Everywhere you went – the girl watching the bouncy castle at Largs seafront; the young administrators on the Glasgow-Edinburgh train; the taxi driver switching on his nightlight to grab a few paragraphs – young people were reading Welsh (I’m told London was the same).How is it that Britain’s chemical generation found its most authoritative literary voice in the street-talk of Leith’s junkies? This was, and remains, the richest irony for the Scottish Voice, as it expressed itself under Westminster rule. Salmond’s new supporters could easily lose heart if there is an economic downturn, especially if that would make entry into EMU more difficult .He is an optimist. The one difficulty Salmond does not contemplate is a gut opposition among the English towards the break-up of the Union, either in Parliament or outside it. And the actual deed may not even require a declaration of independence.

All that need happen, so he says, is the dissolution of the Act of Union. He would like to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Act in 2007 by consigning it to history’s dustbin.Salmond’s bold talk is engaging – and so is he – but there are plenty more hurdles to be jumped. Scottish independence might eventually prove to be a good bet, but my tip is to look for a much better price than odds on !. Novelist Alan Warner brought the curiously numb Morvern Caller to life in 1993 – an Oban girl who murders her boyfriend and deals with it by escaping to Ibiza, immersing herself in Balearic bliss.And of course, there was Irvine Welsh’s grotesquerie – Sick Boy, Colin Strang in Marabou Stork Nightmares, various smart bastards in various short stories, all rendered in an almost academically perfect East Coast Scots vernacular. Scottish rave band the Shamen created Ebeneezer Goode (personified in the video by that perverse local life-force, comedian Jerry Sadowitz) who dispensed doves and mandies to happy hardcore ravers in their Central Belt sheds. It’s all, to use the correct scatology, a loada shite.This was the flipside of the Scottish Voice: underneath all that neo- Calvinist self-discipline in the service of the nation lurked an evil twin – the Pop-Cult Jekyll to the Agit-Prop Hyde, driven by a desperate, dangerous hedonism.

So amidst all the noises of nation-building and cultural positivity – which fooled (and still fools) many a cosmopolitan media- type, sniffing for the latest nationalist eruption after the end of the Cold War – there were creative Scots who said, in short, F*** Scotland. Way before the Gallagher brothers snarled their way into his heart, Glaswegian punk-presario Alan McGee was signing up acts like Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, Momus: Scottish boys dealing in black stuff, sexual extremes, violence’n'drugs as a way of life. Writers such as Janice Galloway and Alison Kennedy, conceptual artists such as Christine Boreland and Julie Roberts – rather than blithely imagining a better nation, all of them seemed to feel that “the trick was to keep breathing”.And anticipating Welsh, there was Creation Records. But it’s important to remember that Welsh’s McNihilism didn’t come from out of the blue. Some of us remember crazy dark cynics, even in the heroic/defiant days – a comedian called Bing Hitler (who claimed to be a member of the Scottish National Fascist Party); brilliant young writers like Barry Graham who scrambled off, sickened by the beat of the hollow drums, to Arizona; comix makers like Grant Morrison and John Wagner, who dived straight into their own darkness, referring to Scotland only as a source of psychopathy.Even at the heart of Eighties light entertainment, who could say that the lashing tongue of Muriel Gray was ever a complacent articulation of the Scottish consensus? In fact, women’s creative voices in Scotland at this time were all about being fractured and failing, not defiant and whole. You know, the one about how Scots are so pathetic, they can’t even get their subjugation right – “we have to be colonised by a race of wankers”. Sing all the rousing songs you want, went this sensibility: it won’t stop the closure of one factory, if the Tory hegemony wills it.At this point, it’s customary to mention the Right Honourable Irvine Welsh, and the nicely turned oration he provides for Renton the junkie in his 1992 novel Trainspotting.