Holmes at last

There are books and CDs piled on vintage keyboards and synths. There are family snap-shots stuck on exposed surfaces, a toy Dracula perched on a note pad, and an eerie model of the robot from Metropolis lurking in the corner. Lights flash on various pieces of kit (it’s not somewhere where you can casually lay a mug of coffee down), and while, if you look through the window, there’s still plenty of daylight in the sky, the sound-proofed ceiling and walls dim everything down.

Part lab, part den, part bolt-hole: David Holmes’s home studio looks like a room conjured up by the combined imaginations of Joe Meek, Captain Nemo and Huckleberry Finn.
“It’s actually really badly designed,” he says. “Sound needs to be able to bounce off things. Go into most modern control rooms everything is really angular. I couldn’t mix in here because what comes out of the speakers isn’t a true reflection of what you’ll hear coming through your car speakers, or on your stereo. But I didn’t really think about that. I just wanted a really cool place to work.”
It’s been eight years since Bow Down To The Exit Sign, Holmes’s last solo LP. And even though a glance at his slate in the time since then (including a stint with The Free Association, various rolling production/remixing gigs with the likes of Joy Zipper, Martina Topley Bird and Primal Scream, and, of course, his acclaimed scores and soundtrack work) goes some way towards explaining the delay; it’s not the whole story.
Holmes’s new album, The Holy Pictures, is unlike any of his three previous records. Gone are many of his most identifiable tics. For a start, there are few dancefloor killers in the vein of ’69 Police’ or ‘Gritty Shaker’. And there’s little evidence of any sampled dialogue and recorded street sound. As for guest vocalists... Well, we’ll get to that later.
If his solo records to date have been edgy, urban and moodily hip, The Holy Pictures is a much more human, intimate and organic prospect. Aided by Eno collaborators Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins, and with Belfast locals Tanya Mellotte, Danny ‘Cashier No. 9’ Todd, and Foy Vance contributing backing vocals, it’s a flesh and blood record full of shades, depths and subtexts.
To rephrase an old tune he has more than a passing knowledge of – there’s a little more conversation, a little less action here. And most of the talk is of matters close to home.
Why? Well, some unpicking of the album’s title proves revealing.
The Holy Pictures was the nickname given to the social club Holmes’s father, Jack, patronised in the Markets area of South Belfast (“the kind of place you knocked to get out of, not to get into,” he laughs) – so called because every spare inch of its walls was taken up by a religious artefact or picture of a saint.
“Apparently when they moved premises they had to take them down and carry them all the way to the new place,” he reveals. “There’s a photograph out there of all these fellas dandering up the Ormeau Road carrying big framed pictures of St Anthony and Padre Pio. But the name The Holy Pictures represented everything I wanted the record to be about. It’s a title that works on so many different ways – none of them religious – I mean my holy pictures – the cinema, pictures of my family and friends. Everything that’s important to me.”
Jack Holmes died in May 2007. Up until that point, David had been “taking one step forward, two steps back” on an album which stubbornly refused to explain itself.
“I was doing tracks that I was happy with, but they had no resonance. They were good tracks, but I wasn’t jumping up and down and getting excited by them. It did happen sometimes, and when it did, the music had an emotion and a depth to it. But I didn’t really know where it was coming from.”
After his father’s death, it was six weeks before he went back to the studio. In the time between, he came to the realisation that the new songs that meant most to him, were those he associated most strongly with his late mother, his wife Lisa and Nina, their young daughter. Subsequently, he decided to concentrate on exploring these personal themes when he returned to work.
“I was sitting in the house with Jon Hopkins, talking about losing my dad,” he explains. “I played him some Daniel Johnson, and he got up and said there’s something I’d like to play you. We went up the studio and he started playing these notes on the piano and I just knew: that was it. That was exactly how I was feeling. It was a beautiful moment because if I hadn’t have lost my dad, I wouldn’t have recognised those emotions.”
The song in question, ‘The Ballad Of Sarah And Jack’ proved to be the lift-off point for the entire album. Named after his parents, what it lacks in instrumentation (it’s a bare-boned piano and organ track), it more than makes up for in poignancy and subdued grace. In fact, despite the circumstances surrounding its recording, The Holy Pictures, taken as a whole, is anything but a morbid record.
“I don’t think it’s a ‘you get the gun, I’ll get the rope’ thing – I think there’s a lot of joy there. It’s not the type of album you try to make, it just has to develop organically. It was just working hard, seeing where it led me, and I think it’s turned out to be pretty beautiful.”
Old Sugar Sweet veterans may bemoan the absence of a rampaging rival to ‘My Mate Paul’, but once they settle down they’ll realise that Pictures is packed with songs whose company they’ll enjoy beyond a Saturday night. Take the opening track (and first single) ‘I Heard Wonders’ – a galloping head-rush which gives a pointer to what would happen if Wayne Coyne was a member of Kraftwerk. Or ‘Hey Maggie’, which wears some heavy references (minimalist pianist Herbert Henck, the Italian composer, Joel VDB, and a bootleg demo of The Beach Boys’ ‘Til I Die’) as if they were neck scarves.
