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David Holmes Biography
David Holmes is set to release his long-awaited fourth solo album through Canderblinks/Mercury/UMC, and The Holy Pictures is an album whose incubation has lasted almost the entire length of Holmes’ career.
To cut straight to Holmes’ own words, “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.” Personal themes as a basis for creative work proved to be challenging though, hence The Holy Pictures brewing for a period of over a decade while Holmes carried on with his eclectic and productive career to date.
In terms of its musical direction, The Holy Pictures shares with Holmes’ other work a rich and idiosyncratic fusion of influences. The first single, I Heard Wonders, (which will be released with a remix by Andrew Weatherall and flykkiller) calls to mind The Velvet Underground, Blondie and La Düsseldorf. David teamed up with Martin Rev from Suicide to write the lyrics for this track. 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,herbert henk 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.
The Holmes career that has played out in the foreground, while The Holy Pictures developed in the background, started with the release of 1995’s This Film’s Crap, Let’s Slash The Seats, an album that plugged immediately into what remains one of his most enduring and vital sources of musical inspiration – cinema. Further commercial and critical acclaim came with 1997’s Let’s Get Killed and 2000’s Bow Down To The Exit Sign, followed by 2003’s David Holmes Presents the Free Association, the latter leading to a hectic spell on the road with the Free Association. After that, work commenced in earnest on The Holy Pictures.
Alongside these releases came a successful partnership with director Steven Soderbergh, resulting in the soundtracks to Out Of Sight, and all three Ocean’s films – Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13. this year Holmes has also just scored a new Apple iPhone advertisement featuring Robert Downey Jr and directed by David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club. he also scored along side leo abrahams the winner of the camera D'Or at this years cannes film festival 'Hunger' directed by the great artist and turner prize winner Steve mc queen. He is currently working on 5 minutes of heaven directed by oscar nominee and director of the mindblowing 'Downfall' oliver hirschbiegel.and later on in the year 'Cherrybomb' directed by his life long collaborators and 2 of his best friends Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D'Sa.
To cut straight to Holmes’ own words, “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.” Personal themes as a basis for creative work proved to be challenging though, hence The Holy Pictures brewing for a period of over a decade while Holmes carried on with his eclectic and productive career to date.
In terms of its musical direction, The Holy Pictures shares with Holmes’ other work a rich and idiosyncratic fusion of influences. The first single, I Heard Wonders, (which will be released with a remix by Andrew Weatherall and flykkiller) calls to mind The Velvet Underground, Blondie and La Düsseldorf. David teamed up with Martin Rev from Suicide to write the lyrics for this track. 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,herbert henk 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.
The Holmes career that has played out in the foreground, while The Holy Pictures developed in the background, started with the release of 1995’s This Film’s Crap, Let’s Slash The Seats, an album that plugged immediately into what remains one of his most enduring and vital sources of musical inspiration – cinema. Further commercial and critical acclaim came with 1997’s Let’s Get Killed and 2000’s Bow Down To The Exit Sign, followed by 2003’s David Holmes Presents the Free Association, the latter leading to a hectic spell on the road with the Free Association. After that, work commenced in earnest on The Holy Pictures.
Alongside these releases came a successful partnership with director Steven Soderbergh, resulting in the soundtracks to Out Of Sight, and all three Ocean’s films – Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13. this year Holmes has also just scored a new Apple iPhone advertisement featuring Robert Downey Jr and directed by David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club. he also scored along side leo abrahams the winner of the camera D'Or at this years cannes film festival 'Hunger' directed by the great artist and turner prize winner Steve mc queen. He is currently working on 5 minutes of heaven directed by oscar nominee and director of the mindblowing 'Downfall' oliver hirschbiegel.and later on in the year 'Cherrybomb' directed by his life long collaborators and 2 of his best friends Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D'Sa.
David Holmes All Music Guide Biography
David Holmes is the among the best in a growing cadre of invisible-soundtrack producers inspired by the audio verité of classic film composers -- Lalo Schifrin, John Barry, Ennio Morricone -- as well as the usual stable of dancefloor innovators and a large cast of jazz/soul pioneers to boot. Similar to the work of Howie B, Barry Adamson, and Portishead's Geoff Barrow, Holmes' productions are appropriately spacious and theatrical, though usually focused on future club consumption as well. His first album, hotly tipped in England, rose the stakes significantly for his second. Let's Get Killed hardly disappointed, gaining critical and artistic success given the constraints of instrumental dance music. The increased exposure even helped him hire in on Hollywood's bankroll to provide the score for the 1998 feature film Out of Sight.
Born in Belfast the youngest of ten children, Holmes listened to punk rock as a child and began DJing at the age of 15 -- his sets at pubs and clubs around the city during the next few years embraced a range of grooves including soul-jazz, mod rock, Northern soul, and disco. Holmes also worked as an underground concert promoter and wrote a fanzine as well, though he was still just a teenager when the house and techno boom hit Britain in the late '80s. Soon he was integrating the new dance music into his mixing, and his club night Sugar Sweet became the first venue for serious dance music in Northern Ireland. Back-and-forth contact between England and Northern Ireland brought Holmes into contact with leading DJs Andrew Weatherall, Darren Emerson, and Ashley Beedle. After familiarizing himself with the studio, he began recording with Beedle (later of Black Science Orchestra) to produce the single "DeNiro" (as Disco Evangelists), a sizeable dancefloor hit in 1992. The following year, his Scubadevils project (a collaboration with Dub Federation) appeared on the first volume of the seminal compilation series Trance Europe Express.
