David Holmes talks Terri Hooley and Good Vibrations

David Holmes has been talking about the Terri Hooley biopic, Good Vibrations, ahead of its May 31 premiere in the Ulster Hall as part of the Belfast Film Festival. Holmes both produces and oversees the music for the film, which is associate-produced by Gary, Jonny and Nathan from Snow Patrol and co-written by Hot Press-er Colin Carberry.

“It’s The Commitments on cheap speed and Buckfast!” Holmer tells our man David Hanratty down the blower from Los Angeles. “Nobody would come to Belfast in the ‘70s. When Terri opened up Good Vibrations, it was like a community coming together. There was a lot of really good record shops around but Terri went the extra mile and started the label and made it possible for a lot of kids to actually get their music onto vinyl. Everyone’s perception of Northern Ireland is The Troubles, so it’s great to be able to shine some kind of light on something that is really positive and had such a long-lasting legacy. The last thing we need is another really bad Troubles movie.”

Hooley’s tale clearly means a lot to his hometown, but does David think it will translate to a bigger audience?

“Absolutely! A one-eyed man who opens up a record store on the most bombed and murderous mile in Belfast in 1978 and calls it ‘Good Vibrations’? What’s not to love about that? It’s actually a really universal story. It’s much deeper than just a music film. The emotion creeps up on you.”

The multi-talented DJ is no stranger to cinema, having scored many Hollywood productions, working with directors like Steven Soderbergh along the way. What challenges did a smaller, more intimate project pose?

“Just to try and get it right and also not to be clichéd,” he proffers. “Terri stumbled upon punk. It didn’t come to him and he didn’t go to it. Terri was an old hippy, and up until he discovered punk you could get vintage blues records, strange psychedelic records, tons of reggae in Good Vibrations… we wanted to get that right. Also, we didn’t have a huge budget so there was a lot of hard thinking to be done and the directors had to be extremely creative with what they had available, but I think people will be surprised by how big it looks.”

Holmes spent hundreds of hours coming up with the perfect soundtrack.

“We didn’t want the film to be full of hits," he notes. "We wanted to represent the underdog. There’s a lot of music in there that we think is brilliant but doesn’t necessarily have a commercial voice. We tried to be true to the story, to be true to Terri, but to do it with originality. We had to beg, steal and borrow to get the tracks we wanted, because there’s so much, just an extraordinary amount of music to cover all the genres involved. I had fun picking Terri’s brains, trying to squeeze out as many ideas as we could for the general shape of the soundtrack. There’s about 50 pieces of music in the film. A ridiculous number!”