Articles - Interviews

David Holmes on Hollywood, Techno, and Superstar DJs

“Music to me isn’t about what goes on in clubs, it’s about what goes on in your life. If something goes on in my life that I find really interesting musically wise and I want to bring it in the clubs and people can dance to it, then great.”

Nowadays rightly revered both as an a list soundtrack producer and fiercely individualistic artist in his own right, David Holmes first gained recognition as one the best techno Djs in the UK scene of 1993 and 1994. Headlining regularly alongside future superstar spinners like Sven Vath and Jeff Mills, he stepped off the circuit suddenly, never to return.

“It wasn’t just a case of me saying, hey I don’t want to listen to dance music anymore, because I’ve never actually stopped listening to dance music. I just got bored listening to it all the time, it just became like a job to me,” he explains.

“I remember in the mid ’90’s I used to turn up in clubs and play Public Image next to Miles Davis and Can and the Velvet Underground and I was getting threatened,” he chuckles.

“Once I had to get escorted out of one club. People were saying to me ‘what the f**k are you doing? This is rubbish!’ Thankfully people are a lot more open minded these days.”

He’s also cheerfully content about missing out on what might have been, though he’s careful not to slate his erstwhile peers.

“The whole ‘superstar DJ’ thing is so far removed from what I do; just the term makes me cringe,” he says, “Commercialism enters into the equation, I think. You have to appeal to the masses.”

Ironically, he ended up appealing directly to the masses via Hollywood film director Steven Soderbergh (the director of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Traffic, and the Ocean's Eleven series’) and changing his life via his interest in cinema.

“I started getting deeper and deeper into films as a form of inspiration, I started looking for things and before I knew it I made an album, it was called “This Film is Crap, Let’s Slash the Seats”,” says David.

“It was almost like a calling card for producers and film directors, my music started to be picked up for films and before I knew it I was working on my first feature film score and no sooner had I finished that, I got a call from Steven Soderbergh.

There was a lot of faith involved and being at the right place at the right time. It gave me a lot of security because it reinforced my belief in wanting to make music and nothing else for the rest of my life. Before I had this fear of the ‘real life’; of having to do a job that I wasn’t happy doing and I love music so much that I just could never see myself doing anything else.”

Skrufff (Benedetta Ferraro): Your new album is called the Holy Pictures: how much importance do you give to titles generally? And this one in particular?

David Holmes: “I came up with the name for this album, like most of the names I got for my other albums, which is when I’m reading or sitting in bars. In this case, I was sitting talking to a man who was a really good friend of my father’s and he told me of this little bar where they used to drink at, called the Holy Pictures Club. That wasn’t its official name, and the reason why it was called that was because the bar was basically a room and the décor in the room was filled with holy pictures of Jesus and various saints. When I heard that, I immediately knew I had a title for the album. I thought it worked on many different levels. First of all, it was the name of the bar my dad used to drink at, in the city where I grew up. Secondly, every track on the album was to me a holy picture, of my father, my mother… it also had a very cinematic quality to it. So this title is very personal, it felt good immediately.”

Skrufff: On the press release you say the album was inspired by the death of your mother in 1996: it’s now 12 years later: I guess it was a difficult process?

David Holmes: “Yes, it was, but I don’t look at these things in such a way. I mean, I wasn’t getting the razor blades out! Dealing with the death of your parents is a very subtle process. I was closer to my mother than my father, but even though she died before him I felt very different when I lost him, because losing him felt like I suddenly was on my own, I became the man of the house. In a way you kind of take it for granted all your life when they’re around. I loved them and respected them so much and in a way I always wanted to please them, then suddenly they’re not there anymore and you feel like you’re taking on all the responsibilities.”

Skrufff: This also could happen when you become a parent yourself…

David Holmes: “Well, I have nine brothers and sisters you see, believe you me my parents went through the mill bringing up all those kids in Belfast, in the 70’s. Those were very difficult years. They definitely had many sleepless night; just waiting for their kids to come home. I have just one daughter and often I think how on earth did they manage to bring up ten kids? This was before washing machines, disposable nappies, microwaves, dishwashers and you know, times were tough compare to how people live now.”

Skrufff: How much of an active help was your mother in developing your musical career?

David Holmes: “My mother was really supportive of me. My father was more old school instead, of the type ‘get a real job, get a trade’, but that was just the way he was brought up and also he wasn’t so much in touch with the times, whereas my mother was. She would still be up at 3 in the morning and listen to mixes I did on radio. And she would tell me how great she thought they were. I think she really enjoyed having me, she had been through so much and learned so much from life that by the time she had me she just went ‘just go and do what you want’. Just follow your heart, follow your dream, life’s too short. For a much older woman, she was born in 1924, she was such a visionary; she kept up with the times, she followed music, she encouraged me all the way.”

Skrufff: Did you ever take her out to clubs? (how much did you approve of you DJing, with the drug culture associated with clubs?)

David Holmes: “We never spoke about the drugs or anything like that. Of course she knew about that, but we never discussed it. There was an element of trust from her part. I never took her to clubs though; you have to draw the line somewhere. She just let me get on with it.”

