A northern soul

With the release of a new, deeply personal album, superstar DJ David Holmes has turned his musical attention to his family and his home city of Belfast. He talks to Jim Carroll

HE NEVER really left home. Sure, David Holmes has travelled and worked and made a splash well beyond Belfast's city streets. The frequent-flyer miles are all there in the shorthand of his resumé: the club promoter and the DJ, the remixer and producer, the artist albums and snazzy Hollywood film scores.

But Holmes has always remained a homebird at heart. He never followed many of his peers who bolted at the first opportunity for the bright lights of London or New York or Los Angeles. Instead, he set up shop in Belfast. He's always willing to travel over to the US to do a film when Stephen Soderbergh calls looking for some sounds to make George Clooney look slick and snazzy. But he'll always come home again.

"I still live in Belfast and it's a big part of my life," Holmes maintains. "I don't see the need to go to live somewhere else. I have the studio here, I have got my family and my friends nearby. I'm content here; it has all I want from life."

Until now, though, there has been very little of Holmes's hometown in his records, but that all changes with his new album, The Holy Pictures. Van Morrison's Astral Weeksmay be rightly eulogised for capturing the sepia tones of the northern capital from another era, but Holmes twists the civic fabric in another, equally memorable way. It may be - as he tells it - about himself and his people, his family album, but it's also a beautifully melancholic and haunted homage to Belfast. It's certainly the most personal thing Holmes has ever done.

"There's a lot of emotion in it. I'm like most people when it comes to making music, in that I try to reinvent myself every time. You're trying to do something genuine and you're not being contrived about it. With this album, that honesty was the driving force."

Some of that momentum comes down to loss. In 1996, as Holmes's career began to reach new heights and with Hollywood waiting in the wings, his mother died. Last year, with Holmes already in the middle of recording Holy Pictures, his father passed away.

Yet, it's not quite as straightforward as those two events book-ending the album. "I know the press release says the album started in 1996, but that's not really true. From 1996 to this album, I made a bunch of soundtracks and released a couple of albums, so I didn't ever stop and think about making an album about my life. It just didn't occur to me.

"Even though I can trace the album back to my mother's death, I didn't know the album was starting then. There were other life-changing experiences between then and now, stuff like becoming a father myself and losing my father. I channelled all that emotion into the music, and the music got more and more personal as the recording went on."

It turned out to be a strange recording process. "Normally, I have a boxful of ideas when I go into the studio. There's a degree of experimentation, but I have the ideas to begin with going in.

"What I was working with this time at the start, though, had no real resonance for me. When you're making an album under your own name, you do tend to want it to reflect you, and what I had at first just didn't do that.

"But as I got deeper into it, I found that the tracks I was most attached to were the ones which had the most emotional impact. And those emotions had to do with my life, and the people and places which meant a lot to me."

It was at this stage that the lyrics and vocals came into the picture. On previous albums, Holmes stayed strictly instrumental or brought in singers to flesh out the songs. This time, there was only one option - do the singing himself. Every morning, when his wife was at work and his daughter at school, he'd start to write and record.

"I had never sung before in my life, so I had no idea how it would turn out. It was a case of doing it because you had to, not because you wanted to. I won't bullshit you and say I wasn't nervous about the whole thing, but with the help of a great microphone and some modern-day gadgetry in my studio, I worked things out."

Holmes compares the songwriting process to therapy. "I've nothing against therapy or people who do it, because some people do need to sit down and talk about their problems. Believe you me, there are many times when I have thought about it. But I never thought that writing songs and singing would be like therapy. You really feel like you're working it all out and getting better because when you write a song, you've drawn a line and you can move on with a big smile on your face."

What Holmes was working out in those songs was the stuff which inevitably ended up shaping him. He describes himself as a "classic Irish boy" who was very close to his mother and who became closer to his father after she died. The Holmes siblings, all 10 of them, remain a close-knit bunch ("lots of love with the odd scuffle"), and Holmes feels that The Holy Picturesputs those relationships and all the various city-wide connections into perspective. "It's a record for the people I'm writing about and, because of that, I feel it goes beyond criticism."

Holmes came of age in a very different Belfast. "[In the late 1980s] the city had such a dark edge to it, but it was so much fun at the same time. I think I was too young and stupid to have any fear about what was happening ... You'd hear about a bomb scare in the pub and you wouldn't move until you had finished your pint. When it was going on, you never thought about it. But afterwards, you realised you were living and working and partying in a war zone."

Holmes still DJs, though not as extensively as he used to. "I just DJ when I feel like it's a good time to DJ." A DJ date with Holmes may be the only way you'll get to experience the album outside the walls of your own home. Everyone else may be hitching a ride on the live music bandwagon, but not him.

"I will not be touring the album and I will not be singing live," he emphasises. That policy, though, shouldn't prevent music as truly moving and wonderful as The Holy Picturesremaining hidden for very long.

• The Holy Picturesis released today on Canderblinks/Mercury. David Holmes DJs at Pogo at the Pod, Dublin on September 20th. www.myspace.com/davidholmesofficial