RISING to fame in the mid ’90s, Irvine Welsh produced writing that captured the essence of a raw vernacular language in conversations and events around not only his hometown of Leith, Edinburgh, or London — to where he moved in the ’80s finding punk and acid house scenes — but also resonating with readers on a truly global scale.

If you ever have the delight of finding a copy of his debut novel, Trainspotting, in a French edition — and wonder how translators tackled words such as “bampot,” “swedge,” “radge,” “weedgie” and “gadgie” — then spare a thought for the person who had the task of adapting Welsh’s book into Chinese, likesay.

Trainspotting was perhaps received as a mostly drug-themed story — yet within the narrative and candid style, there is an undercurrent reflecting the realities of a dispossessed generation that still resonates today.

Welsh has spoken previously on literature that explores post-industrial adjustment — moving from a conventionally productive capitalist system to a more conceptualist society, humans facing an existential crisis resulting in emotional and physical redundancy caused by the encroachment of automation upon the labour market and society in general; but he is also more grounded in his explanation of the writing process.

“It’s not so much an attempt to consciously create a new genre of writing, as react to the ongoing changes in society. Ultimately, that’s what writers have to do, to speak for the individual and community in a time of exponential change and upheaval, by responding to the changing environment we find ourselves in.

“There’s no point in starting a story in a pub with ‘two pints of heavy please barman’ if everyone’s drinking lager, or aren’t drinking at all, because the pub has closed down and are snorting cocaine in a friend’s flat.”

Football, a lingua franca or easy talking topic of sorts for people who may not have much else in common, can unite as much as divide.

A side character named Stevie in the Trainspotting book who is overseen in its movie inception, considers in one piece of the vignette, titled Victory on New Year’s Day: “Football divisions were a stupid and irrelevant nonsense, acting against the interests of working-class unity, ensuring the bourgeoisie’s hegemony went unchallenged.”

Welsh expands on this:“Football’s a sport and people have been drawn to it in working class communities as a means of escape and expression. But it operates in a capitalist, for-profit, business environment, and the tribalism and perceived ethnic and cultural divisions within the working classes have always led to it being exploited to that end.

“If you can make people feel they have a deep bond with ‘their’ club, but you actually own ‘their’ club, then you’ve got your hand in the pockets of them, and their children, just like you did their fathers before them. There’s always an inherent conflict between the club as an emblem of the local community, and as a business owned by private individuals and corporations.”

His new book, The Long Knives, features policeman Ray Lennox, earlier seen in Filth (1998), who investigates the murder of a Tory MP and revisits a transgender theme from that book.

Welsh has previously indicated  that he believes whilst all oppressed minorities should be supported, some of the identity politics surrounding these issues sometimes functions as a distraction from more fundamental issues such as the cost-of-living crisis, and how to pay the heating bills; does he think there’s an element of the furore being fomented by those who would prefer people to bicker over issues of hyper-social liberalism, rather than the traditional struggles between economic classes?

“It’s complicated, because the withering away of capitalism has led to the ruling classes exploiting the citizens even more intensely — thus the so-called cost-of-living crisis — but because the structures of capitalism and industrial society, the division of labour and gender roles are almost breaking down, and we see how deterministic they were of behaviour and identity. So, there are competing currents in a complex river — if everything flowed the same way it would be resolved easily.”

Marabou Stork Nightmares is by some consensus one of Welsh’s best novels, albeit a potentially traumatic read; that and his subsequent imprint Filth both break the conventional text format — as did Trainspotting in parts, with narratives on pages splitting into multiple personalities, characters and mezzanines of thought, creating literary innovations.

Tracing the origins of this innovation, however, is not easy, he says.“For me writing is a largely subconscious act, so I don’t have great awareness of what my influences are.”

Not just a man of words, Welsh has turned his hands to music by performing as a DJ and creating an outlet for new sounds of an old-school ilk, dripping with 303 basslines that fans of heavy acid house music will love.

Rave culture is a running theme throughout his literature, with the Marabou Stork Nightmares book featuring the protagonist spinning out at one of Scotland’s renowned Rezerection events, and techno producer Joey Beltram referenced in the novel Glue.

He also speaks of partying with Glasgow’s Desert Storm sound system, founded by the late Keith Robinson, who drove his truck full of speakers to Reclaim the Streets events protesting John Major’s Criminal Justice Bill, supported 500 sacked Liverpool dockers at the March for Social Justice attended by 20,000 people, and threw a party in Trafalgar Square.

Here, a meeting between Robinson and volunteers from Workers Aid for Bosnia led to the sound system being driven through Europe to Sarajevo, to provide a party for the war-afflicted populace, famously having to turn disco lights off in order to avoid attracting sniper fire.

“I occasionally do house, techno and disco sets, and have a dance record label, Jack Said What, which I started with Steve Mac and Carl Loben. I did meet some of the Desert Storm people. I have huge respect for them and what they did.”

Welsh has expressed his support for Scottish and Welsh independence as a route to breaking down the power structures of monarchy and ruling classes. In the wake of this current wave of anachronistic and Anglo-Saxon monarchist flag-shagging, does he think people will warm to belting out God Save the King (not least at the Labour Party conference where it was decreed to be sung), or is there more of an appetite for change?

“I can’t see the old antiquated structures of imperial Britain delivering the goods for anyone but its own ruling class and a transnational corporate elite.

“This at the expense of all the citizens. They shot themselves in the foot with Brexit. The EU was a useful scapegoat to them, it served to hide their own venal levels of exploitation. They were too short-sighted in their greed to see this.”

The Long Knives by Irvine Welsh has just been published by‎ Jonathan Cape, £24.20.