That first taste of success brought David Holmes much remixing work during 1993-1994, for Weatherall's Sabres of Paradise, St. Etienne, Therapy?, Fortran 5, Sandals, and Justin Warfield, among others. He later signed to Go! Discs and in 1995 released his debut album, This Film's Crap, Let's Slash the Seats. Besides the cinema-terrorist persona evoked in the title, the album featured other ties to the cinema: the single "No Mans Land" had been written in response to the controversial Guildford 4 film In the Name of the Father. Television director Lynda La Plante ended up using many of the tracks from the album for her series Supply & Demand, and one track was used in the Sean Penn/Michael Douglas film The Game. Holmes' first proper soundtrack, the Marc Evans film Resurrection Game, appeared in 1997. The experience inspired Holmes to travel to New York and gather a wealth of urban-jungle environment recordings, compiled and mixed into his second proper album, Let's Get Killed.
He followed with the remix collection Stop Arresting Artists, and in 1998 scored Steven Soderbergh's A-list Hollywood feature Out of Sight with a prescient set of groove-funk. (The attention also earned him a place in Entertainment Weekly's list of the Top 100 Creative People in Entertainment.) His single "My Mate Paul" even featured as the theme music to the Sony Playstation game Psybadek. Essential Mix 98/01 followed later that year, and in 1999 This Film's Crap, Let's Slash the Seats was reissued with a bonus disc of rarities and unreleased tracks. Holmes issued his third studio effort, Bow Down to the Exit Sign, in September 2000. One year later, Soderbergh tapped him to produce another feature-film soundtrack, Ocean's Eleven, and it pushed a single -- Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation," as remixed by Junkie XL -- into the charts (as well as the top spot in many countries).
Holmes' next project was a studio band, the Free Association, introduced on the 2002 mix album Come Get It, I Got It. On the record, Holmes mixed and matched older tracks with new productions from him and his lab-mate, Stephen Hilton. Late that same year, a full album of new tracks (David Holmes Presents the Free Association, which was reissued with a new track order in 2006) followed it onto the racks, and in 2004 Cherrystones: Hidden Charms came out. ~ John Bush, All Music Guide
Born in Belfast the youngest of ten children, Holmes listened to punk rock as a child and began DJing at the age of 15 -- his sets at pubs and clubs around the city during the next few years embraced a range of grooves including soul-jazz, mod rock, Northern soul, and disco. Holmes also worked as an underground concert promoter and wrote a fanzine as well, though he was still just a teenager when the house and techno boom hit Britain in the late '80s. Soon he was integrating the new dance music into his mixing, and his club night Sugar Sweet became the first venue for serious dance music in Northern Ireland. Back-and-forth contact between England and Northern Ireland brought Holmes into contact with leading DJs Andrew Weatherall, Darren Emerson, and Ashley Beedle. After familiarizing himself with the studio, he began recording with Beedle (later of Black Science Orchestra) to produce the single "DeNiro" (as Disco Evangelists), a sizeable dancefloor hit in 1992. The following year, his Scubadevils project (a collaboration with Dub Federation) appeared on the first volume of the seminal compilation series Trance Europe Express.
That first taste of success brought David Holmes much remixing work during 1993-1994, for Weatherall's Sabres of Paradise, St. Etienne, Therapy?, Fortran 5, Sandals, and Justin Warfield, among others. He later signed to Go! Discs and in 1995 released his debut album, This Film's Crap, Let's Slash the Seats. Besides the cinema-terrorist persona evoked in the title, the album featured other ties to the cinema: the single "No Mans Land" had been written in response to the controversial Guildford 4 film In the Name of the Father. Television director Lynda La Plante ended up using many of the tracks from the album for her series Supply & Demand, and one track was used in the Sean Penn/Michael Douglas film The Game. Holmes' first proper soundtrack, the Marc Evans film Resurrection Game, appeared in 1997. The experience inspired Holmes to travel to New York and gather a wealth of urban-jungle environment recordings, compiled and mixed into his second proper album, Let's Get Killed.
He followed with the remix collection Stop Arresting Artists, and in 1998 scored Steven Soderbergh's A-list Hollywood feature Out of Sight with a prescient set of groove-funk. (The attention also earned him a place in Entertainment Weekly's list of the Top 100 Creative People in Entertainment.) His single "My Mate Paul" even featured as the theme music to the Sony Playstation game Psybadek. Essential Mix 98/01 followed later that year, and in 1999 This Film's Crap, Let's Slash the Seats was reissued with a bonus disc of rarities and unreleased tracks. Holmes issued his third studio effort, Bow Down to the Exit Sign, in September 2000. One year later, Soderbergh tapped him to produce another feature-film soundtrack, Ocean's Eleven, and it pushed a single -- Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation," as remixed by Junkie XL -- into the charts (as well as the top spot in many countries).
Holmes' next project was a studio band, the Free Association, introduced on the 2002 mix album Come Get It, I Got It. On the record, Holmes mixed and matched older tracks with new productions from him and his lab-mate, Stephen Hilton. Late that same year, a full album of new tracks (David Holmes Presents the Free Association, which was reissued with a new track order in 2006) followed it onto the racks, and in 2004 Cherrystones: Hidden Charms came out. ~ John Bush, All Music Guide
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