Skrufff: How much do commercial considerations figure in the album? How conscious are you of making any tracks deliberately radio friendly?

David Holmes: “None. When you make a record, you can only make what’s from your heart and I set out with that in my sights. No one can take that away from you then. I don’t even know how anyone can make a record with commercial considerations in mind, you’re either that way inclined or not. To me, you can’t walk in the studio one day saying ‘today I’m going to make a single’. Luckily “X Factor” isn’t the world we’re living in, it’s just a part of it. People can still be free to express themselves and that’s what I try to do, express myself.”

Skrufff: Virtually every electronic producer sees soundtracks as the holy grail- and particularly lucrative: how much did entering the soundtrack world change your life?

David Holmes: “If you’re asking in a general sense, first of all I can tell you that making soundtracks is something I’ve always dreamt of doing. Growing up in Belfast in the early 70’s you didn’t have many options. There was a lot of dark shit happening outside, which meant you would spend a lot of time inside, you have a lot of time and I would spend mine constantly watching films and getting into the music. I fell into the whole film thing very accidentally, but it was also very natural. When I first started making music a lot of it was inspired by films, though at the time the last thing I would have thought was to make music for films. I never thought that my music had a cinematic quality to it. That’s what other people said and then I started thinking but I never forced it.

“Doing more work for Soderbergh gave me more space and therefore the feeling that I didn’t need to put out albums all the time. It brought me some security, the possibility to experiment and work in a great studio. It’s a totally inspiring artwork that also enriches and informs my own work as a DJ and vice versa. If I had to take one out of the equation I think I’d really suffer, that’s why I still DJ and I still put out my own records.”

Skrufff: What about the lucrative aspect of it? Are you a millionaire now?

David Holmes: “It’s funny, everybody thinks that. I was lucky to have made films like ‘Ocean’ for example and I’d be lying if I’d said they weren’t lucrative. All movies aren’t like that though; I’m in the middle of making a score for one that doesn’t pay hardly anything actually. It swings around. The most important movies that I have done and continue to do don’t pay that much at all. On the one hand it can be a lucrative business, but ironically the real pay off is in the smaller films. I loved doing ‘Ocean’, I worked with amazing musicians, an amazing director. These films are what they are, big Hollywood blockbusters where the impossible is achieved most of the times, and they are so much fun to work on. If you want to work with a thirty-piece orchestra, it’s done. Those are the real ‘pinch yourself’ moments, you know?”

Skrufff: Going back into your DJing: I remember you spinning techno at Club UK back in the early 90s: what made you decide to quit techno? And never go back to it?

David Holmes: “First of all I consider myself a music lover. I’ve been DJing since I was 14; that’s 24 years. When I first started DJing I used to play very rare soul, Rhythm and Blues and Northern Soul. I was always into music, not into ‘techno’. One of the best things about growing up in the ’80’s and the ’90’s was that there was so much music yet to be done, so much music yet to be discovered. Acid house and techno were just a part of the bigger picture. I love music whichever genre it is and I’ve always tried to be true to myself, but you can get distracted if something new comes along. When I started producing I got exposed to so much more music, especially being signed to Mute, you meet new people and what they’re doing inspires you. I just saw myself evolving. When I stopped playing full on dance music it was because my heart was somewhere else; at the time I remember people saying ‘are you mad?’ and I used to answer them that I was just following my heart.”

 “The beauty about the world we’re living in now is that there are no boundaries whatsoever. People can just go out and do and be what they want. There are so many clubs you can go to now and hear everything. In many ways that’s how I was brought up. The clubs in Belfast in the early ’80’s played everything, you heard the Clash next to the Jackson 5 next to The Cure next to The Cult, Prince Buster and Gene Vincent. They were the clubs I went to as a young boy. I admire people who are just into one thing, just don’t be judgemental. Don’t judge me if I want to play everything because I’m not judgemental towards your choices, I actually really respect people who are into just into one genre because I feel it takes so much, they must truly love it. In the end I’ve always followed my heart, sometimes it works out really well, sometimes it confuses people. But if you follow your heart nobody can take that away from you.”

Skrufff: Going into your Belfast days you said in an earlier interview ‘In Belfast, especially growing up in the Seventies, there was a lot of temptation for people to make the wrong choice and either join the army or join a paramilitary group’: how close did you come to either path?

David Holmes: “I wasn’t brought up that way. I mean I was born in ’69, the year when the troubles started. I was brought up to be non judgmental. My friends have always been of very mixed religion. With regards to that comment I made, that choice was there for anyone in the city, ultimately it all depends on your mindset and my thing has always been music. I still live in Belfast and I still see all my friends I grew up with, no one is involved in music though, it’s not like a normal job. Even I never thought this could be a career, it’s just that when I started earning from it, it just dawned on me that I could do this for a living. But I was obsessed, you know, obsessed! And I still am. I wasn’t more ambitious than anyone else. This is just part of my personality and when it started happening I didn’t want to let it go, because I had a taste of something magical: making money out of something that you love. That was a whole new experience for me.”

The Holy Pictures is out now

http://www.davidholmesofficial.com

Article by Benedetta Ferraro (Skrufff.com)

Subscribe to Skrufff music newsletter at www.skrufff.com