing.

If you discover drugs when you're younger,

it suddenly opens up a whole new kind of psychoactive terrain.

That offers you alternate sets of realities

from the kind of path that you imagined yourself to be on.

I don't think reality is enough for a writer.

I think that's why writers of fiction become writers,

to explore these paths not travelled.

You're never really satisfied with anything you do.

It's good you're not satisfied. Cos it means you're still learning.

And if you stop learning, you're dying.

So we're here tonight to talk about Irvine's new book,

his thirteenth novel and his seventeenth work of fiction.

On top of that he's now a DJ.

He's produced screenplays, short stories,

branching out into musical theatre,

had his work adapted for radio, TV, film and theatre.

"Trainspotting" is not my best book,

but it's the one I'll be remembered by.

I never liked it. (LAUGHTER)

So "Trainspotting" came out in '93?

I found these old diaries I'd written.

And I thought, these are actually quite interesting to me,

because I've written some of these things in character.

You wrote your way out of heroin.

Yeah. It showed people something that they knew existed

but they hadn't seen.

It's the shock of the new.

Danny Boyle's film adaptation was released in 1996

and it instantly became a cultural phenomenon.

"Trainspotting" was a very slick made movie,

even though it wasn't shot on a big budget.

One thing that interests me about your characters

is this ferocity and brutality of them.

Robert Carlyle as one Francis Begbie springs to mind.

Fucking listen to me, you piece of junkie shit.

So how do you balance the misery and the humour?

It's usually in your darkest moments that you find the greatest humour.

Beautifully fucking illustrated.

A lot of them are not good people.

Bruce Robertson in "Filth", Ray Lennox in "Crime",

and, c'mon, Sick Boy.

Where do these dark and troubled humans come from?

I like to get people at crisis moments

when they're jumping into something

and looking for the inappropriate kind of life belts,

things that aren't going to help them

because that kind of propels the drama.

A lot of people assume that Renton is autobiographical.

The characters you create are all kind of different aspects of you.

What's driving Renton?

Like most of us, he's trying to do the right thing,

but stumbling through a very rapidly changing world.

Welsh has produced many imitators, but few equals.

And he's outlasted them all.

Let's hear it for the incredible, Irvine Welsh.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

(SONG FADES)

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

Can I get a picture with you? Yeah, of course, man.

I didn't believe it at first. I didn't make the connection.

To? "Trainspotting".

Oh, right, yeah, yeah. I'm the "Trainspotting" guy.

I've been doing this for 30 years now,

but things I've been obsessed with,

like football, boxing, music, I've always been pretty average at.

And the things I'm not really bothered about like writing,

I've kind of been good at.

And I think that's because, you know,

I think I'll never be as good as Bowie or Iggy Pop

or Sugar Ray Leonard or Ken Buchanan

and I found it quite demotivating.

But writers, I never gave a fuck about,

I didn't even know who they were. So I just dived in.

I don't give a toss what the writer's views are

or what they think they are. So I try to apply that to myself.

I want to create characters who speak for themselves.

I don't want to use them to prove my ideas.

Cheers, guys. Thanks, Irvine.

It's funny, I'm worried that I'm morphing into one of these writers

that I used to detest. Every time I went on tour,

I was like, "Look at that old boring bastard

up in his fucking room working. He should be out having a blast."

And I've become that. I can feel myself slowly becoming that guy.

And even worse, not being that bothered about it, as I should be.

When you go on tour, you go out most nights.

Even if you're not drinking loads, you feel obligated

to be out all the time.

And I have so much work on right now.

It's just absolutely unreal.

I think the older you get, the less appealing intoxication becomes.

So I think this is technically opening night show

at the Toronto Festival tonight. Is it?

They've put it in our capable hands. Is it?

International literature showcase, Scotland heavy.

It is Scotland heavy. Scotland's the focus country.

I met the people from the Scottish government in Canada. Right.

Holyrood or the Scottish Office?

The Scottish Office, so it's all the Scot hubs.

So I guess it's the preamble to what would be cultural embassies.

Yep. I mean, whether it's the Scottish or Westminster,

they're all a set of cunts, anyway, so... (LAUGHTER)

These guys are great poets. I'm not a poet.

But I'm not going to have a go at it.

I'm going to read some bits of weird stuff

from "Marabou Stork Nightmares",

which is still one of my favourite books.

It was influenced by a lot of great Scottish books

like Iain Banks' "The Bridge" and Alasdair Gray's "Lanark".

But it takes place along these different realities.

(APPLAUSE)

"Marabou Stork Nightmares" is a book about a guy who's in a coma

that he doesn't want to get out of

because he's enjoying his adventures there.

He's got some control over his life.

But he's always being pulled out of this world into the real world

of his hospital bed and his family.

I was briefly in a coma myself

when I was badly electrocuted as a teenager.

There was something comforting about it,

about not wanting to wake up, hearing everybody around you

and just being under that threshold of consciousness

and able to delve into these different worlds.

"Roy, I'm shining this torch into your eyes.

Pupil dilation seems more evident.

Good. Good."

"Fuck off!"

"Definitely more of a response that time, Roy."

(FAINT AUDIENCE LAUGHTER)

"It's probably just a reflex. I'll try again.

No, nothing this time round."

"No, cos I'm too quick for youse. You'll never find us in here.

Deeper. Deeper. Deeper."

While I'm here, I want to check out a drug clinic

that does psychedelic enhanced therapy.

Basically just to gain a kind of wider knowledge

of life and the world through DMT.

You know, it's educative and it's a new experience.

And I think drugs are very, very educative.

I think it's about me trying to make sense of myself in this world.

(IRVINE HUMMING)

"Join with computer audio"... Hello!

You're on mute, just so you know.

I won't be able to hear you.

Right. Fuck, yeah.

Hello. One more time.

(LAUGHS)

Hi, Irvine. Hiya.

Being best in service to you is getting an idea,

well, what has life dealt this human being here?

Wait... How have they been dealing with life?

This to me is the kind of bullshit that I hate.

It's like the whole purpose of DMT

is not to set up an alternative priesthood.

It's maybe the old Scottish Protestant kind of

no pope, priest or holy water mentality kind of coming out in me

that I always kind of fight against, but to me it comes over as culty.

Great.

Do you have any idea what it is that I do?

No. (BOTH LAUGH)

But I hear you have a projection. Yeah, I have a projection...

Like, I'm presenting myself... What I'm trying to say is...

basically, gi' us the drugs and let me kind of get into them, basically.

OK. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Bye, Irvine.

Bye.

I was quite looking forward to it. Now I'm fucking shiteing it, like.

It feels like you're diving into some cult.

