De Schotse schrijver Irvine Welsh werd geboren op 27 september 1958 in Leith, Edinburgh. Zie ook alle tags voor Irvine Welsh op dit blog.

Uit:The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

“She Came to Dance, 20 January 1980
– THIS IS THE fuckin Clash! The green-haired girl had screamed into the face of the flinty-eyed bouncer, who’d shoved her back into her seat. — And this is a fuckin cinema, he’d told her. It was the Odeon cinema, and the security personnel seemed determined to stop any dancing. But after the local band, Joseph K, had finished their set, the main act had come out all guns blazing, blasting out ‘Clash City Rockers’, and the crowd immediately surged down to the front of the house. The girl with the green hair scanned around for the bouncer, who was preoccupied, then sprang back up. For a while the security staff tried to stem the tide, but finally capitulated about halfway through the set, between ‘I Fought the Law’ and ‘(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais’. The crowd was lost in the thrashing noise; at the front of the house they bounced along in rapture, while those at the back climbed on to their seats to dance. The girl with green hair, now right at the front centre of the stage, seemed to be rising higher than the rest, or perhaps it was just her hair, and the way the strobes hit it, making it appear as if a spectacular emerald flame was bursting from her head. A few, only a few, were gobbing at the band and she was screaming at them to cut it out as he – her hero – had only just recovered from hepatitis. She’d been to the Odeon only a few times before, most recently to see Apocalypse Now, but it wasn’t like this and she could bet that it had never been. Her friend Trina was a few feet from her, the only other girl so near the front that she could almost smell the band. Taking a last gulp from the plastic Im Bru bottle she’d filled with snakebite, she killed it and let it fall to the sticky, carpeted floor. Her brain fizzed with the buzz of it working in tandem with the amphetamine sulphate she’d taken earlier. She roared the words of the songs as she leapt, working herself into a defiant frenzy, going to a place where she could almost forget what he had told her earlier that afternoon. Just after they’d made love when he’d gone so quiet and distant, his thin, wiry frame shivering on the mattress. — What’s up, Donnie? What is it? she’d asked him. — It’s all fucked, he’d said blankly. She told him not to be daft, everything was brilliant and the Clash gig was happening tonight, they’d been waiting for this for ages. Then he turned round and his eyes were moist and he looked like a child. It was then that her first and only lover had told her that he’d been fucking someone else earlier; right there on the mattress they shared every night, the place where they’d just made love. It had meant nothing; it was a mistake, he immediately claimed, panic rising in him as the extent of his transgression became apparent in her reaction.”

 
Irvine Welsh (Edinburg, 27 september 1958)