The notorious author is breaking new ground with his TV debut. He talks about messed up cops, exorcising Sick Boy … and writing the tunes for Trainspotting: The Musical

‘I like the way you call me Irvine,” says Irvine Welsh to a young woman who’s just offered him a cup of tea, and pronounced his first name to rhyme with wine. “I’ve been living in Miami and it makes me feel like I’m back there.” The so-called Magic City is his happy place, “the polar opposite of Edinburgh. All people do in Scotland is fucking talk, they rabbit in each other’s faces. Miami is nothing like that. At the start, I found it so vacuous, but you can get all your stuff from Edinburgh and London, then take it away to Miami and write in peace.” The world is one long, warm bath to this man, it seems. He is “happy everywhere. All the shit comes out in the writing. In normal life, I focus on the good things: the beauty in life, romance, friendship.”

The undisputed king of the 1990s, of swear words, of Scottishness, is here to talk about Crime, in which he breaks new ground with his first script for television. It’s a riveting and quite surprising move from him – it starts off looking like a classic cop show, although I’ve only been allowed to watch the first three episodes. “I know this sounds like what everybody would say, but episode four is when it really kicks off, and five and six go absolutely fucking mental.” It really doesn’t sound like what everybody would say. It’s hard to figure out what is more charming about Welsh – how much of a one-off he is, or his conviction that he’s exactly like everyone else.