(LAUGHS)

I'm quite interested in the type of DMT

that they have in this clinic in Toronto,

because it seems to me, from what I've heard,

to be more of a pre-life experience,

like what happens to you before you come here,

rather than a post-death experience,

like what happens to you after you leave.

I've had a few near-death experiences.

Once when I fell into this kind of well in this rave

and my mate, Bill Hillman, managed to get a hold of me.

I had an electric shock experience when I was younger.

I had the bus crash, which hospitalised me.

I had the near drowning experience in San Francisco,

when I was fished out of the pool

by the vodka promotions model from Boston.

As you get older, you become more aware of your own mortality

and how your days are numbered.

This could be quite an interesting trip.

Hi, Ronan. Good to see you. Irvine.

Nice to meet you. How are you doing?

Welcome to Field Trip Toronto.

Fabulous. This is our first ever location,

where we do primarily Ketamine assisted therapy,

but today we're doing something a bit different.

Looking forward to it.

This is Chad, our facilitator. Hey, Irvine.

Hello. Good to see you. Good to see you, chief.

Shall we? Yes.

All right, let's get started. All right.

So here's an interesting thing about 5-MeO-DMT.

In order for our ego, our mind, um, the mental activity,

the activity of just being a person,

our persona, our character etc...

It has to... It has to turn off somehow.

Now, when we go to sleep, we're dreaming.

And so there is a subconscious activity

that part of my sense of self is still active.

It's still present.

It's kind of like the layers of the onion, so to speak.

One is prepared to encounter different layers of themselves

on the way to that more impersonal experience

where there is no sense of self.

I'm not really interested in self-exploration

and therapy to that extent.

I'm more interested in sort of, um, in cosmic exploration,

if that kind of sounds sort of not too pretentious and sort of not...

I mean, I quite like my kind of demons. You know, they're...

They're drivers if you're an artist. You need to keep them.

I like to make mistakes, basically, and, uh, learn from them.

Now, because this experience is totally unpredictable,

I see myself as an accompaniment for your journey.

Kind of on the side.

You know, I think of a moving body of water, a river.

It has a direction, it has a flow, and I trust the river.

Now, you might hear me, maybe somewhere in your journey space,

just saying something simple like, take your time there,

I wish for you to just be there.

And so you're going to have one inhale.

Suck on it, one, two, three, four.

Keep going. Sucking, sucking.

(INHALING)

And you are in.

(HAUNTING AMBIENT MUSIC)

MAN: DMT is a powerful psychedelic drug

that can cause a similar effect to a near-death experience

in those who take it.

Derived from the main psychoactive compound in ayahuasca,

a type of brew made from ingredients with hallucinogenic properties,

DMT has been used for thousands of years for religious purposes,

usually as part of tribal ceremonies

to achieve higher spiritual consciousness.

The effects of DMT are similar to those of other psychedelics,

such as LSD.

Due to its potency and unpredictable nature,

the use of this drug can be dangerous

and may affect one's mental and physical well-being.

WOMAN: "The grey sky ferociously split and sunlight burst through..."

(VOICE ECHOES) "I realise now death is usually a process,

rather than an event.

The vandalism time perpetuates on the human body...

People generally die by degrees, incrementally...

You're nothing but a work-in-progress.

The grim reality of impending death can be talked away

by trying to invest in the present reality of life..."

(IN SCOTS DIALECT) "The blood pounded in ma heid,

makin me want tae be somewhere else...

This is limbo."

I always saw life as a big canvas that unfolds

and I don't think you should be limited to any one place.

But I think you have to have the proper kind of launch pad

and the proper refuge as well.

If somebody asked me where I live, probably I would say Edinburgh

because even though I don't spend most of my time here,

you know, it is home.

The place that you grew up,

the place where you spent childhood and early adulthood,

the place you went to school, the neighbourhood you grew up in.

These are the forces that shape you in life.

I always come back here and always will.

When you grow up in a place,

you're always rebelling against it slightly.

I used to jump on buses as a small kid.

I'd be found up the town and picked up a couple of times by the cops.

My mum and dad were absolutely mortified.

They said, "Why are you running away?"

It was embarrassing to them.

When a kid runs away, you think there's trouble at home.

Home was a really comfortable place.

But I ran away just cos I was fucking curious, and still am.

I lost my dad when I was in my 20s

and that kind of set me off on quite a destructive spiral.

I was very close to him. He was a really good guy.

Even though he was really ill,

when he actually did die, it was a shock, cos he was my best mate.

To lose someone that you're close to is a terrible thing.

My mum was never ill or sick. She was always very robust healthwise.

I used to love sparring with her, the kind of jousts we had.

She ripped the piss out of me and not gave as good as she got,

gave better than she got. She cut me down to size.

(WOMAN'S VOICE IN BACKGROUND)

I think she was very proud of me and she always read my books.

But, um, if my ego was getting out of control,

10 minutes from the old girl

would smash me right into nothingness again.

I miss the old girl.

(MUSIC BUILDS GENTLY)

You lose part of yourself when your parents die.

You miss the interactions you would have with them.

Dad had no knowledge of "Trainspotting".

He was dead before I even put pen to paper to start writing the book.

My dad had quite a big personality. He cast quite a big shadow.

And when that shadow was gone, I came out of myself quite a bit

because, you know, you can either shrink into nothingness

or you can take your place in the spotlight, basically.

And I think that I kind of did that.

It was probably the making of me, because I cleaned up my act to focus

and I realised that, fuck me, people just die.

So you've got to do something with yourself.

You owe it to them to live your life to the full.

(ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC)

"He emphasised basic truths:

you are not dying yet, you have to live your life until you are.

Underpinning them was the belief

that the grim reality of impending death

can be talked away

by trying to invest in the present reality of life.

I didn't believe that at the time, but now I do.

By definition, you have to live until you die.

Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience

as possible,

in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be."

(MUSIC FADES)

(APPLAUSE)

INTERVIEWER: "The Long Knives" tells the story

of a week in the life of detective investigator Ray Lennox.

We, the readers, are invited

to partake in a cathartic experience.

We partake in the extreme punishment of a wannabe kingly figure,

an utterly awful Tory politician, as if there were any other kind.

(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

Yeah, well, I think that's the issue that the central character faces.

He doesn't know who the perpetrator is,

but in some ways, he's sympathetic to them on one level.

Then he has to go through all this wrestling that we all go through.

Well, you can't kind of... You can't justify that kind of terrorism.

The state always has to have the monopoly of terror

and then you start asking who is the state

and as a copper, he's an agent of the state

and how has the state changed?

From my own experience growing up

in the welfare state Britain of the '70s,

the state was responsible for full employment.

It was responsible for education.

Now the relationship with the state is different. Oppressive.

