When Iggy Pop, Irvine Welsh and Underworld met up to discuss ‘Trainspotting’
Nearly 27 years ago, movie-goers were smacked in the face with the unpalatable truths of the British Isles – with “smack” being the operative word. English director Danny Boyle left his rose-tinted lens at home, replacing it with an untinted, filthy one to capture the unheard, unseen majority. Our friends across the Atlantic may stereotype the Brits as a bunch of over-polite tea-sippers, but nothing could prepare them for Irvine Welsh’s gritty depiction of rave-era Scotland, Trainspotting.
Scottish author Irvine Welsh shook up the realm of pop literature in the 1990s. His mordant and revealing catalogue boasts fictional novels, plays and short stories, but it all started with his first novel, 1993’s Trainspotting. Welsh takes the reader through a matrix of Scottish slang as the life of heroin addict Mark Renton arrives at an uncomfortable crossroads.
With a side order of shock and outrage, Welsh’s Trainspotting garnered a glowing critical response, and he was soon inundated with representatives looking to get their clients’ hands on the rights to adapt the story. Fortunately, Boyle was among the interested parties, and he duly adapted the novel into one of the decade’s greatest movies.
Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd and Robert Carlyle headed up the water-tight cast, perfectly capturing the comedy, pain and desperation of the novel. All the while, a faultless and befitting soundtrack featured the likes of Lou Reed, Sleeper, New Order, Brian Eno, Primal Scream, Blur, Elastica, David Bowie and Heaven 17.
Perhaps the most memorable contributions to the movie’s soundtrack, however, were those of Iggy Pop, whose 1977 classic ‘Lust for Life’ served as the introductory banner for the film and its official trailer, and Underworld, the British electro duo responsible for the enrapturing ‘Born Slippy’.
In 2018, a year after the successful release of the sequel movie, T2 Trainspotting, Iggy Pop, Irvine Welsh and Underworld (Karl Hyde and Rick Smith) met up at Iggy’s house in Miami for a chat over cream tea. The conversation, documented by Welsh in The Sydney Morning Herald, flowed from comical cocaine-related anecdotes to the movie that bound them. In the prologue, Welsh referred to the artistic debt he owes to his musical hero, Iggy Pop and dance music pioneers Underworld. “In the ’90s, I did a novel, Trainspotting, about being fucked up, practically ghostwritten by Iggy and underscored by the beats of dance music,” he wrote.
Trainspotting was written as a stark reflection of Scotland’s toxic drug culture of the 1980s, but the lives led by the protagonists, who are shown to be die-hard Iggy fans in the novel, don’t fall far from Iggy’s famed hedonism in 1970s America.
During their conversation, Welsh and Iggy exchanged cocaine-related anecdotes, hinting at the true life experiences that once guided their art. “In the incident described in the song ‘Bells & Circles’, I was out with the last gasp, truly derelict desperate Stooges, in ’74. We were on our way to DC, and I did snort a gram,” Iggy said.
“A gram of cocaine? Welsh asked.
“Yeah, I put down the tray table and snorted the whole gram, and this beautiful tall, very dark stewardess was available, but then I started drinking: I had to take the edge off,” he replied. “When I got to the hotel, I realised I’d forgotten her number, which was terrible, and because I didn’t hook up with her, I got together with a notorious groupie who had a friend who had some angel dust, so I took it before the gig.”
“They didn’t mind about coke on planes in those days?” Welsh asked.
“Well, I didn’t mind!” Iggy responded playfully.
Without divulging the details of his own drug-related anecdotes, Welsh wrote: “Iggy and I then swap cocaine stories before agreeing that it’s a terrible drug, but you need to test it thoroughly and repeatedly to be absolutely sure.”
Moving on to the topic of Trainspotting, Welsh asked the three musicians how they got together to record the Teatime Dub Encounters EP together for T2. “Danny Boyle asked me to help with T2 Trainspotting, and we got quite excited about how to look at music differently from the first film because then there was no composer involved,” Smith recalled. “We thought, ‘What if we had an original piece of music from Iggy that would play in this particular scene’ so my manager chased a connection with Iggy. The timing kind of worked out, and you were in London, about to do some shows?”
