David Holmes: ‘I was able to see the real Sinéad O’Connor. She was fiercely intelligent, ridiculously funny’

Talking about Sinéad O’Connor is difficult for David Holmes, as his memories of her are still so raw. The Belfast DJ, producer and soundtrack composer had been collaborating with the singer and was devastated when she died, in July, at the age of 56. “I was profoundly sad,” he says, “because it seemed inevitable to me.”

Holmes is about to release his first solo album for 15 years, a chunk of smart, generous, shoe-gazy pop called Blind on a Galloping Horse. But he is aware it is fated to be overshadowed by the music he recorded with O’Connor. “Sinéad and I worked together quite sporadically. I called it ‘Sinéad time’, even though we’ve got nine tracks. I started working with her in 2018 – it was very sporadic. There was a year when I didn’t speak to her.”

They got on well, having met at the National Concert Hall in Dublin at the birthday gig for Shane MacGowan in January 2018. “What made me sad more than anything was that I felt I got to know her in a way. I was able to see the real Sinéad,” he says. “She was fiercely intelligent, ridiculously funny … Sinéad just had problems with her mental health, like we all do. Only hers were on a different level.”

O’Connor would drive from her home in Bray, in Co Wicklow, to Holmes’ studio in Belfast, such was her enthusiasm for working with him. They made the bones of an album together. One number, The Magdalene Song, has already featured on the soundtrack to The Woman in the Wall, the recent BBC drama about the Magdalene laundries. Holmes is limited in how much he can reveal about the rest.

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“I’m still processing it, because I’ve made this record with her that I can’t actually talk about. I think we should wait. Hopefully, the record will come out. And then I’ll be able to talk more freely about it. I haven’t listened to the record in a while. I listened to it after her death. It’s a very unique situation. Very, very difficult. I still haven’t heard the result of her autopsy or anything like that. We all know she was a phenomenal human being who was cancelled for being right,” he says, referring to her speaking out about clerical sexual abuse. “For speaking truth to power, at whatever cost.”

Holmes regards O’Connor as more than a singer. “She defined art. Nina Simone once said an artist’s job, their responsibility, is to reflect their times and to speak truthfully about what was going on in the world. Both of those artists did that. When I was recording Sinéad I felt I was recording Nina Simone.”

Whatever the future holds, fans of Holmes’ warm and thoughtful electronica will find much to like about Blind on a Galloping Horse, which features vocals from Raven Violet, the daughter of the American musicians Jade Vincent and Keefus Ciancia, with whom Holmes formed the retro-pop project Unloved. Like the material he made with O’Connor, it addresses mental health – specifically, Holmes’ struggles with a form of OCD.

“I dealt with that through psychedelic therapy. I had profound results from that,” he says. “I actually managed to clear the fog – that is probably the best way of describing it. I was diagnosed with an intense form of OCD, but without the compulsion. So it was just pure obsession. We all suffer from those. In the medical world, they call them NATs – negative automatic thoughts. One of the things I’ve learned is that everyone gets these, everyone. In my case, I couldn’t get off the Ferris wheel.”

As an artist, obsessiveness can be a powerful tool. In his case, though, the compulsions spiralled and spiralled.

“You’ve got 70 per cent of it which is really great, actually: you’re obsessed with what you’re doing – a film, a record, DJ-ing, whatever that is. I’ve always been like that, going back to being a child. You’ve got this other percentage which becomes destructive. I still am dealing with it. But the thoughts don’t hang around as much. The thoughts don’t spiral out of control like they did.”

The other thread running through the album is the fallout from Brexit and the descent of UK politics into grand farce. Holmes is much in demand as a screen composer: over the past 25 years he has soundtracked everything from Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy to Killing Eve. One of his big undertakings during the pandemic was scoring This England, Michael Winterbottom’s reconstruction of Boris Johnson’s ham-fisted response to the Covid-19 emergency (with a wig-wearing Kenneth Branagh as Bojo).

[ This England review: If you can stomach the material, this show is hugely watchable ]

He and Winterbottom worked on the project through the second of the UK’s lockdowns. Night after night, Holmes would watch dramatisations of the first lockdown – even as he and everyone he knew was still living through the Covid nightmare. To say it was surreal would be an understatement – and he has now poured that angst into his album via songs such as Tyranny of the Talentless, which tracks the decline of Britain since the fateful 2016 referendum vote to leave the European Union without a back-up plan.

“The fact David Cameron had given people this catastrophic decision – this decision to make that they knew absolutely nothing about,” he says. “As the album says, ‘a blind man on a galloping horse’ could see it was a terrible idea.”

Holmes didn’t sit down to write a concept album – Blind on a Galloping Horse touches on a variety subjects and its single Necessary Genius is a tribute to O’Connor – but he kept returning to Brexit and the terrible toll it has inflicted on ordinary people. “We were all there. We all witnessed it. The mismanagement of that choice that was given to people within the UK, including ourselves up here [in the North], who voted to stay in Europe,” he says.