It's basically going to siphon off the resources of all the citizens,

uh, into the pockets of a very, um, massively rich, transnational elite.

I can't be bothered to queue, but thank you.

All right, yeah. I mean, look at the queue.

Look at it, it's terrible.

The reason I'm pro-Scottish independence

is that I want democracy for everybody.

Right. So you've had it ever since. Great.

You'll have to read it out loud in a Scottish accent.

If Scotland did become independent,

you've instantly got rid of the monarchy,

the House of Lords, aristocracy,

Eton, Harrow and all these public schools that dominate our politics.

And all these institutions like the City of London,

they're essentially in a parasitic role

with the citizens of this country.

I see Scottish independence not solely being about the Scots per se.

It's being about democracy on these islands.

I'm photo bombing my own picture there.

The lack of independence and being ran from somewhere else,

I think that leads to a kind of very self-destructive kind of mentality,

and a lack of kind of belief that you can influence your own future.

I think that's very prominent in the Scottish psychology

that things are happening elsewhere,

decisions have been made elsewhere.

Hiya. My daughter Shonagh, with a "gh" at the end.

Growing up, I hated the whole idea of Scottish nationalism

and this blaming the English for everything.

It was something I wrote into Renton, that phase, if you like,

of Scottish nationalism in "Trainspotting",

bleeding into that tendency in Scots for self-flagellation.

And that idea that it's just terrible being Scottish.

Thanks a lot, buddy. Cheers.

(HOWLING WIND)

RENTON: It's shite being Scottish!

We're the lowest of the low.

The scum of the fucking Earth!

The most wretched, miserable,

servile, pathetic trash

that was ever shat into civilisation.

Some people hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers.

We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers.

Can't even find a decent culture to be colonised by.

We're ruled by effete arseholes.

It's a shite state of affairs, Tommy,

and all the fresh air in the world won't make any fucking difference!

Hey, congratulations. Thank you very much.

So where'd you get married? Mrs Welsh the third.

(LAUGHS)

We don't talk about the first two, darling.

Did you get a honeymoon? This is the honeymoon.

This is the honeymoon? Our whole life is a honeymoon.

Honeymoon, yeah. One big honeymoon.

(LAUGHS)

(HUMS)

So this is how the other half live then?

I'm afraid so, darling. It must have... Well, I'm not impressed.

(LAUGHS)

I'm not fucking impressed.

I wouldn't thank anybody for a house like that, for fuck's sake.

Could you not run some amazing community project in it?

Yeah, I mean, I'm not a writers retreat sort of type of guy.

I'm a bit more inclined to just be a kind of, um, a lone wolf,

travel light and have no kind of...

Nothing like that that needs upkeep and you're tied to it.

And it's shite anyway.

It's a place you visit. You don't live in fucking...

This is not shite. ..places like that.

It's the landed gentry of Scotland.

But, yeah, but that's... Fuck that.

I'm going to have to indoctrinate you into the ways of the posh.

Yeah, well... (CHUCKLES)

I've got my cunty shield up, like, yeah.

Beat it, ya fuckin' radges.

(GOAT BLEATING)

This is a climbing goat. Yeah, they're mountain goats.

Well, they're not mountin' me, anyway. The dirty bastards.

These goats look more intelligent and sly than most goats.

They've probably been interbred. Yeah.

(LAUGHS) With aristocrats.

That's right. So is it...?

(BLEATS)

That's a sweet wee apple.

When we were young, we used to chorie apples,

like coming from Muirhouse and going up to Barnton

and stealing apples from a garden.

The only problem with it, going over walls in big houses

and getting apples and running away,

it was kind of preparation for housebreaking in later life.

Didn't realise at the time you're actually mentally casing the joint.

Is that right?

I did once nick something from a friend's house.

Yeah? Yeah.

You stole from a friend? You posh folks are kind of morally bankrupt.

Mm. Youse would steal from your own.

(ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC FADES IN)

We all came from the prefabs in Pilton

to move into Muirhouse maisonettes.

Now, you know, I see it as like an ugly concrete jungle

with no social amenities at all.

But as kids it was like living in a spaceship almost,

compared to the prefab. Very kind of modern and very futuristic.

It was fertile territory for your imaginations.

And wherever we went, somebody had a ball.

We'd just kick it around anywhere basically.

You know, everywhere was a potential goal.

Whoa! Nice head!

What a guy. Let me help you up.

(LAUGHTER) Go on, the Welsh!

Your delivery's getting better, Welshy!

Well, I've still got all the skills of old, but a lot less stamina.

That's been the take-home for this one.

Whoa!

Colin and Dougie are kind of my oldest pals, my boyhood chums.

We've known each other since pre-school,

because we all lived in the prefabs in Pilton together.

Whoa.

Getting the hang of it now, Irvine!

In terms of the way that I think as a writer,

having these guys around at an early age to bounce all that stuff with

and throw that shit about with was very influential.

It felt kind of quite misfit-y in a lot of ways.

We had this little kind of bond, and, um, still do.

I was gonna say the football skills have diminished

but, nah, they're about the same, like.

I'm surprised none of us made it as a professional.

The coaches will be going,

"How the fuck did these bastards slip through our net?"

When's the last time we played football together?

Trying to think... about 50 years ago.

If it was just a kickabout.

Probably something ridiculous like that.

That's when I moved to London, so half a fucking century ago.

Would you play on grass? Sometimes on glue.

(LAUGHTER)

What do you prefer, grass or AstroTurf?

(LAUGHTER)

I don't know, I've not smoked AstroTurf.

(LAUGHTER)

I remember when we got arrested for playing football in the street

outside on the green. I mean, that was, uh...

How old were you? Played there a lot.

We were just kids, we were about six, seven.

I don't know if you remember,

when the two policemen took our names and addresses and he says,

"Your mother's gonna get a letter

saying you're gonna be taken to court."

For playing football in the street! But true enough, two weeks later.

At that age, though, you think you're gonna get put away.

That's your first thing. You think, "Fuck me!"

But the thing was that the actual judge that we came up for,

he just thought it was fucking ridiculous. He was embarrassed.

Furious.

The two cops, they had fuckin' big beamers, like.

But it was still on the record.

I remember getting done in London when I was about 16, 17,

and the guy said, "You've got previous."

It definitely shaped my attitude to authority.

This is happening because we're in a certain part of town.

Absolutely. Let's make no bones about it.

There's a hierarchy and we're at the bottom of the fucking pile.

I always remember that summer, '77, '78.

That's when the old smack started appearing.

In Muirhouse, like? Yeah, big time.

We lost a lot of guys that we kind of drank with at 17, 18.

They were in our group. They all died of smack abuse.

