Irvine Welsh on Fabric: "It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on people"

Irvine Welsh, the man who penned Trainspotting, has revealed his sadness over the closure of London club fabric.

25 years after he started writing the Edinburgh-set novel, which later became a hit on the big screen, Welsh spoke to Dazed about the current situation regarding nightlife in the UK, fabric in particular after it lost its licence in September.

The author, now living in Chicago, claims the decision to shut down fabric was not based on the drug-related deaths that led to the revocation, but was an attack on society.

"It’s not a war on drugs, it’s a war on people. The war on drugs is a war on you. It’s a war on alternate lifestyles. It’s a civil war – the state against the citizens.”

A founding member of fabric when it first opened in 1999, Welsh says the closure hit him quite hard as it was "iconic" to him when he lived in the capital.

"I had some really good nights there. That whole area of Clerkenwell was a real powerhouse of ideas and alternatives, very different to the West End which was really anodyne. It was a mess of artists and villains, liggers and blaggers. It’s become a one-dimensional facsimile of itself now, but that’s the way cities go, they play the long game.”

As hype for the Trainspotting sequel T2 grows, there's still not much that's been revealed but Welsh says Renton, Begbie, Spud and Sick Boy are "all at pretty different places in their life and have responded to the last twenty years in different ways."

Check out a teaser of T2 here.

Dave Turner is Mixmag's Digital News Editor, follow him on Twitter