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David Holmes
David Holmes will perform at The Big Chill festival 2008 A-Z line up | Ticket infoDavid Holmes - Biography
The Holy Pictures is David Holmes long-awaited fourth solo album. Unlike its predecessors, it has its roots planted firmly in his own personal history.
David’s first solo record, This Film’s Crap, Let’s Slash the Seats (released in 1995) plugged immediately into what remains one of his most enduring and vital sources of musical inspiration - cinema. A distinctively eclectic set of references, both musical and filmic, continued to feed subsequent albums, bringing his work to the attention and acclaim of an international audience. 1997’s Let’s Get Killed was laced with sounds and voices gathered by David from the New York streets, and 2000’s Bow Down to the Exit Sign was created as the soundtrack to a not-yet-made movie, and featured a unique collection of collaborators, from Martina Topley Bird to poet Carl Hancock Rux. Following Bow Down, David staked out new creative ground as part of the Free Association. David Holmes Presents the Free Association was released in 2003, and like his solo efforts, received commercial and massive critical acclaim. After a hectic spell on the road with the band, David felt the time was right to commence another solo album. But in truth, the story of The Holy Pictures had begun long before this.
As David says: ‘The story of this album really began on the 4th of August 1996, when my mother, Sarah Holmes, passed away. I had always wanted to make a record about my life in Belfast and all the things attached to that - family, friends, loss, love and starting a family of my own. All the stuff that shapes the person you become.’ But as he had long concluded, using personal themes as a basis for new creative work isn’t always the right approach: ‘you realise it’s something that can’t be contrived - it has to happen naturally, when you reach the right moment in life, whenever that might come along.’
When David began work on this album, his focus was not on personal but on musical exploration. ‘As often happens, when I went into the studio some four years ago, my original intentions for the work I was beginning were very far from the place this album has ended up. I wasn’t thinking about making a very personal record - I just had in mind some general ideas about fusions of different styles that I felt would produce something original.’ But the early stages of the album’s development proved to be somewhat frustrating. ‘It was a constant case of one step forward, two steps back. I never felt a real sense of satisfaction about the work. It seemed that I had to go through the process of making four or five different tracks before I came up with one that I felt reached a point of true resonance.’
While the heart of the album continued to remain elusive, other ventures in film and music were flourishing. David’s successful partnership with director Steven Soderbergh, developed on 1998’s Out of Sight and 2001’s Ocean’s 11, now continued through the sequels Ocean’s 12 and 13. And with Steve Hilton, his long-time collaborator on these and many other films, David had the opportunity to explore a wholly different filmic mood on Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46. Their acclaimed soundtrack evokes the poignant emotional landscape of a dystopian near-future world. An even deeper engagement with filmmaking was cemented when long-held plans to set up a film production company came to fruition: in 2006 Canderblinks Film and Music Ltd was born. Their first short film was a co-production called The 18th Electricity Plan, for which David created an original score. Soon the new company had several feature film ideas in development.
During this time, work on the album continued, and now its focus began to emerge more clearly. David explains: ‘It was only as the process gained momentum, and I got to the point of having three or four instrumentals I was happy with, that I began to realise what I was in love with about the tunes I was hanging on to, the ones I felt belonged on the record: they were the ones that most reflected my real life, emotionally and also stylistically.’ Though the process remained challenging, the path ahead became a bit clearer at this point. ‘Twenty-five tracks later I realized that I had the guts of an instrumental album - but still no vocals. Doing vocals myself had been something I’d always fantasised about, but I’d never really had the balls to do it, and felt pretty far from making that idea a reality. Then on 16th May 2007, my father passed away. When I got back into the studio six weeks later, my focus was very much on memories of both my parents and what they meant to me.’ And beyond that, on all the other things David had always known would come, at some stage, to directly inform his music: ‘…like my wife, my daughter, my immediate family, lost friends and my whole history with Belfast and how it shaped me as a human being.’ These themes fed into the lyrics David was beginning to write for the album. ‘And then came the vocals. All along, I had toyed with the idea of working with various singers on my record but the more personal the music became, the more I recognised that the only person who could do it was me.’ Although this was a huge new challenge for David, and something he approached with a certain amount of trepidation, he’s now convinced it was an inevitable part of this album’s particular, personal story: ‘I think it’s fair to say that I sang on my record, not because I wanted to, but because I had to.’
In terms of its musical direction, this album shares with David’s other work a rich and idiosyncratic fusion of influences. I Heard Wonders calls to mind The Velvet Underground, Blondie and La Dusseldorf. David teamed up with Martin Rev from Suicide to write the lyrics for this track, which will be the album’s first single. Threaded through the rest of the album are myriad other influences - from the Jesus and Mary Chain on Story of the Ink, through the Soft Machine and the Beach Boys on Melanie and Hey Maggy, to Daniel Johnson and early Eno and Lanois on the beautifully haunting track The Ballad of Sarah and Jack. As well as Rev, The Holy Pictures features collaborations with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins. The album was recorded in Belfast, which, given its themes, seems only fitting.
As The Holy Pictures emerges, David is looking outward to a series of exciting new ventures and collaborations in music and film. He continues to resist being pigeonholed in one style or genre. Earlier this year he worked with Leo Abrahams to create the score for Hunger, the debut feature film from Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen. In May of this year, Hunger was awarded the prestigious Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. And on the international front, David has just scored a new Apple iPhone advertisement featuring Robert Downey Jr and directed by David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club). More film projects are lined up for the next months; David is currently working on the soundtrack for Five Minutes of Heaven, a drama set in seventies Northern Ireland, which is the latest work by Oliver Hirschbiegel, director of the Oscar-nominated Downfall. This will be followed by the score for an edgy, contemporary coming-of-age film, Cherrybomb, to be directed this summer in Belfast by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, David’s partners in Canderblinks Film.
www.myspace.com/davidholmesofficial
David Holmes will perform at The Big Chill festival 2008 A-Z line up | Ticket info
Written: 8th May, 08
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