A book tour, bundled with an album one, for the Men in Love project, as well as some promo for my film portrait Reality Is Not Enough by the documentary-maker Paul Sng. It was all great fun but left me feeling absolutely knackered. It also fed into my natural sense of entitlement: it was high time to indulge myself, so I hit my home city of Edinburgh. August is an interesting time to go there. It’s not just the start of the football season but one that features Hibernian FC – Hibs – back in Europe, and Oasis are playing a series of gigs, albeit across the wrong side of the city at Murrayfield Stadium. What’s not to like? Maybe only the tedious distraction of the Edinburgh Festival, manifest in that perennial question, usually from people you run into who are up from London, shivering on the cold, blustery streets: what have you seen so far?
Hibs and Oasis, mate. Hibs and Oasis.
Home and away
Last Thursday at Edinburgh’s Easter Road Stadium, Hibs performed well against a very good Danish side. Then on Sunday I went up to Dens Park in Dundee to see them claim a very comfortable victory. The midweek and Sunday games are a feature of European and domestic football combination, and Leith fairly buzzes on a Thursday evening. It was rocking when I met the Edinburgh cultural powerhouse Kevin Williamson, who had just done a poetry session at Gleneagles House, at the Harp and Castle on Leith Walk, where we watched Hibs earn a great win in Belgrade against Partizan.
The next day, after limiting the celebratory drinks, I hooked up with my boys Dougs, Barra, Col Simpson and Woody, and we headed, via a nice Italian meal in town, off to Murrayfield to watch Oasis. What a monumental experience this was. Raised the bar for all gigs. The last time I was in Murrayfield, Hibs played Barcelona and the young Messi was outshone by Alan O’Brien (OK, maybe I’m pushing it a wee bit there…), and the time before that Bowie was wearing a white cagoule. One day I’ll even have to take in a rugby game.
Yes, Oasis were almost inconceivably brilliant. It seemed like the first genuine post-lockdown event of scale for all my people, right here, right now; a splurge of unmitigated love, freedom and loss, and a celebration of life and of each other. You know, all the things that music was meant to be about. Of course, the voice of the knee-jerk moaning old ponce, determined to be a ghost at the feast, was whispering malevolently from the troubled depths of my subconscious. The one who declares that everything was better before the internet. I’m happy to say that it was silenced emphatically by the blast of the opening chords of “Acquiesce”, as the experiential pragmatist gained internal-megaphone sway, declaring that the band are even better than they were back in the day.
Postcard from Blackpool
It was a hardcore evening, and while tempted to hit the Arches in Leith’s fashionable Manderson Street for the get down organised by my buddies Subbo and Ricardo, I had to try to get some sleep, as I had an early-morning train. It seemed like I barely slept an hour before I was speeding south on the TransPennine to Blackpool and the fabulous Rebellion Festival of punk rock. I’d been excited about this one for months, especially the idea of watching Public Image in the Winter Gardens. However, Oasis had set the bar so high that I was underwhelmed – or it might have been that I was too melted from the night before, and from hooking up with old punk mates and wiring into the Guinness.
The Rebellion Festival is magnificent, a gathering of the best of the old clans, but Blackpool is the place to go if you want to see the (lack of) health of the country. Morbidly obese (yet malnutrition-suffering, due to sugar/salt non-food addictive stress-eating) people are everywhere. Non-food produced by corporate killers, has, along with mobile phones, replaced cigarettes as the thing anxious, depressed and stressed people do with their hands and mouths.
Rinse, repeat
Anyway, while there’s the necessity of us all trying to build a better world, such a world has to be stuffed with the joy, good times and memories that only football and music can provide. So, I’m back at Oasis tomorrow with fellow Scottish scribe John Niven, and I’m taking my wife, Emma, this time. And, I’m even hoping to talk her into coming to Hibs with me on Thursday…
Irvine Welsh will be appearing at the Cambridge Literary Festival on Saturday 22 November
[See also: The wonderful world of Prince Andrew]
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This article appears in the 27 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Gentle Parent Trap