Holmes Where The Heart Is

By Joe Kavanagh

Since the 1970s, music has followed a curious pattern at the turn of each decade, whereupon the prevailing sound seems born from a collision between dance and rock music.

The late-1970s saw the two combine with soul music, to produce the blissful energy of disco, a genre so locked into its era that the word is now almost a byword for the decade that gave it life.

Ten years later - driven by ecstasy and acid house - rock and electronic music briefly intersected again, potently enough for much of the music media to declare that bands like the Stone Roses, Jesus Jones and Soup Dragons would dominate the 90s.

They did not, however, yet the natural progression of this club/rock flirtation continued to develop until exploding into global prominence once again, with acts like the Chemical Brothers, Crystal Method and particularly, Prodigy, creating the kind of cyborg rock that seemed analogous with the expectation, anxiety and technical innovation that defined the turn of the Millennium.

Once again, however, this surge in popularity proved to be a mere anomaly, and club music returned to its underground layer, rock rediscovered its purity and the public took sides.

The past two years have seen the two genres cozy up to each other once more, although this time around all signs point to the marriage being permanent in a mainstream sense.

Advances in technology now makes better bedfellows of club and rock music, while the widely reported death of the album as we know it renders words like "genre" increasingly redundant, as artists cherry pick styles from across the music continuum.

Today's acts are more concerned with substance, variety and texture than adhering to any constraint such as a genre, and the word "crossover" is currently the buzzword in the industry.

Given the predilection for instant gratification and ever more extensive tastes of today's so-called Echo Boomer generation, if the album is to survive, then it must evolve into something which offers more depth, diversity and scope than times past when record companies were overly concerned with filling pigeonholes.

The contemporary Irish music scene offers a superb example of this phenomenon, as - unfettered by genres - bands pluck influences from across the board on the simple mission to make good tunes.

Then again, such a turn of events should hardly be surprising, because we're not only part of this revolution, we also gave the world one of its most capable leaders.

For almost two decades, David Holmes has quietly created the type of career that will inevitably see him referred to as an 'important artist', by those charged with writing the history of music.

Born the youngest of 10 children, Holmes grew up in a music-mad household, in the often surreal world that characterized his hometown of Belfast in the 1970s.

Prompted by a sister that lived in London, who was friends with acts like the Clash and Sex Pistols, he worshipped at the altar of punk at an early age, before his acquaintance with The Who's Quadrophenia, became a genuine watershed moment in his young life.

Wowed by the album's multiformity, it set him off on a path of exploration that took him through northern soul, rock'n'roll, American soul, eradicating any compulsion to slavishly follow one genre and instilling in him the profound notion that good music can be found in all sources.

The quirky musical about a blind pinball wizard also created for him an unbreakable connection between music and film, that would later blossom into one of the hallmarks of his career.

His budding relationship with music was given succor when 15-year-old Holmes offered to fill in when the scheduled deejay proved a no-show in a local pub, touching off a career that endures to this day.

Spending his days working in a hair salon and, later, as a chef, he became intoxicated with this new world and was soon promoting gigs around the city and writing his own fanzine, but the advent of acid-house music in the late 80s turned his hobby into a vocation.

Given his experience in promoting and deejaying, it was hardly surprising that Holmes soon became the biggest player on the dance music scene in the north of Ireland, running a night called Sugar Sweet, in Belfast Art College, which is widely regarded as the first serious club night in the city (and perhaps even the country), as soon-to-be-famous names like Andrew Weatherall, Darren Emerson and the Dust Brothers (who would later change their name to Chemical Brothers) traveled over from the UK to perform.

By 1992 he was ready to embark on the next phase of his career, this time as an artist, releasing the widely-acclaimed track, DeNiro, with Ashley Beedle, who would later go on to form X-Press 2.

This flirtation with creating his own music soon became the focus of his career and over the next couple of years he gained a reputation as a remixer par excellence, in addition to his thriving career as an international deejay.

Signed by Go! Discs, he made his full debut in 1995, with, This Film's Crap, Let's Slash The Seats, an album inspired by movies and movie soundtracks, whose depth and cinematic sonic qualities were a welcome oddity on a dance scene that sometimes struggled to attain gravitas.

It was 1997's Let's Get Killed, however, that confirmed Holmes' status as one of the most imaginative and inventive artists working in the dance genre.

Wanting to capture the very essence of New York City, he and a group of friends spent their days and nights traveling to all four corners of Gotham, recording the sights, sounds and people that came across their path.

Eclectic, intense and infectiously groovy, the album proved a triumph and gave Holmes his first global smash single: My Mate Paul.

It also launched his career in film, when in 1998 he was recommended to director, Steven Soderbergh, who commissioned him to score the music for the movie, Out Of Sight.

So pleased was the director with the results that Holmes became his composer of choice, going on to collaborate on the Oceans 11 franchise, in addition to scoring a host of other films for other directors.

Aside from his obvious ability and knack of reading the mood of a film, Holmes excels in this particular field through his ability to use his music to connect the viewer with the movie and his involvement begins when the movie is first scripted.

In the years since becoming one of Hollywood's hottest composers, he has also continued to create his own music, even going so far as to briefly create a band called The Free Association, in order to reproduce his visions in a live setting.

In 2000, he released what many consider to be his darkest solo effort in, Bow Down To The Exit Sign, which was meant to be a companion album for a movie that was never released.

To his enduring credit, Holmes also never forgot his roots and he has contributed both culturally and financially to the development of original music in his home area.

Known as one of the nicest guys in the music business, since returning to live in Belfast, he has offered advice and assistance to up-and-coming local acts and has even been known to help bands out financially, courtesy of his own pocket.

Now he is back with his most heartfelt and soulful album to date, a marvelous pastiche of mood, sound and color that draws inspiration from myriad sources, but has, according to Holmes, "its roots firmly planted in Belfast and family."

In the end, all of these influences combine to make something entirely fresh having been channeled through the conduit that is David Holmes.

The Holy Pictures is one of those rare records that is uplifting and intense, hardly surprising given the fact that it was inspired to a large degree by the death of his parents.

Having lost his mother in 1996 and his father last year, Holmes recently recalled: "When you lose the second parent it's a very different hit to the first because suddenly you've got no one. So that's what I was really aiming to capture when I went into the studio, to encapsulate how I felt in the music and words."

In a lesser artists hands, such a project could buckle under the weight of sadness and sentimentality, but the entire undertaking works simply because Holmes is so profoundly adept at articulating himself through the medium of music.

While it has been terrific to see him deservedly do so well out in La-La-Land scoring other people's projects, it is certainly a pleasure to hear David Holmes back scoring the soundtrack to his own mind. Viva la revolucion!