There are films you watch, and then there are films that stay with you. Trainspotting stayed with me. I can still remember sitting in a cinema with my mates in 1996, the lights going down, Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life kicking in through the speakers, and Ewan McGregor running full pelt down Princes Street with that grin whilst rattling off the “choose life” monologue. By the time the credits rolled, none of us said much for a bit. We just sat there processing it. That tends to be the effect Trainspotting has on people.
Three decades on from its release in February 1996, Danny Boyle’s film turns thirty this year, and it holds up remarkably well. Revisiting it now, what strikes you is not just how good it is but how specific and honest it remains about the world it came from.
To understand why Trainspotting resonated the way it did, you have to understand the Britain it emerged from. The early to mid-1980s had been genuinely brutal for large parts of the country, particularly across the north of England and Scotland. The dismantling of traditional industries left communities with little to replace them. Unemployment was severe, social housing was deteriorating, and a generation of young people found themselves with limited prospects and not much of a future on offer. Edinburgh, where Irvine Welsh’s source novel is set, had developed a serious heroin problem through the late 1980s, with intravenous drug use contributing to rates of HIV infection that drew unwelcome attention across Europe. The epidemic that moved through Leith and similar working-class Edinburgh communities was less a lifestyle choice than a symptom of a place that had been left to get on with it.
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New Trentemøller album is comingWelsh published his novel in 1993 to an immediate and divisive reaction. Written in a dense vernacular Scots that some readers found difficult and others found completely absorbing, it was not a comfortable book. John Hodge’s screenplay took its energy and shaped it into something more propulsive, and Boyle, only on his second feature after Shallow Grave, brought a visual restlessness to the material that suited it well. Working with cinematographer Brian Tufano, he found a look that moved easily between the hallucinatory and the grimly mundane. The film was largely shot in Glasgow rather than Edinburgh, with locations including the Red Road flats standing in for the novel’s Leith settings. Glasgow’s post-industrial environment gave the film a texture that worked in its favour.
What Boyle got right, and what keeps Trainspotting from feeling like a straightforward cautionary tale, is the acknowledgement that heroin is seductive. Renton’s description of a hit is delivered with conviction because the film is honest about why people become addicted, not just what addiction eventually does to them. It doesn’t moralise at you. It shows you, and leaves you to draw your own conclusions.
Which makes the moments when it does confront you directly all the more effective.
The death of Allison’s baby is still a difficult watch. The infant has been present throughout the earlier scenes, quietly overlooked whilst the adults around her disappear into various states of oblivion. When Renton wakes to find her gone, with the camera drifting across the ceiling as the earlier sound of her crying replays, it lands heavily. Boyle doesn’t push it. He doesn’t need to.
The cold turkey sequence, Renton locked in his childhood bedroom by his parents, hallucinating badly with Underworld’s Dark and Long running underneath it all, is where the film’s more unsettling visual ideas come together. It is not easy viewing. But it is honest about what withdrawal looks like, and Dark and Long, with its slow-building pulse and that churning, insistent groove, was an unusual and effective choice. The track doesn’t commentate on what’s happening. It just sits underneath it and lets the scene breathe.
For a lot of people who saw Trainspotting in 1996, it was their first encounter with Underworld. Karl Hyde and Rick Smith had been working in electronic music for years, but this was the exposure that introduced them to a much wider audience. And then Born Slippy .NUXX played over the closing sequence, Renton walking away into something uncertain but at least open, and that was that. For many people that song was the beginning of a longer journey into electronic music, from Underworld back through their catalogue, and from there into the broader world of techno, house, drum and bass and beyond. A significant number of electronic music fans from that era can point to this soundtrack as where it started for them.
The wider tracklist holds up as a genuinely well-considered piece of work. Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life sets the tone immediately and effectively. Lou Reed’s Perfect Day is used with a dry irony that works better than it has any right to. Brian Eno’s Deep Blue Day accompanies the toilet sequence in a way that somehow makes it both worse and funnier. Blur, Pulp, Elastica, Primal Scream, New Order, Heaven 17. It reads as a considered survey of British music spanning roughly two decades, which makes sense for a film that is itself very much about a specific cultural moment and everything that fed into it.
It is worth remembering what else was in cinemas around the same time. Jerry Maguire. The English Patient. Space Jam. Trainspotting was a different kind of film entirely, and it felt like one. Whilst a lot of what was showing leaned towards the polished and the reassuring, Boyle and Welsh and Hodge were making something that came from a real place and didn’t particularly care about making you comfortable. The cast, including a then little-known McGregor, Robert Carlyle as the volatile Begbie, and Kelly Macdonald in her first screen role, committed to it completely.
Its influence on British film and television since has been reasonably clear. The appetite it demonstrated for grittier, more regionally specific British storytelling opened doors. It showed that a low-budget film made in Scotland with a strong vernacular voice could find a global audience. The budget was around £1.5 million. It made over £48 million at the box office.
Thirty years on, I still think about that cinema and those mates and what it felt like walking out into the street afterwards. Trainspotting shaped how I thought about what film could do, what a soundtrack could add to it, and what kinds of stories were worth telling. It remains one of the more honest and well-made British films of the past few decades, and it has aged a good deal better than most of what surrounded it at the time.
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