“I was on tour doing the Post Pop Depression tour with Josh Homme,” Iggy replied.
“You were at The Savoy and graciously said ‘Yeah’ because, you know, we both felt a strong connection to Trainspotting, and I turned up thinking I’ve got one chance here to convince this gentleman that we should work together on a piece of music,” Smith added. “So I brought basically half my studio, and we hired a hotel room, and I set it up and sat waiting.”
“Well yeah, the thing was traumatic for me, really, the whole thing,” Iggy started. “The way it came at me while I was on this tour with guys 25 years younger than me doing the rock tour schedule, and I get, ‘Danny Boyle wants to talk to you about doing something for a movie’. I thought, ‘Well, that sounds great, but I’m in the middle of a tour.’”
“My performance is a big deal to me, but they had this song ‘Shotgun Mouthwash’ [a track by Underworld collaborator High Contrast that ended up as the opening track in T2 Trainspotting]. So I listened to it, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s fine; what do they need me for?’ And Danny said, ‘Well, we like that, but we wondered if we could get some Iggy Pop into ‘Shotgun Mouthwash’, and I thought, ‘No, you can’t fucking get Iggy Pop into the fucking ‘Shotgun Mouthwash’, but I didn’t say that; I said ‘Well I could just see what I can do.’”
“I was at The Savoy just getting ready to play London and met with Rick [Smith], whom I liked as he was very polite, and that goes a long way with me. We were able to get to know each other a little. He had a number of tracks ready. And then my mind was racing because when you are confronted with somebody who has a whole damn studio there in the hotel room in front of you and 30 finished pieces of very polished music, you don’t want to be the wimp that goes ‘uh, uhhh.’”
Later, the conversation returned to the original Trainspotting movie, and Welsh described how he almost mis-sold the rights in the name of “short-term greed”.
“When they got in touch to buy the rights to Trainspotting, I was living in Amsterdam, and Danny sent me his film,” Welsh remembered. “I knew nothing about that business except that everybody wanted to buy it, but I liked Shallow Grave, and I thought the characters in the book would work well with that filmic energy. Then I met this guy, and he goes, ‘I’ll give you a lot of money for Trainspotting’ and says, ‘You know Danny Boyle would be a good director for this’, and I go, ‘Yeah’.
“Of course, I thought he was Danny’s producer, but he was just a random guy who had a lot of money, so I sold it to him straight away. Danny came back and said, ‘What the fuck, you were going to sell it to me!’ I said, ‘Oh, sorry gadge, I thought he was your guy! He had a big cheque book you know!’ So I kind of fucked up, but we got in touch with this guy, and he was very gracious about it, and he actually signed it over to Danny, Andrew and John. So it almost didn’t happen, basically because of my short-term greed.”
“Just think what wouldn’t have happened,” Hyde commented. “Wow.”
Elsewhere, Hyde recalled Underworld’s involvement in the first movie back in 1996. It appears the duo were initially hesitant as they had been told the film was simply about drug overindulgence. “With the original Trainspotting, our mates had said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s this film about caning it’, so we were like, ‘No, our music’s not about caning it’. So they got us in to show us some scenes from the film. You know, going into the toilet and the whole kind of, you know, babies on the ceiling, and we’re like, ‘Oh OK, well that’s a whole different thing’, and in that case yeah, that’s cool.”
Welsh signed off his interview feature with an epilogue teeming with pride and respect for the group of musicians. “A pleasure to hang with those boys, and cream teas really are the new rock’n’roll. How do I feel about being the glue, the cultural meat in the sandwich between those giant talents of punk and dance music? Well, I know that shit tends to happen in the digital age with technology breaking all barriers down and collaborations once thought weird are now almost de rigueur, but no sense in lying: pretty damn good.”
Recapture Iggy Pop and Underworld’s iconic bookending contributions to Trainspotting below.
