LAST month he was the centre of attention on the red carpet at the premiere of the film in which he also made a cameo appearance but the career of Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh takes a new turn on Thursday when his first pop opera is performed in the USA.

The small-scale Chicago Theatre Workshop will host Creatives’ world premiere on Thursday. Welsh now lives in the US city and has collaborated with Don De Grazia, author of the bestseller American Skin and professor of creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago.

According to Chicago Theatre Workshop, Creatives is about a Wednesday night songwriting class run by Paul Brenner that is a “perfect cross-section of the Chicago music scene, with all its incestuous dysfunction, navel-gazing narcissism, bitter rivalries, and, here and there, shards of transcendent brilliance”.

When Brenner’s former student, pop star and singer/songwriter Sean O’Neil, visits this group of wannabe musicians to judge a contest, the stakes are suddenly raised to startling new levels.

The company says Creatives is “a darkly comic pop opera with an original book by Irvine Welsh and Don De Grazia and a score including songs from some of the most popular rock bands of recent decades which reveals the desperation that fuels the passion to create.

“The score will include songs by Simple Minds, New Order, Iggy Pop, Oasis, Happy Mondays and others, along with original music by Laurence Mark Wythe.”

There’s another Scottish connection behind the scenes as the play is co-produced by mother-and-daughter team Helen and Susan Jack in their first production.

Helen Jack hailed from Edinburgh and has lived in the USA for 36 years. Susan Jack has been a political and entertainment investigative reporter for The National’s sister paper and in the USA has written for The National Journal, Us Weekly and In Touch Weekly among others for over 20 years before turning to film, television and theatre.

It is only the second production for Chicago Theatre Workshop which has dedicated itself to presenting contemporary theatre of all kinds.

Creatives’ director Tom Mullen adapted and directed Welsh’s most famous book as Trainspotting USA, transporting the setting from Edinburgh, Scotland to Kansas City.

He told Broadway World: “We’re living in a divided America, at a time when the arts are more vital than ever. This Chicago story of artists desperate to create original work in a troubling time rings true more now than ever and Chicago Theatre Workshop is proud to debut this unique and captivating pop opera.”

The two authors share the fact that they both had varied careers before taking up writing. De Grazia was a bouncer, soldier and factory worker, while Welsh did a television repairman apprenticeship before working for the housing department of Edinburgh District Council.

De Grazia recently told the Chicago Tribune about how Welsh indirectly helped him to start his writing life.

He said: “I was having a very hard time trying to get [my first novel] American Skin published. I just couldn’t get anybody to look at it. I had tried everything.

“Then I read a New York Times magazine cover story titled The Beats of Edinburgh, about that Scottish city’s working-class literary movement.

“Irvine was the star of the story, but it also mentioned London-based publishing house Jonathan Cape.”

De Grazia then borrowed $75 from a girlfriend and sent his manuscript off to Cape, and six weeks later a deal was made with American Skin published in the UK in 1998 and in the US a year later.

Both writers had originally thought of Creatives as a screenplay but were persuaded that the script was really a play.

Welsh has previously been involved in several theatrical adaptations of his work and has written two plays, You’ll Have Had Your Hole and Babylon Heights.

The Scot has enjoyed working with De Grazia and the Workshop, telling the Tribune: “You get to play God when you are a novelist. But it gets to be lonely spending all that time in a room with people who don’t exist.”