Headstate

Billed on the cover as “a play about love”.

From the programme, Irvine Welsh (Amsterdam, July 1995): “I saw ‘Headstate’ as more of a pre-club night rather than a piece of theatre. My concept was for punters to come along, neck a pill, get into it then head off to a club…We wanted to assemble a collaborative team and work on a piece that would be very different from the potential ‘long-running play’ of ‘Trainspotting’. The idea about this was that it would be a snapshot of a point in time (now) looking at what formed ‘our’ (how many questions does that word raise?) current sensibilities over the last fifteen or so years…I was initially suspicious of that ‘last fifteen years’ concept, because the last thing I wanted to get involved in was a narrow bitter polemic about ‘Tory misrule’ or ‘monetarianism’ or ‘Thatcherism’, mainly because it all started in 1976, not 1979, when the Labour Government expressly went to the institutions of multi-national capitalism with a programme for the domestic economy based on these principles. Now, under Blair’s leadership, they seem set to carry them forward with renewed vigour as the Tories have ran out of steam.”

The programme thanks Carl “Technical Wizard” Partridge for sound effects, Impact for kind use of their computers, Paul Ham for tireless Net surfing, “The Booking Room Lady” for friendly helpfulness, “The Bitches” for lots of brews, and “Belle and Sebastian for, well, being Belle and Sebastian”.