You cannae expect a bunch of kids used to the idea

you'd have apprenticeships, or at least labouring jobs, to sit,

and even if it was a shit job, you'd be fucked at night.

Not running around the streets.

You'd be knackered. Watching telly.

You have all the drama at work. And that's all gone.

If you've not got paid work, drugs will fill the gap,

because they're the compelling adventure on the street, like.

(SOMBRE ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC)

I think subconsciously in my early 20s

I didn't believe that I would see 30.

I think for me "Trainspotting" was a way of figuring out

how I became this junkie. Like, how did I get into this place?

You know, it was never in my kind of personal script to be that way.

When I first tried heroin, I was shiteing it,

and I kept thinking, I should turn back now.

I've got all this opportunity to turn back, you know.

And then, bang. It kind of, you know...

When it hit me, I just thought, "Well, this is fucking great."

Just a tremendous sense, you know,

after feeling sick and nauseous, the first rushes of it,

this is a fucking great drug. What's all the fuss about?

I feel fucking brilliant.

And generally that's the thing. You do feel brilliant until you don't.

And the effect soon wears off. It just becomes a hedonistic pastime.

I was determined to make every drug experience that I had,

whether, you know, heroin or alcohol or cocaine or ecstasy,

to try and use it in some way creatively

to try to find what this is actually telling me about myself.

But, basically, I just got too bored with drugs to be able to keep it up.

Writing pulled me out, not only of that self-destructive side,

but also that spirit-crushing mundane white-collar 9 to 5 stuff,

which was as equally horrible in a different way.

(HAUNTING MUSIC)

"All those dull broadsheet newspaper articles

on the scheme where we lived

tended to focus on how deprived it was.

Maybe it was, but I'd always defined the place

as less characterised by poverty than by boredom,

although the relationship between the two is pretty evident.

For me, though, the sterile boredom outside my house

was preferable to the chaos inside it."

CHAD: What's happening for you, Irvine?

(MUFFLED) I don't really know but I like it.

Take your time.

Does it feel familiar?

I don't really feel my body.

I can... feel my heart beat slowly.

Kind of relaxing, but rapturous at the same time.

(AMBIENT ELECTRONIC MUSIC)

Hi, Simone. (REPLIES INDISTINCTLY)

I'm good, pal. How are you?

(HUMMING AND WHISTLING)

(ROPE AND FEET TAPPING)

This has always been one of my favourite places in the world.

When I started coming to Miami in the '90s, DJing for the WMC,

I said, "Gotta find a boxing club in Miami."

And I've been coming here ever since.

Give me a jab.

Getting higher.

Move it around, move it around.

You can't stay still, you'll get hit. Jab cross, hook cross.

Ha, you can't hook with a hooker.

Gotta keep that hand up, yeah.

Being a kind of poncey artsy kid,

I got sent, against my will, really, to the boxing club.

But I really liked it.

I've always railed against this kind of "art versus sport" dichotomy.

I think you have to do both in life, you know.

Faster now!

C'mon! C'mon!

I mean, boxing's just loads and loads of simple things.

Putting them together is the complicated part.

Your body doesn't want to do it.

You have to burn different neural pathways in your head

before you can do it. And writing's about the same.

Keep pushing! Keep pushing! Push back.

You write things and you have to keep asking the "What if?" question.

Why should this character do this? Maybe they shouldn't.

When I go after a session and I go back and sit writing, start typing,

I'm very energised but I'm also much more focused.

I'm looking at the piece of work I'm doing

and saying, "What does this actually need?"

(EXHALES LOUDLY) Hell, yeah, Irvine!

(LAUGHS) Hell, yeah!

That's what I'm fuckin' talking about.

The two things seem to be very far apart,

but everything is ultimately about process.

I love this fucking sport. I love it!

Life and creativity and art and drugs,

it's essentially a square go with yourself,

and you can't really let anybody else

get in the way and hold your jacket.

You have to just engage with yourself fully in that state.

(HYPNOTIC ELECTRONIC MUSIC)

"I'm more of a warrior than you'll ever be.

I believe in class war.

I believe in the battle of the sexes.

I believe in my tribe.

I believe in the righteous,

intelligent clued-up section of the working classes

against the brain-dead moronic masses

as well as the mediocre, soulless bourgeoisie.

I believe in punk rock.

In northern soul. In acid house.

In mod. In rock and roll.

I also believe in pre-commercial righteous rap and hip-hop.

That's my manifesto.

(AMBIENT MUSIC)

I've always hunted around different scenes.

I used to look at some of my peers that were making a full-time life

out of clubbing or out of music, playing in bands.

I did write songs, and I was always getting turfed out of bands

cos I just didn't have the musicianship.

I always felt that I was very close

to living the life that I wanted to live.

And it was about having something that I could redefine myself

as a kind of artist rather than just a guy who worked 9 to 5

and went to clubs in his spare time.

I wouldn't have been a writer if it hadn't been for acid house.

When I started to write, I wanted to capture the excitement

of being in a club on E, dancing to a 4-4 beat.

I wanted to try to capture that on the page.

It just came out from me, really.

I didnae join any writer groups. I didn't study English literature.

It kind of just evolved.

I'd come back up to Edinburgh

and there was this embryonic, uh, literary scene

and I was bringing this acid house kind of thing into it.

Janice Galloway and Hamish Whyte

published a section of "Trainspotting"

in this New Writing Scotland thing.

Duncan McLean was starting Clocktower Press.

And Duncan said that I should send the manuscript of "Trainspotting"

to Robin Robertson at Secker & Warburg, Scottish guy.

I lied it was finished. It wasn't anywhere near finished,

but bullshitting like that gave me the impetus to finish it.

And it got published and then I was away.

(MUSIC BUILDS)

(MUSIC FADES)

Why would you come to a museum about Hackney?

(SIGHS)

(CHUCKLES) Other than to see something about yourself?

What's this? Free speech.

Right. Free speech, yeah.

Well...

"Wages of sin is death." The wages of sin.

Let that be a lesson to you, Welshy. Yeah, I know.

I met Deb back in the day round about the miners' strike.

She was involved in that. She was involved in everything politically.

And in London there was always people looking for places to stay.

And Debble never turned anybody away, me included.

My connection to Hackney was it was cheap to live there

back in the day.

It did attract a load of disaffected punks and politicos.

Everybody seemed to wind up in either Hackney or Brixton.

These were the epicentres of London counterculture, if you like.

Hello.

Hiya. I'm Rebecca, the museum curator.

Hi, Rebecca. Thanks for coming in.

Thanks for having us. This is Debbie.

Lovely to meet you. Nice to meet you.

I just wanted to stress that this permanent display in the museum

is just the tiniest fraction of the 8,500 objects, artworks, interviews

we have telling all the histories and stories of the borough.

