sentences:  While based in Edinburgh in the 1980s, he started writing songs, stand-up routines, and plays for the Merry Mac Fun Co, a street theatre and comedy act with agitprop tendencies.The Merry Macs won various awards, and were twice nominated for the Perrier Comedy Award.In the 1990s McLean was part of a loose grouping of writers centred on Edinburgh whose characters were mainly poor, working class and young, whose themes were drugs, drink, dance music, violence and alienation, and who took their inspiration variously from the Glaswegian writers of the previous generation, notably James Kelman, and from overseas writers like Richard Brautigan and Knut Hamsun.