However, as the record’s abstract themes began to emerge, a few practical difficulties announced themselves. Mark E Smith had agreed to provide vocals on some of the tracks, but while Holmes was looking forward to working with a long-time hero, he had also started to harbour doubts as to how appropriate a guest singer’s presence would be.
“I remember speaking to Andrew Weatherall and I was talking about getting in Mark E Smith to sing on it. And he said – are you sure you want to do that? Why don’t you just do it yourself? It went in one ear and out the other – I was just buzzing about the collaboration. But once I realised what the album was about, I knew that the only person who could write the lyrics and sing on it was me. It would have been a cop-out if I hadn’t done it. It was a classic case of doing it because I had to, rather than because I wanted to. Practically speaking, I couldn’t turn round and say this album is a eulogy to the people I love. At least my part is. I haven’t a fucking clue what he’s singing about.”
And did you take to it naturally, or was it a nerve-wrecking experience?
“The first time I did it – I was a bit stoned, I put the track on and put the first part of it on a loop.
When I listened back, I sounded like Bobby Gillespie. I wasn’t cool with that, I thought ‘I’ve gotta find my own fucking voice’. So there was a lot of experimentation, a lot of work downstairs when Lisa and Nina weren’t here. It was all about gaining confidence, and finding out how to do it. It was a singing for dummies kinda process. If you’re going to put this out there, it better be good. But then I thought – fuck it. The words and the emotion were the important things. If you sound believable, then no-one can take it away from you. If you do something so close and personal, if people don’t like it, then it doesn’t matter. Of course, you want people to like it, but if they don’t, that’s cool. What’s important is that it means something to me.”
With The Holy Pictures about to fly the nest, it’s looking like 2008 could prove to be the most productive year yet for David. At the moment he is working on the soundtrack for Five Minutes of Heaven, the new film by Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel, set in Belfast, and starring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt. The imminent UK release of another film he’s scored, Steve McQueen’s Cannes-winning H-Block drama, Hunger, should also keep him (and a raft of newspaper columnists) busy.
“Hunger was something I chased,” he says. “I knew Steve McQueen’s work, knew he wasn’t a typical director and I knew it was going to be a really intriguing film. When I got the script, I was totally blown away by it. It was fucking amazing. I just saw so many things – not even about the music, just how he wanted sound to be used. I love Musique Concrete – it’s always been a massive influence on me, and that was the direction he seemed to be heading. But when I read it, I thought it doesn’t actually need any music. I told the producer this and he said, ‘We should meet up because that’s exactly how Steve feels.’ He came round here. I asked him what his thoughts were about the music and he said ‘I want it to be really emotional but I want it to be totally unmusical.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, one of those.’ Then I remembered I had a track that didn’t make it onto my album called ‘Any City With A Dirty History’ which had a hurdy gurdy on it. I stuck it on, played it, and he said, ‘That’s exactly it.’ It was one of those things that if I hadn’t got it instantly, I’d have been tearing my hair out for weeks. Brilliant direction, but how do you go about doing that? He was completely right – I mean Bobby Sands is about to die – how fucking shit if you bring in a huge string section.”
Noticeably, both Hunger and Five Minutes Of Heaven are films that deal with Northern Ireland’s recent past. Obviously there’s no reluctance on Holmes’s part to engage the subject.
“One of the interesting things about doing movies from here – because I lived through the hunger strike, I completely understood it. It was instinctive – you’re aware of all the clichés. All the things not to do. But I think, more importantly, it’s about speaking to people, thinking your way into the psychology of the piece. You talk with the director, get to know the kinds of colours and textures that they want to develop. You get the script, try to get into the heads of the characters, try to feel your way into the story. You don’t really have to see one shot. And working with the likes of Nesbitt and Neeson, you can visualise the scenes.”
With much intriguing film work ahead and The Holy Pictures by some distance the best record of his career, you could be forgiven for thinking that David Holmes would be happy just now to rest on his laurels. But such a suggestion is given short shrift.
“Apart from my family, there’s nothing more important to me than being able to continue doing what I’m trying to do,” he states. “I appreciate it every day. I’ve never sold that many records. I’ve been very lucky that a few of the movies I’ve been involved in have allowed me to build this studio. But I consider myself to be a novice. There’s so much that I don’t know. I’m happy for that. I don’t know if naivety is the right word, but there are people who suffer from knowing too much. I love the fact that I’ve so much to learn.”
So stay inquisitive, stay hungry, don’t get too comfortable.
“I might change the studio round,” he says, peering at the stacked magazines, the ash tray, the keyboards picked up in LA jazz shops. “Things are coming in on top of me a bit. You know, I’ve been thinking I might go minimal for a while.”