I was wondering if you'd be

interested to peek behind the scenes?

Oh, yeah, we'd go for that. Yeah.

Come with me. Brilliant.

Cheers. Thanks.

(IMITATES EXPLOSION)

Ta-da!

Oh, my God. That's like the one hanging from the ceiling

at that fetish club where you had that party. Yes, it was actually.

It was. That was a strange night. That was a strange night. Yeah.

I found myself sitting talking to a great train robber

on what I subsequently discovered was a rack.

I lifted up the tenting to see what I was sitting on.

I went like that and one of them was hanging with stirrups. Yes.

(PAPER RUSTLING)

Are we allowed to go straight in? Are we allowed to touch these?

It's fine. As long as you've clean, dry hands, and obviously gentle.

(LAUGHS)

Class war. Straight into it.

Get in. Get in there.

That was a great mag. It was a great mag.

It was quite uncompromising. Look at these.

Hackney really was a hotbed of dissent, wasn't it, then?

Yeah. Totally, yeah. When we first met here.

It was. There was always...

And the miners said they collected more here

than they collected anywhere else.

You were a big noise in the Miners Support Committee. A senior comrade.

"Senior comrade" is better than "big noise"!

You read that bit about Orgreave I did in "Skagboys"?

Yeah. I did. I did.

And I think that it was, um...

I think what it was really good at, and you know this as well,

describing what it feels like

when on your way to things like that.

To something like that. Yeah. Sort of all...

That kind of adrenaline.

I mean, Orgreave, you had the complication

that so many of the police were from down here, weren't they?

Oh, they all were.

White shirts. Exactly.

And used to taunt all the miners at home

about how they had bought a new car or house with all their overtime.

But I... I mean, I was there at the Eddy Shah thing.

I was there on that big Tuesday night where it was a massive battle.

But I think the difference then was, one, we were all much younger.

And two, after what happened in the '70s, we actually did believe,

certainly at the beginning, that we were going to do it.

(PULSING ELECTRONIC MUSIC)

(IN SCOTS DIALECT) "Every cunt steams forward

tae try and get through the polis lines,

n ah'm propelled right intae it aw,

airms pinned tae ma side for a scary minute.

A space opens up and ah move intae it,

then the mounted polis charge us and every fucker runs back.

It's like a row at the football

but it's made room fir the lorries tae pass

and we're aw gaun fuckin mental!

Aw' shoutin right in the face ay a young copper, ages wi me.

'What ye fuckin daein, ya scabby Nazi cunt?!'"

There's another surge forward,

but when the horseback polis charge again,

the whole polis lines are right behind them.

Stanes are hurled through the air at the cunts

and a pig oan the tannoy

warns that if we dinnae retreat a hundred yards,

they're gaunny steam in wi full riot gear.

We can see them, gettin ready,

wi their helmets, short shields and batons."

(ELECTRONIC MUSIC BUILDS)

That was a turning point.

Thatcherism was ascendant. Reaganism in America.

And, you know, we made decisions in the '80s

that have basically fucked us since.

We've turned our back on a kind of idea for social democracy.

And it's interesting that people on the left

are just as deluded about this as people on the right.

If you look at the crushing of organised labour that happened,

you now have no counterbalance to capital.

You just have the unfettered power of capital devouring itself.

It's an interesting time for a writer.

It's not a particularly great time to be a human being.

And, you know, if you've got some concern

for your fellow human beings and some sense of self-preservation,

I think that we've really created a proper old shit show.

(ELECTRONIC MUSIC FADES)

You got off heroin but did the writing solve that?

Are you happy now?

Are you glad with who the fuck you are? You must be.

Bestselling author, all that. Or is that all bullshit?

I've always been happy with who I am. I've never been unhappy.

Were you ever ashamed, even in your junkie days?

Shame and unhappiness are different things. Know what I mean?

I think I've always been a happy soul.

I can't be a fucking miserable cunt. I just can't fucking do it.

Have you ever seen a therapist? I think therapy is all about control.

I don't think anybody should go to therapy.

You go to therapy, you cede control to someone else.

You shouldn't be doing that. Take control yourself.

So your parents, were they behind your creativity

when you started writing? Um, yeah, yeah. They were, like. Yeah.

But what were they like when you were on heroin? Uh, not so good.

But were they similar to the way Renton's parents react?

Like, helpful. Yeah, yeah.

But didn't really have the personality to express shame?

I was just told from an early age, don't smoke dope.

Dope will fucking kill you. How good is heroin?

Personally? I mean, it's like, um...

It just absolves everything that you're bothered about.

Not just everything you're bothered about.

It takes away everything you care about.

The positive things, good things. OK.

You just sit there. It takes motivation.

You're sitting in a fucking bath, basically.

To me, heroin was always like sitting in a nice warm bath.

Were you the guy in the group that started that?

Get others into heroin? Fucking loads.

Are some of them dead now? Probably. Yeah.

(HOWLING WIND)

I'm trying hard, Mark, but I'm not feeling anything.

We were young, bad things happened. It's over.

Can we go home now?

Two hours till the next train. For fuck's sake.

Look, we're here as an act of memorial. (SIGHS)

Nostalgia, that's why you're here.

You're a tourist in your own youth.

Cos you had a near-death experience

and now you're feeling fuzzy and warm.

What other moments will you be revisiting?

Here's a good one: how about the time you sold Tommy his first hit,

leading him on to heroin addiction, HIV infection

and ultimately his death at the age of, what was it, 22, 23?

23. 23. How innocent was that?

Aye, that's mine.

How's yours? Dunno what you're talking about.

She'd be a woman by now. Maybe kids of her own.

But she never got that far, did she? Never got to lead her life.

Because her father who should have been looking after her,

protecting his own infant,

was busy filling his own veins with heroin

to check that she was breathing properly.

Aye, how'd you keep a lid on that one?

(QUIET MELANCHOLIC MUSIC)

With "Trainspotting 2",

you had to acknowledge the guys are older

and it can't be just another series of wacky adventures.

If "Trainspotting 1" was about friendship and betrayal,

"Trainspotting 2" is essentially about revenge and nostalgia

and the struggle of people to find themselves

in an accelerated capitalist world,

which is slipping through their fingers very, very quickly.

It's a love-hate relationship Renton and Sick Boy have.

There's a kind of symbiosis to it. They're like feuding brothers.

At the start of "Trainspotting 2", they're pretty atomised

and they're finding their own way in life,

but they're still connected in that way due to all the baggage

they've accumulated down the years together.

And I'm convinced that neither of those guys

would be into heroin if they hadn't met each other.

But I don't think that anybody's fundamentally responsible

for anybody else's triumphs or tragedies.

