Hello again everyone, thanks for bearing with us - and greetings to the new sign-ups as there seem to be a lot who’ve been excited by the prospect of this latest subject.
David Holmes probably doesn’t need much introduction to most of you. He’s the man who more than any other brought acid house to Northern Ireland with his Sugar Sweet club. He was a key early collaborator with the late Andrew Weatherall in his heavy techno-leaning Sabresonic days, they remained lifelong friends, and Holmes has been one of the mainstays in preserving Weatherall’s legacy (as I reported here). He was a passionate advocate for soul, funk and psychedelic rock in the 90s and remains a DJ who can join dots through decades and styles with ease. His soundtrack work for Steven Soderburgh and others is fantastically characterful, a world away from the Zimmerfied identikit screen moods that all too often dominate mainstream cinema.
And he’s still as prolific and enthusiastic as he’s ever been: his Blind on a Galloping Horse album with singer Raven Violet (who was also part of his band Unloved) is 75 minutes yet doesn’t have an ounce of fat on, and manages to be moody and psychedelic yet deliriously pop (in a Motown, Mary Chain, Goldfrapp sense) at the same time - and he produced the sadly missed Sinead O’Connor’s final album No Veteran Dies Alone too. But we hardly talked about any specifics of his output - this was about the undercurrents that feed into it all. Brian had photographed him in London, and we then had a Zoom call just before Christmas, both of us definitely in the festive spirit with me on the Welsh whisky and Holmes on the fine red wine and weed. Once again, he proved to be perfect for our mission of mapping out the contours of subculture - indeed he is a perfect sequel to the last interviewee Philip Hoare, with some recurring themes about familial inheritance and the importance of artefacts, and there are intersections not just with fellow Weatherall collaborator Andy Bell, but also Fabio & Grooverider, who Holmes recalls dancing to in their very earliest house DJ days. Anyway - no more spoilers, settle in and let the man himself take you on a trip…
So this is funny, I suddenly realised just before I called, that you may well have been the first person I ever interviewed for print - we did a phoner for a Brighton listings mag, with me frantically trying to scribble down notes because I didn't know how to record a phonecall.... that must have been about 1995, 96 I think, which really gave me vertigo. A lot of water under the bridge since then....
Wow, yeah there is. I remember so little about the 90s. For me, the 90s are all in my upstairs attic - literally - and every time I go up there to look for something, the memories come flooding back just through seeing a record cover. So if I'm going to start trying to remember the 90s maybe I should be up in the loft.
Right - and the tactile memories take you back as much as the visual, right? Leafing through a specific sequence of records next to each other, the texture of the sleeves, you'll be right back where you last played them?
Yeah and you'll remember your fingers on the faders - and the labels are fingermarked, or written on from where I was still learning to mix, like I'll have put "+2", "-3" on them to tell me what pitch to play them at! But wow it's a long time since I've done something like that.
So let's start with that mid-90s point maybe, if you can dredge up any memories! At that point, I knew you from the Sabres of Paradise connection, “De Niro”1, all those big dramatic techno type things you'd done - but by 95, 96 you'd already broken out of that, you'd be playing northern soul records in what were ostensibly house and techno clubs...
Yeah that was definitely a part of it. From my experience there's a lot - I don't know how many exactly but quite a surprising ratio - of people who weren't really into music until acid house. They had that epiphany, the lightbulb moment with the music and the drugs and everything, it was like a gift from God for a lot of people. I mean I was already into music, but it was all that for me, especially living in Belfast - the 80s were especially bleak here in terms of assassinations and bombs and just general not normal living, so when acid house came along it really was a bold from the blue. But like I say, I really was into music before, since I could talk. Coming from a large family I inherited a lot of music, I got a head start on a lot of things like punk, because I had older brothers and sisters who were in their late teens - I had a sister who lived in London and was a fashion designer, she went to art college in Manchester and moved to London, so she'd come home with a suitcase for her and a suitcase for the family, and the suitcase for the family was normally just full of culture really. NMEs, 7" singles, tapes, I was listening to the Sex Pistols when I was eight! That's what was in the house, that's what was available to me - I wasn't trying to be ahead of the game, it was just there, it was just a stroke of luck, it could very easily have been something else. Maggie brought me all sorts, she brought me home the front cover of the Daily Mirror with "THE FILTH AND THE FURY" - I've still got it in fact! So I just followed through being into whatever was there, and going into the 80s that was the mod scene and 60s soul, rhythm & blues, modern jazz - and I've got a very obsessive personality, so when I get into something I really get into it.
