Trainspotting was a huge part of my formative years, as was beer
In my memory the characters in Trainspotting, drank the classic Scottish “Tramp Juice”, Tennent’s Super when they drink beer out of cans.
However on re-watching the original, in preparation for watching the sequel, I notice it is not. They aren’t a beer I recognize (and I am very familiar with the range of budget super strength beer available in cans the UK during the mid-nineties ). The cans appear to have images on them, maybe religious icons (and also maybe Princess Diana?). Here are some pictures:
Are they a made up brand? (as no one wanted to be associated with the junky’s beer of choice.) The visual quality looks too high to me for it to something that was added in post for the DVD release (as does sometimes happen). Can anyone help solve this vitally important conundrum?
I dinnae care for, a/ drugs, beer, nor Trainspotting, and those are naturally indistinct, but around that period Tennents was putting pretty girls, of the Page 3 type towards the end, down the sides of their cans, in Scotland ( as they had for a long few years )
Dunno when the film was set, but here’s the set from 1986-7
They were sold in England, too, but whether you saw them or not might depend on where you lived and where you shopped (probably not prominent on the shelves of Waitrose, for instance).
The original book is clearly set in the Eighties. However, I think it’s more likely that the film is meant to be contemporaneously set in the mid-Nineties, but I’m not sure it ever makes that entirely explicit. It, however, seems unlikely that many people would have hallucinated about Dale Winton in the Eighties.
The references to the passage of time in the new film are all consistent with a 1996 date for the first, but don’t work for an Eighties dating. (And T2 is set very recently; the Edinburgh trams only opened in 2014.)
The snag with the beer cans is that, according to that site, Tennent’s discontinued the “Lager Lovelies” in 1991.
It mentioned that many of the main characters were teenagers when during the height of punk (which I took to be late seventies). But I just assumed this meant they were in their thirties when the book was set, in the nineties.
It’s about a quarter of a century since I read the book and don’t have a copy immediately to hand, so I can’t offer any specifics, but I lived in Edinburgh in the late Eighties - though in very different circumstances - in my early twenties and it was always fairly clear that that was the time setting and that Renton was only a few years older than me.
I seem to recall that Renton had been to university, but dropped out a couple of years before the stories. If he’s born in, say, 64, he’d have been 13 for punk, at uni in, say, 1984 and then a mid-to-late-Eighties dating follows.
In terms of Welsh, he seems to have started publishing bits of it in 1991 and it seems well accepted that his heroin experience dates from his return to Edinburgh in 1988.
The novel chapter Scotland Takes Drugs in Psychic Defence refers to an Iggy Pop gig at the Glasgow Barrowlands. According to the Barrowlands site, there have been four but only one really fits - the one on 15th December 1988. So that further supports the 80s setting in the book. Most of the film was shot in Glasgow and it was quite recognisably contemporary to anyone who knew the city at the time.
A bit of T2 was filmed in my workplace. I look forward to seeing if I can spot it.