I can't point my finger and say this person led me astray

or this person was responsible for me taking loads of drugs

and messing my life up.

There's certainly people that didn't help on the way.

There's certainly encounters that didn't help.

My mind state at the time didn't help.

I'm not gonna be held a scapegoat for anybody else,

but equally I'm not gonna hold anybody as a scapegoat for me.

(SOMBRE MUSIC)

"Some people spend years in counselling,

trying to cope with being fucked up.

I just move on.

The fucked-upness always goes.

The conventional wisdom is that you're running away,

you should learn to cope with being fucked-up.

I don't hold with that.

Life is a dynamic rather than a static process,

and when we don't change it kills us.

It's not running away, it's moving on.

Yeah.

This should make me feel better.

You can't beat self-justification.

I'm not running away.

I'm moving on.

Moving on."

(ATMOSPHERIC ETHEREAL MUSIC)

(WHISPERS) Irvine...

(HOWLING WIND)

(WHISPERS) Irvine. (WHISPERS) Irvine.

(DISTORTED WHISPER) Irvine. Irvine?

(WOMAN'S VOICE ECHOES) What's happening for you?

(DISTORTED) Where are you now?

Where are you now? (QUIET) Where are you now?

Further. Further.

Further. (QUIET) Further.

Deeper. Deeper.

Deeper. (QUIET) Deeper.

What are you running from? What are you running from?

(FAINT ULTRASOUND HEARTBEAT)

(ECHOES) From a place called home.

From a place called home... From a place... called home.

Where have you gone? Where have you gone?

Where have you gone? (QUIET) Where have you gone?

A place... A place...

A place away from your gaze...

Away from your gaze. A place far away from your gaze.

(DISTORTED WHISPER) Irvine.

Irvine. (WHISPERS) Irvine.

Irvine...

Irvine, what's happening for you?

CHAD: What's happening for you?

(MUSIC FADES)

I had a sensation that...

I was...

kind of in the womb and about to be born.

And hearing the noises around me,

the noises of doctors and the operating theatre

waiting to pull me out of this world that I'm enjoying being in...

(CONTEMPLATIVE ELECTRONIC MUSIC)

I feel I've just dissolved.

I'm interested in how people fuck up.

This has always been my mission as a writer,

to explore why we make the wrong decisions to compound our misery.

There's different realities contained within us all,

and writing is a way of finding some of these different realities.

You use your own life and you use your own stories

and use the stories of friends and people that you're close to,

but you just move slightly beyond yourself.

(INDISTINCT MUFFLED VOICE)

When you tend to work off the subconscious, as I do,

the material kind of chooses you, really.

So if the characters come to me as racist or sexist

or violent or psychopathic or whatever, then so be it.

I'm not gonna set myself up as this great liberal

who approves or disapproves of the characters in the book.

To me they only exist as a culmination of behaviour.

I wanted to write about a character who was just basically horrible.

So I wrote "Filth", made him a cop,

because the guys who we call on to protect us against the bad bastards

are often bad bastards themselves.

Bruce Robertson was inspired by a cop

that arrested us in Gonerby Moor in Lincolnshire,

out of our heads running across the A1.

And one of the cops stepped forward and goes,

"Look, son. I'm one of your old-fashioned Scottish cops

and I'm gonna kick your ribs in if you don't shut the fuck up."

So he had our attention.

It was basically all the Scottish cops,

all the bad cops you've ever known that sort of coalesced

and probably a bit of the darker side of almost everybody

that I've met, basically.

A character on a page can be as bad as you want.

An audience needs to engage with a character on the screen,

in spite of all the things he does.

I mean, I think Bruce is actually quite a decent guy,

just going through a really hard time.

He might be a bit of a bastard, but, you know, he's having it tough.

And James McAvoy, he pushes that out there

and puts empathy into the character.

(MUSIC FADES)

(MELANCHOLIC PIANO MUSIC)

You see, there's something wrong with me.

There's something seriously wrong with me.

Have you spoken to anyone?

Have you been to see a doctor?

Yeah. Yeah?

No.

I don't know... I don't know.

(SCREECHES)

I'm in charge.

I'm in charge of me. I'm in charge of me.

I'm in charge of this investigation

and don't you ever fucking forget that. Hey, Bruce.

You need to listen to me. Can you hear me?

I'm really worried about you.

I don't think you're fit for work at the moment.

You go up there and suck someone's cock

and stop playing the amateur fucking psychologist,

you evil witch!

(MUSIC FADES)

(SEAGULLS SQUAWKING)

# You gave me fame and fortune

# And for that, I thank you all #

Thank you!

What can I say about LA, it's like a beautiful lady.

You have to treat it with kindness and respect.

And then when you do that, it'll come through for you. Yeah?

Nah, I mean, it's fucking...

I mean, it is what it is. It's fucking kind of, erm...

There's great things and shit things about it,

like there is anywhere else.

Oh, I didn't tell you. I was in Vegas this weekend

and I see this really cool looking group

of young people walking towards me.

And two had "Trainspotting" shirts on. Brilliant.

(UPBEAT ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN BACKGROUND)

Trevor I met at a party in LA.

I was hanging out there and this guy comes up to me

and he says... "Irvine Welsh,

you need fuckin' management, man. I should be your fuckin' manager."

He had a big life in LA and it just opened up the whole place for me.

(MUSIC STOPS)

Fuck's sake! Come on. Come on!

Here we go! Fuck's sake!

So you've gotta have a big bar.

Mentally, kind of zigging... (LAUGHS)

Sick man...

This is where we show the interns "Trainspotting".

Jesus, fucking hell, man. So they can learn the classics.

Trevor, come on, for fuck's sake, man. This is just... You know.

Oh, God.

No wonder you've not had me here. You'd never get rid of me!

(LAUGHS)

That was a great day when you said yes.

Me and Nick, my old partner, we were jumping up and down like,

"I can't believe we represent Irvine. What a fuckin' win."

When "Trainspotting" came out, studios were like,

"Give us the next 'Trainspotting'." I thought they meant,

"Give us something that's really unique and original."

I wrote this thing, I think it was for Paramount.

I wrote this kind of, what I thought was a great script,

a mad science fiction script that I wrote, you know.

And actually I realised, when they said,

"Give me the next 'Trainspotting'," they meant "Trainspotting 2",

something that I can cast Ewan McGregor

and Johnny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle

and bring the gang back."

And I'm thinking "Fuck, I don't want to do that!"

(LAUGHTER)

I went all posh like, "I'm an artiste, how dare you!"

Can you teach writing? No.

Is it just something that somebody has?

You know what it is? It's all about fucking desire to do it.

I had to teach for six months

in order to get my visa to stay in the States.