“Like most, you were head in hands, going ‘What the f**k is going on?’ The fact Boris Johnson had two [newspaper articles] written, for and against Brexit, to me that said everything about the world of privilege and entitlement. How detached they are from the working classes. Born with a silver spoon in their mouth. They detest their working class. They’re pathological liars whose only interest is in serving themselves. And then Covid happened.”

Northern Ireland was a battleground of the Brexit stand-off between Britain and the EU. Having grown up in Belfast during the Troubles, the youngest of 10 children, Holmes understood only too well what was at stake. His Catholic family had lived on the largely Protestant Ormeau Road: when Holmes was a teenager the UVF told his older brother to leave the city after his best friend was shot dead on the street outside their home.

“The head of the UVF in south Belfast, he knew we weren’t republican. We were definitely a nationalist family – nothing wrong with that. The head of the UVF pulled my dad aside and said, ‘Jackie, get rid of your son, because he’s going to get whacked.’ Within 24 hours my brother was living in Chicago – and stayed there for the rest of his life.”

Life was, if not bleak, then certainly intense. But then dance music reached Northern Ireland. Going clubbing, you didn’t have to be a nationalist or unionist. You could be whatever you wanted. To Holmes, it was a rebirth.

“When acid house came along and I was having these profound, life-changing experiences on a weekly basis, that was almost a gift from God. The last thing I wanted to talk about was the Troubles. They were still in full flow. Acid-house culture, to me, it was the joining of the tribes. You grew up in the 1980s, you had all your mods, your skinheads. Acid house brought all those tribes together.”

The Troubles are viewed quite differently by the generations that came along after Holmes. In the 1990s, The Wolfe Tones were regarded as beyond the pale. Today they’re playing 3Arena while groups such as Kneecap, from west Belfast, incorporate republican iconography into provocative songs such as Get Your Brits Out.

[ Patrick Freyne: The Wolfe Tones love Ireland so much they luxuriate in its tortured history ]

“Kneecap are really important. They, obviously, are way, way younger than I am. I’ve seen them live. It’s pretty extraordinary. It’s like watching NWA in west Belfast,” he says. “Number one, Kneecap aren’t sectarian. They’re pro-Irish. That’s how they grew up. They grew up speaking Irish. They feel they have more in common with the kids from the Shankill Road than they do with anyone from the South. They come from the same raw, working-class background. Both ruled by a Government that is undoubtedly corrupt – we’re talking about the Tories here.

“From what I’ve heard, on the ground in Belfast, there are lots of kids from the Shankill who love them but they have to keep it on the down-low. So I do think they’re important. A lot of it is tongue-in-cheek. They’re not sectarian at all. They’re nationalist, pro-Irish. They’re great lads.”

[ Kneecap: ‘Low-life scum’ of west Belfast rap whose day has come ]

What does he think about the debate around people chanting “Up the ’Ra” at Wolfe Tones gigs? “A lot of that is playful. It’s people taking the piss … A lot of kids these days don’t even know what that means. A lot of the time it’s kids out pissed singing along for the laugh. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”

It has been a strange few weeks for Holmes. In addition to the new album, he has composed the soundtrack for another Michael Winterbottom project, Shoshana, about British rule in Palestine in the 1930s and the foundation of the Israeli state. In a chilling coincidence, it premiered in London the day Hamas terrorists butchered civilians in Israel. Holmes has strong opinions about the conflict, which he references on the opening song of his new LP.

Shoshana “is about the beginning of those settlements and the beginning of the Zionist movement”. It’s now “such a complicated situation. I could rant on all day,” he says. “The fact of the matter is, if you keep 2.2 million people in a cage and treat them like subhumans, on their own land, there is going to be retaliation. The first track on my album is called When People Are Occupied Resistance Is Justified.

[ Shoshana first-look review: Michael Winterbottom’s new film offers a warning from history as it evokes a frenzied era ]

“That doesn’t mean it’s okay to go out willy-nilly and start killing innocent people,” he says, stressing that he is not making excuses for Hamas. “Is [resistance] justified? Absolutely. Is the way they do it justified? Absolutely not. It’s one of those very, very difficult situations. But if we’re going to be really truthful and put it into context, this whole thing began by the British government handing a piece of land to someone. It wasn’t theirs. And it didn’t belong to the people who they gave it to.”

The situation in the Middle East is “a bit like trying to understand the Troubles”, he says. “I’ve always said, the Troubles, the way it evolved … it’s not as black and white as wanting to be Irish and wanting to be British. So many people got involved with paramilitary organisations because something personal happened to them. Now Israel are going in and they’re wiping out Gaza. It is ethnic cleansing. It is genocide. No one can deny that.

“What people fail to realise is that the young kids who are surviving that are being radicalised. It boils down to how you treat people. If you’re going to treat people in a certain way there’s going to be consequences, and that’s just a fact of life. I’ve seen it in Northern Ireland. I’m watching it happening on the Gaza Strip.”

Blind on a Galloping Horse is released on Friday, November 10th