A soundtrack album for a film that's yet to be made - we've been down this route before, most notably with U2 and Eno's brill Passengers album, but with the new David Holmes album, clunkily titled Bow Down To The Exit Sign, it looks like the film will be made. The album emerged in tandem with Lisa Barrosbassa's screenplay Living Room and is a typically Holmsian affair in that it dabbles with urban nightmare imagery and is all very sleazy - but in a stylised Scorsese sort of way. Underpinning the beats 'n' bleeps is a narrative line which concerns a newcomer arriving in a city and the various characters that inhabit the local Mean Streets.
Quite the biggest name in Irish dance music, Holmes has been DJ-ing in his native Belfast since he was 15 and has a been-there, done-that take on most musical movements: the one-time punk, mod and acid house raver is now producing music that is more than the sum of his record collection and he's moving his stuff along in that peculiarly cinematic way he has.
The celluloid world has come to meet him half-way: Now a soundtrack artist of some status, he's booked in to score the upcoming Steven Soderbergh film, Ocean Eleven (a remake of the Sinatra Rat Pack movie) having already done the score for Soderbergh's previous feature, Out Of Sight - a passable adaptation of an Elmore Leonard book, which featured George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.
The youngest of 10 children, Holmes's world was thrown off its axis by the arrival of The Sex Pistols. "I'm 31 now, so I just caught the tail-end of the punk" he says, "but listening to stuff like Pretty Vacant changed my life. I knew when I heard it that I was waiting all my life to hear this but I was too young at the time to really understand how it changed me. From there I really got into Soul and Jazz music, then I had a big Mod period, then Acid House started to happen."
The late 1980s club scene changed his world again. With a freeing-up of musical styles and an acknowledgment of the importance of then-forgotten movements, the Acid House scene was to shape his future soundscapes. "The great thing about the early days of House, was that it was a big secret" he says, "there were all these clubs in Belfast at the time and we were all sort of telling ourselves not to tell anybody else. We thought this music was just for us. What I liked about the music was that it had no uniform, in that you could listen to anything and you didn't have to stay within a certain genre. The whole House thing was like another punk rock happening."
Because of the size of his record collection ("I'd go over to London and buy everything in sight") and his love of all styles of music, he quickly became a main player on the DJ scene. And although, unlike a few of his contemporaries, he has yet to have mainstream chart success, he has already racked up quite a few noteworthy jobs.
His first two albums, This Film's Crap, Let's Slash The Seats (1995) and Let's Get Killed (1997) are two of the most vital Irish dance records ever released. On the re-mix end of things, he has twiddled the knobs for bands such as the Manic Street Preachers, Primal Scream, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and the little-known but rather excellent weirdo band, Fortran 5. He's also released the obligatory Essential Mix album.
"What I think I've achieved on this new album is a real sense of the arrangements and the sequencing working, certainly it's not as programmed as the Let's Get Killed album - there's more of an improvised feel to this one. The obvious influences are still there, The Stooges and the Velvet Underground, but I've totally twisted that sound to make something new out of it. There's also bits of Can, Dr John, PiL and The Creation in there."
So soundtrack or album, how should we classify the new album? "I think what I've tried to do is to create loads of different emotions, so it becomes like a journey, so that's very cinematic. That's what I like about scoring films: the picture on the screen tells you to make something more exciting or when to add that sound effect. But we didn't have a picture to look at when we were making this album, so we had to try even harder than usual. I think it's worked."
Bow Down To The Exit Sign is on the Go! Beat label. David Holmes plays Creamfields Ireland on June 24th at the Punchestown Racecourse, Co Kildare
