David Holmes is at home in east Belfast making tea while his maltipoo Maisie scampers around our feet looking for something to nibble. A music video director, Andrew “Wiz” Whiston (whose collaborative credits include Oasis, David Bowie and Arctic Monkeys), is here to talk business but has to wait as Holmes, Maisie and I traipse upstairs, tea in hand, to Holmes’s recording studio. Here we are greeted with a mesh of cables, synthesizers and an extensive vinyl collection. In the centre of the room is the microphone on which Sinéad O’Connor recorded her final album.
Holmes plays me The Magdalene Song, one of O’Connor’s new songs that appeared on The Woman in the Wall, a recent BBC1 drama for which Holmes also co-authored the soundtrack. Listening to O’Connor’s soaring voice — “I’m going to live not for anybody but myself” — in the room where she sang these words is uplifting and haunting. At the end I’m looking at Holmes expectantly.
“You’re dying to hear the whole thing, aren’t you? And you know what? You’re going to have to wait. But it’s an amazing record, I have to say. When will it be out? I’ve no idea. I’ll leave that with the family, it’s none of my business. She had signed to Chrysalis [record label] and now the whole process is just about making sure the family are 100 per cent happy. Although I made this record with Sinéad, to me this is Sinéad O’Connor’s album. I was the facilitator.”
Describing himself as a facilitator is an understatement. The producer, composer and DJ always excelled in bringing out the best in other artists. In this studio, he recorded Who Built the Moon? (2017), the third album by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, which led Gallagher to describe Holmes as “the best producer in the world”. His soundtrack collaborations include most of Steven Soderbergh’s movies — from Out of Sight (1998) through to Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and its sequels — and locally produced fare such as Lyra, a documentary about the murder of the journalist Lyra McKee.
This space is also where he recorded his new solo record. Blind on a Galloping Horse consists of 14 tracks of atmospheric walls of sound, euphoric psychedelia and hooky choruses. It’s his first solo venture since The Holy Pictures (2008): a personal album that he thought left him with nothing more to say as a solo artist.
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“I was dealing with family on that album: the death of my parents in all its complexities,” he says. “It was a love letter to them. After you’ve done that, you wonder: ‘Where am I going to go from here?’”
What changed, he explains, wasn’t him. It was the world. “We have seen profound changes sprung upon us: from the financial collapse in 2008 to Brexit. During the second lockdown, I did the score to a [Sky] TV series called This England about the Tory party’s handling of Covid. I was watching the same scenes over and over again — and I was getting angry.”
If The Holy Pictures looked inward then this album — in particular songs such as Hope Is the Last Thing to Die — is widescreen. During the record’s creation, he also worked on the scores for In the Shadow of Beirut (2023), a Northern Irish-produced documentary about the Lebanese capital, and Michael Winterbottom’s Shoshana (2023), which explores the foundation of the Israeli state. The album’s musings on the legacy of colonialism and its rallying call against elites — on tracks such as When People Are Occupied Resistance Is Justified, and spoken-word excerpts from an Afghan refugee in Belfast and a taxi driver in Gaza — are timely. Holmes knows what it is like to exist in a society where violence is normalised. “I grew up in the Troubles in the heart of it in Belfast. The British Army kicked out my front door in the middle of the night, ripped the house apart. There were bombs going off, people getting shot, within spitting distance from my house.” As a DJ in the acid house scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s (he ran an underground club in Belfast called Sugar Sweet), he didn’t want to talk about the Troubles. “I just wanted to go out and go clubbing and take drugs and dance my socks off. But as a grown man now — 54, a father of one daughter, with a wife — I feel like I’ve finally grown up. I felt compelled to say something [with this album] and it wasn’t contrived.”
Blind on a Galloping Horse was compiled from his notes, sessions and collaborations. It’s Over, if We Run Out of Love, a thumping pop anthem, was written with Noel Gallagher and appeared on Soderbergh’s film Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023). “Soderbergh has always been a great supporter of my solo music,” Holmes says. “Let’s Get Killed [Holmes’s iconic album from 1997] was all over Ocean’s Eleven.”
Holmes sang the tracks on The Holy Pictures, but he handed the microphone to his goddaughter Raven Violet for his new album. Holmes first worked with Violet on a track for his side project Unloved, which has recorded albums and the score for the BBC drama Killing Eve. “I always describe Raven as Michelle Phillips [from the Mamas & the Papas] with attitude because she’s got that Californian west coast warmth and timbre and feeling. Raven’s a young woman: 27 years of age now. I realised there was a real power in having these words sung by a female with a unique attitude and warmth.”
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The album isn’t entirely global in its outlook. Tracks such as Love in the Upside Down and Emotionally Clear deal with some of the producer’s mental health issues. “I was diagnosed with a really severe form of OCD, but without the compulsion: it was pure obsession,” he says. “I had certain things happen to me in my childhood that didn’t seem like a problem at the time. I never gave much thought to them. What’s that old adage: ‘Give me the boy from birth to seven and I’ll show you the man’.”
Another track, Necessary Genius, is a shout-out to the artists who inspired him: from Samuel Beckett to Nina Simone, Terry Hall to Andrew Weatherall. The track ends with Holmes, through the voice of Raven Violet, pledging his faith in Sinéad O’Connor.
They met in 2018 at Shane MacGowan’s 60th birthday celebration in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. “I said: ‘Excuse me, my name’s David Holmes. You probably don’t have a clue who I am. I want to make a record with you about healing.’ ” O’Connor didn’t know who he was but she was intrigued by his idea. Holmes gave her his number that night. Some weeks later, she phoned him.
“I’m thinking about coming to Belfast to live there for a while,” she said.
Holmes asked when she was leaving.
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“I’ll be there this evening.”
Holmes moved her into a bungalow that he owns near the Ormeau Road: “I got it looking nice for her and got the chimney swept.” The first track they recorded together was called Milestones. In 2021, O’Connor revealed the album would be called No Veteran Dies Alone, which now seems a poignant epitaph.
Maisie, Holmes’s dog, hops onto a chair in the studio. Did O’Connor get on with Maisie?
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “She loved Maisie. I’ve got some lovely photographs of her and Maisie.” He looks lost in thought. “Sinéad was such a unique person. We connected as humans, first and foremost. That’s the brilliance of Sinéad. She didn’t know me from Adam. She didn’t know about the work that I’d done or anything. She just liked the cut of my jib and out of that a trust and a friendship grew.”
In his job as a producer and composer, David Holmes has become adept at bringing out the best in other people. But through his new album he has learnt the importance of setting aside time for himself and his own voice. “I find both of these albums, The Holy Pictures and Blind on a Galloping Horse, incredibly cathartic whether through anger or empathy or dealing with my own mental health.”
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So I leave him there in his studio: a room where magic is distilled into music for our future.
Blind on a Galloping Horse is out via Heavenly Recordings on Nov 10
