Oasis turned down Trainspotting because they thought it was about trainspotting

'That's what [Noel] actually said', crew member recalls

Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Transpotting remains a celebrated exploration of heroin addiction and poverty in Edinburgh, and Oasis missed their chance to be on the soundtrack because they took the name too literally.

"I met Noel [Gallagher] at a thing the other week,” the film’s costume designer Rachel Fleming said at a Q&A this week, “and he said to me 'I would have done something but honestly I thought it was about train spotters. I didn't know.'

“That's what he actually said," Fleming added.

The band could perhaps have been forgiven for making the false assumption were it simply a script they were missing, but Transpotting was based on the Irvine Welsh novel of the same name which was released three years before and also very much not centred around railway nerds.

Boyle is currently filming a sequel featuring the original cast called T2, an adaptation of Welsh’s follow-up novel Porno.

“I feel very fortunate and grateful to be able to make films, and to be able to always have a choice in what I do,” director Danny Boyle previously said of the film.

“Coming back to Edinburgh has actually been really fascinating, since filming the first Trainspotting Edinburgh has changed dramatically. You can see the gentrification massively in the city.”