You had all these kids in their early 20s, and I was saying like,

"You're wasting your time, this is ripping off your parents.

If you want to write, you'll write.

Fuck off. Leave this place. Go away.

Impregnate your fucking brother's fiancee.

Fucking run around, get a beaten convertible,

run off with a hooker down to Mexico.

Get some fucking stories," you know.

I love this... The other day at dinner with Brett,

you said, he didn't realise that the relationship he has in real life

was sort of mirroring one of the storylines in your new thing.

Yeah. I was like, "You don't know if you're stealing from your own life?"

And you go, "We're just a bunch of vampires."

That really stuck with me. We're vampires.

I think you don't realise that you steal from your own life.

You're constantly fucking putting fangs in your own neck.

(AMBIENT MUSIC FADES IN)

"It doesn't matter whether you're an ideologue or a sensualist.

You follow the stimuli thinking that...

they're your signposts to the promised land.

But they're nothing of the kind.

What they are is rocks to navigate past,

each one you brush against, ripping you a little more open

and there are always more on the horizon.

But you can't face up to that,

so you force yourself to believe the bullshit

of those you instinctively know are liars

and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others,

hoping that by repeating them often and fervently enough

you'll attain the godlike status we accord to those who tell the lies

most frequently and most passionately."

I like to challenge and annoy and disturb

and irritate the fuck out of myself when I write.

Basically, if you write a book, you're left alone,

whereas when you go into a TV or cinema environment,

instantly it's a collaborative undertaking.

That's why I like writing with Dean because we red pen each other

before everybody else comes in with their red pens.

I've lost track of the projects that we've worked on.

Films like "Wedding Belles"

and obviously "Crime" is getting in towards its second season now.

(MUSIC FADES)

It is funny cos with season one of "Crime",

because the cast was so strong, you want to give them as much to do

in the second series as you can. Absolutely.

But it still has to be about Lennox.

Like you said, if we get the rough structure...

I think we should send the fucking lot off now as it is, first draft.

If we fanny around with it and polish it too much,

we're gonna get all these notes back anyway. Absolutely.

When we think about all the things we've done in the last 20 years,

it's like you can do something really brilliant

and it can just, you know, oh, it can't get...

You know, it's like "Wedding Belles".

It's one of the best things we've done, but it never got the exposure.

Mark Cousins... Remember? He said,

if you wanna make a successful film,

write about a wedding. It was tongue in cheek.

Yeah, put wedding in the title.

We actually took it as some sort of clarion call.

That's a great idea! We'll do a wedding film.

And the amount of money we spent... incredible.

The first shot was the cranes. The overhead cranes and all that.

Big shot down at the sugar place in London.

Yeah. In Wapping.

I think with "Wedding Belles" we hit a nerve. Yeah.

(HOWLING WIND)

(WATER LAPPING)

(TRAIN RATTLING PAST)

(GUN COCKING)

Hasta la vista, Taffy.

(ECHOING GUNSHOT)

This is for my Kev.

(ECHOING GUNSHOT)

You can't... You can't kill a priest.

You've got a lot of explaining to do to St Peter.

(ECHOING GUNSHOT)

I never got the chance to do it to you when you was alive,

so this will have to do.

(ECHOING GUNSHOTS)

(SUCCESSION OF LOUD SPLASHES)

The first time we talked about films.

All we talked about at first was music.

I remember I was doing a gig in London,

with my little record box full of Northern Soul.

We met at Jerry's - Filthy McNasty's that were first there.

After all them years of people like, "You've gotta meet Irvine Welsh."

That's definitely the bond,

and then obviously started writing together.

And all the producers are always saying, "How do you work?"

In America, it's like, "What's your process? What's your process?"

The interesting thing is, we don't have any process.

We just make this up as we go along.

So I dunno. I mean, if we just blooter these six drafts off now

then that's that part of "Crime" done.

Absolutely. Brilliant.

And then just loads of drugs tonight and all the usual fucking shit.

Paracetamol... Thyroid tablets...

(LAUGHTER)

Kidney pills.

Clean living will get us through, buddy.

MAN: Can you give me a list of remaining places?

This is "Crime" now.

Lennox is just back from his extended leave.

There's a new guy, Stark, who's this guy here,

who's a bit of a cunt.

But, um... they've not met yet.

That's the first time they see each other.

EMMA: And just every day...

Emma plays Lennox's sister. She's a lawyer.

I think you'll find I do know criminal law

as I practise it every day.

So she's a bit of a...

..very different to how she is in real life, very uptight,

quite a controlling person... the character that she's playing.

And she's so not that.

It's quite interesting to see her perform like that.

(TENDER CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC)

(MUFFLED VOICES)

I like being in a relationship.

I like being into a kind of exclusive, loving relationship.

(MUFFLED CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

I like the romantic gesture of getting married,

of making a kind of declaration of love and passion.

Most women I've been with have said that I'm a good lover,

but I don't know if women just say this to their boyfriends

to keep them in order. So you never know. You know what I mean?

(LAUGHS)

Married to me... God, I think it'd be a tough shift.

(LAUGHS)

"You said when we embarked on this great adventure together,

that lots of laughter was essential in a relationship.

I agreed.

You also made the point that a great deal of sex

was of equal importance.

Again, I agreed. Wholeheartedly.

In fact, I remember your exact words:

laughter and sex are the barometers of a relationship.

This was the statement you made, if I remember correctly.

Don't get me wrong. I couldn't agree more.

But not at the same time, ya fuckin' cow!"

(MUSIC BUILDS)

Renton's in some ways a more authentic self.

I think I probably write more self-consciously

when I write as him.

He's got ideas above his station. He's a wee bit full of himself,

and he oscillates between being really cool

and in control of everything

and utterly socially inept, which is certainly me.

You have to have good reasons to stay addicted to a drug like heroin.

You get to a point where you think, "Why the fuck am I doing this?"

And then you think to yourself, "Well, what if I just stopped?"

There's no compelling thing to drive it

other than the addiction itself,

which isn't really enough, I don't think.

There has to be some kind of depression and anxiety

or stress disorder for you to keep on it.

Most of the people that kick it successfully

do it because there's nothing else driving it.

It's just the addiction itself.

(MUSIC FADES)

# BIZET: Carmen Suite No.2: "Habanera"

(DOOR SHUTS)

RENTON: Relinquishing junk.

Stage one: preparation.

(KEYS CLATTER)

For this you will need one room, which you will not leave.

Soothing music.

Tomato soup, ten tins of.

Mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold.

Ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of.

Magnesia, milk of, one bottle.

Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins,

mineral water, Lucozade, pornography.

One mattress, one bucket for urine, one for faeces and one for vomitus.