OK so going back to that eight year old - if your sister was bringing home articles, paraphernalia, around the culture, were you aware that there was more to the music than just the sound on a record?
Yeah I guess. Of course this was the pre-internet generation, so there was still a lot of mystery to everything - I was just fortunate to get a leg-up compared to a lot of other kids when it came to that information. But to me I've always reacted very emotionally to music, to the sound of it, so whatever it was in those early punk records that worked for me was working on that emotional level. At that stage, my house had already been bombed, already been raided by the British army, they ripped everything apart, people were shot dead in my street, I'd watched bombs go off in real time not knowing they were going to... so by that stage, eight years of age, I was pretty formed in terms of how that would affect the rest of your life. I'm only starting to figure this out now, in the last ten years, I'm only just starting to understand trauma and what came with that and how it manifested itself into my life. Right now, at 54, I'm the best I've ever been in my life, I can actually understand this stuff - but mostly you don't recognise these things, do you? They just manifest in really unusual ways that you can't figure out. And I definitely think those records doing something to me must have had something to do with what was actually happening just living where I was in Belfast and what was going on around me, overhearing conversations, my mum listening to police messages on medium wave radio, not being allowed out - which suited me because the VHS had just arrived in the early 80s and I just turned my obsession to watching a whole lot of cinema I shouldn't have been watching. But then that attachment to music as a very emotional thing carried on right through the mod thing, then in the mid 80s when I was just going to clubs that were playing everything from early house music - 1986, you'd have Farley Jackmaster Funk one minute then Public Image Limited then Gene Vincent, just a mad mix of music...
Were there particular spots for this?
Yeah, the Delta and the Plaza were the main places I used to go to. They were the two clubs that catered to the freaks of Belfast, if you in any way different - you didn't see any squares in there, you know. A lot of the straighter people would have been put off purely because it was so diverse, a real "we're all alone in this together" thing, and that was totally reflected in the music: one minute the DJ would be playing Nina Simone "My Baby Just Cares For Me" then the next it would be a King Kurt record or The Polecats to cater for the psychobilly, rockabilly element....
This era is fascinating to me, being just before my time: as a teenager of course acid house and rave seemed revolutionary - and they were - but I had no idea that just before there was this club culture across these islands where goth, rockabilly, b-boys and all these subcultures really intersected.
Absolutely. Going back through northern soul revival, through postpunk, through punk and all the branches that came off it through the 80s, I was still young enough - but I always looked older for my age, I was tall, so I got away with more, so I was going to clubs from when I was 15. The mod thing faded away a bit, then I was in the middle of all those things.
Were you a dancer as a mod?
Oh yeah. Big time. There was a club we used to go to on a Saturday afternoon in the Delta. In the evening it was just full of freaks, then in the afternoon it'd be a mod all-dayer. They re-ran all the Ready Steady Gos2 on TV around 1983, 84, so you were getting to relive those moments in Quadrophenia where Jimmy's sitting in his wet Levis watching, I think it's The Who on Ready Steady Go. And they'd have different dances every week on the show. I went in deep with the mod thing so I was obsessed with people like Guy Stevens, who'd been a really important figure in the whole culture of DJing3, and Peter Meaden4 and stuff - I knew who these people were just by reading.
There was very few outlets for this kind of information, but we always had really good record shops in Belfast, like Good Vibrations5 and Heroes & Villains and Makin' Tracks and Caroline Music - even the ones that weren't fully independent or alternative had a big section for, say, 60s soul, so you could get everything from Kent Records, everything under the Ace umbrella... And it was cheap, you now - for an album it was £3.49 - so I could afford one album from a paper round. I got £5 from my paper round. And I was always blagging money off my brothers and sisters, then Christmas, birthday - records! What was really interesting about acid house though - and we're actually making a documentary about this at the minute with some friends, Phil Kieran6, and my production company, and it's about how you could arguably say that club culture in general was the beginning of the peace process in Northern Ireland, because it was the only time when Catholics and Protestants got together, where the religion was music and the church was a club.
But they still had to navigate the city to get to the club, which was a bit tricky: sometimes it was a bit like the fucking Warriors. Getting to point A, having to pass the Shankhill Road skinheads to get to point B, then you're looking for police, ready to defuse anything - that was just part of our lives. But when acid house happened, and I think acid house did this around Europe, certainly around the United Kingdom and Ireland, it was where all the clans joined together into one gang. You had your little splinter groups, your actual crews, your Boys Owns and what have you, but that was just people part of that larger gang doing their own thing and creating their own little gang in the middle - in terms of writing fanzines, putting out records, putting on club nights. Loads of different little communities...
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