'I think that human lives have become a lot cheaper'

In his new book Resolution’, Irvine Welsh proves his writing has lost none of its bite. He speaks to Chris Harvey about how identity politics has played into the hands of the wealthy

- Chris Harvey

“I’ve always thought of myself as an anarchist,” says Irvine Welsh, “albeit kind of one with a bus pass.” A sly grin steals over the face of the Trainspotting author. He loves this sort of undercut punchline. “I’m a guy who writes fiction. I tell lies for a living. So I’m the last person anyone should listen to about this stuff,” he’ll say, after carefully delineating another tautly argued, radical view of class, politics, art, you name it.

We’re in the Groucho Club, fittingly. One icon of excess, who turned his experiences as a heroin addict into the most original novel of the Nineties, reclining in an armchair in another – the celebrity hang-out that became a byword for drug-fuelled hedonism around the same time. Both are reformed characters these days.

Welsh is tall, languid and soft-spoken, with a voice that displays minimal register changes however worked up he gets. He’s wearing a green high-collared Sixties-cut jacket, trainers and a T-shirt. At 66, the author has never shifted his look to “literati” – no open-necked linen shirt, corduroy or expensive knitwear – and like Quentin Tarantino, he’s never taken a polite step back from the graphic, violent, hyper-stylised, confrontational cult work that made his name.

He’s experimental, with an ear for speech and a credo of “character first”, but sex, drugs, sleaze and gallows humour are still staple ingredients, and it would be easy to come away from his writing thinking he gets a kick out of violence. “I like to get a reaction from myself,” he says. “If I’m not gonna get a reaction from myself, I’m not gonna get a reaction from anybody else.”