One television and one bottle of Valium,

which I've procured from my mother, who is,

in her own domestic and socially acceptable way, also a drug addict.

Now I'm ready.

All I need is one final hit to soothe the pain,

while the Valium takes effect.

(MUSIC STOPS)

(CONTEMPLATIVE ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC FADES IN)

IRVINE: Somebody said in one of these broadsheet papers,

"Are you middle class now?" I said, "No, I'm upper class.

I don't do what middle-class people do."

I think the great thing about being an artist, you know, or a writer,

if you're successful at it, financially successful at it,

it kind of takes you out of the class system in a lot of ways.

You become free, you're not forced to work.

You can make your hobby the whole centre of your life.

The most important resource you have is time.

I retired 30 years ago.

I've just been indulging myself since then.

I think I've always had a massive sense of entitlement.

It's not something that I feel is a good or bad thing.

I just felt that I can basically do what the fuck I like

and that's what I'm gonna do.

I don't think my demons have changed as I've got older,

but I don't see they're anything to fear.

I think they give you a hunger and something to react against.

They're sabotaging versions of the self

that will drag you into this hole, if you let them.

But they're also energisers too.

You can also use these things positively.

You realise that the same forces that are working within you

can do you a lot of good as well if you channel them the right way.

(CHAD'S VOICE IN BACKGROUND)

(REFLECTIVE MUSIC FADES)

I kind of feel that, um...

I've had the chance to sneak off home.

I can imagine that being somewhat bittersweet.

Yeah, it is... It is.

(GENTLE MUSIC)

I don't actually have the words for it.

And that makes me quite happy.

I feel I'm coming out of it

but I'd like to enjoy a few more minutes of silence.

Let's do that. Just to enjoy the last of it.

Absolutely.

(MUSIC FADES)

(ELECTRONIC AMBIENT SOUNDSCAPE)

WOMAN: I didn't want people around me.

(DISTORTED ECHO) This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety.

Merely beauty, and the scary unfathomable wisdom of transition...

Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain...

It's what you do rather than what you are.

You can't lie to your soul...

Ah couldnae allow masel tae be trained tae think that way...

Now, for the first time,

he's seeing that there really is a way out of this.

You don't have to run away.

You just meet somebody special

and step sideways into a parallel universe.

(SOMBRE AMBIENT MUSIC)

"Most of all, the conclusion is that visiting that place

answers everything about the great dilemmas we ask ourselves,

about human society, the individual and the collective.

It tells you that it's both that are sovereign

and that our politics of trying to resolve the two

are utterly futile.

That we are all connected to a greater force

yet retain our unique singularity.

You can be as much or as little of one or the other as you like.

They are so integrated that even the question,

which has haunted philosophy, politics and religion for all time,

ceases to exist."

(MUSIC FADES)

(EXCLAIMS)

Oh, yeah. Here we go.

(CHUCKLES)

Whoa.

That was good. That was quite emotional. Mm.

Did you meet some of your own layers of your own onion?

Trying to put into terms what really happened to me is like, um...

I felt myself dissolving, like sinking into the mattress,

kind of almost like, um, disintegrating into it.

But also at the same time, I felt myself rising above a little bit.

It's like the sensation of being born when you kind of have that...

You don't have consciousness as a newborn baby,

but you have awareness you're being taken from somewhere,

physically and forcefully, into this other place.

And you're aware of... When you start to reassemble,

you're aware of the kind of the discomfort

and limitations of your own body,

as opposed to the infinite possibilities you have

when you're swimming around in here. You know?

It does take you to a total place of engagement with everything.

You feel like you're a part of everything.

You realise that we're all kind of, um...

We're all gods in a way. We're all part of this cosmic energy.

We're all part of this big cosmic formula.

With DMT, you go to a completely different place.

It's engagement with something that's inside you

that's maybe kind of buried deep in your subconsciousness

or you're accessing another parallel world you're part of

you don't realise you're a part of. It doesn't feel strange.

It feels like we've been here before in some ways.

It feels like it's locked into part of who you are.

I was always a very kind of militant atheist.

And I'm no longer an atheist now.

You know, I believe that there is some form

of cosmic connected energy and that we're all part of it.

And that this... us here is just a holiday.

What it does is it makes the idea of death much less scary, you know.

It does make dying a more exciting thing than a thing to dread.

(UPBEAT DANCE MUSIC PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND)

(MUSIC DROWNS OUT EXCHANGE)

(LAUGHTER)

Basically, it's been great. It's been a great 30 years.

You can't complain when you've had a run like that.

You think you might go out of fashion

or you might become not so good

and it doesn't really bother me.

I think it's something to be embraced.

(GENTLE CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC FADES IN)

I really like the idea that change happens to you

through your experiences

that are often not conscious ones that you've mapped out.

I'll try to be open to the possibilities of change.

Choose Life!

Choose a job, choose a career....

I don't really fear my creativity being shot.

If I can't be bothered any more,

It's an opportunity to do something else.

I don't really want any legacy.

I think things have to exist in real time.

It's fuckin' real life, though, eh?

Oh...

What youse up to, lads?

Trainspotting!

(CHEERING)

(GENTLE CONTEMPLATIVE MUSIC CONTINUES)

When I was in the DMT trip,

I felt very comfortable and very homely

and I didn't really want to leave.

The interesting thing about it was when I started to come out of it,

I saw the faces of people that I was close to,

not just people like Emma that now are in my life,

but people that have been right through my life.

And it was quite emotional.

It said to me that you're in this place

and you'll probably get there eventually,

but you don't belong here now.

DMT is a bit like that. You're sliding towards something.

There's more doors to go through and open,

but you open a few of them, not all of them, but you come back.

This is where you belong right now, you belong here with these people.

Your role in this life is basically to belong.

It's to be here for the people in your life for as long as you can be.

As long as they can enrich your life and you can enrich theirs,

you should be around.

"Increasingly, life seems fractured,

as if his past had been lived by someone else.

It isn't just that the place he now resides in

and the people around him are poles apart.

It's like he himself is an entirely different person.

The overriding obsessions and foibles of the man he'd once been

now feel utterly ludicrous

to the current resident of his mind and body."

.::roBRzo::.

# SUICIDE: "Dream Baby Dream"

# Dream baby dream

# Forever

# Keep them dreams burnin', oh baby

# Keep them dreams burnin', oh forever

# Oh dream baby dream

# Dream baby dream

# Forever

# Dream baby dream

# Oh baby, you gotta keep them dreams burnin'

# Keep them dreams burnin' forever

# Oh dream baby dream Dream baby dream

# Dream baby dream Dream baby dream

# Oh dream baby, dream baby

# Dream baby, dream baby

# Dream baby

# Oh dream baby dream #