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Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh also makes music, will play a DJ set at Clockenflap music festival

Best known for being the voice of the ‘chemical generation’, the writer is set to showcase his DJ skills in Hong Kong for the first time

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Author and DJ Irvine Welsh. Picture: Alamy

Published: 9:02pm, 18 Oct 2018Updated: 6:21pm, 19 Oct 2018

Cult Scottish author Irvine Welsh, whose drug- and violence-fuelled novel Trainspotting (1993) captured the imagination of a generation and spawned an era-defining British film, will play a DJ set at this year’s Clockenflap Music & Arts Festival in November, on his first visit to Hong Kong.

“I’ve been working on a techno album recently so I’ve got a few of my own tracks,” Welsh says in an interview with Post Magazine . “It’s acid-house techno, not really banging, full-on kinda mad stuff, but it’s a lot of classic acid house, swirling effects and noises and all that, and boomy basslines. Some of it is pretty groovy as well.”

The author, who in March this year published Dead Men’s Trousers – the fourth instalment in the misadventures of anti-heroes, Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud, written in his trademark clipped Scottish vernacular – also tells Post Magazine about his feelings on having turned 60 in September and his own experiences with mind-altering substances.

Of his performance at Clockenflap, he says: “Hopefully people are going to go for it and jump around and have a bop, but you’re not going to have your ears bleeding and pounding all night, and you’re not going to want to start doing loads of base speed and be stripped to the waist and salivating and banging your head off the floor and all that.

“I hate when you get to that point where the BPM [beats per minute] just keeps creeping up and all the women start to move off the floor and it just becomes a big sausage fest.”

Irvine Welsh will appear at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival on November 9 and 10, and at Clockenflap Music & Arts Festival on November 10.