Irvine Welsh says he’s planning to release a club record. The Scottish author has been playing some of his tracks in guest DJ slots during a promo tour of his new book Dead Men’s Trousers, which follows the character Mark Renton (from Welsh’s most famous novel, Trainspotting) in his career running a DJ management company.
The Scottish Sun writes that Welsh wants to offer an antidote to “joyless young artists who have mastered the tech to create music at home but don’t dance” (their words, not his). Apparently he sings on some tracks in a German accent.
“It’s not really banging, full-on mad stuff, but it’s a lot of classic acid house – swirling effects and noises and boomy basslines,” Welsh told the newspaper. “Some of it is pretty groovy. Hopefully people are going to jump around and have a bop, but you’re not going to have your ears bleeding. And you’re not going to want to be stripped to the waist, salivating and banging your head off the floor.”
Welsh has previously talked about the impact of club music on his writing, and released the short story collection The Acid House in 1994 (later adapted into a 1998 film). In 2016, he spoke to Dazed about London’s nightclub closures and the “Dubai-ification” of the city: “I think now you’re going to find more interesting stuff going on outside of London in satellite towns,” he said. “In London you’re going to have DJs playing in gated communities to people from Saudi Arabia and Russia, parties behind closed doors and dead streets.”
No release date has been set for his album.