After the glamour of hanging out with Hollywood stars, top DJ and soundtrack composer, David Holmes, has made Belfast his permanent home. In his most revealing interview to date, he explains how the loss of his parents led to his latest, unusually personal album, and how becoming a parent himself has turned things around.

David Holmes, Belfast’s most successful and celebrated resident musical prodigy, is coming to terms with the questions that will inevitably arise from his latest work.

“I did think about the interviews that would come with this record. And I thought, am I gonna make things up or am I just gonna tell the truth? And I figured, there’s nothing bad about telling the truth.”

The Holy Pictures is that great rarity in dance music – a profoundly intimate, autobiographical album. Holmes has always been a good talker, and can rant on with evangelical zeal about his favourite subjects — music, technology, movies, architecture — but this time around he knows he’s going to have to dig deeper when he’s dealing with the press.

He has made a record that wears its heart on its sleeve, with everything — the lyrics, the vocals, the song titles and even the accompanying artwork — pertinent to the last 39 years of its maker’s life. It makes him a little antsy, but this album means so much to him that he’s decided it’s worth the discomfort of sharing intimate memories with journalists.

“I haven’t even had any of these chats with my brother and sisters yet and I’ve got nine of them!” he says, curling up in his seat. “They’re going to read my thoughts and feelings in the Belfast Telegraph!”

So we’re not in normal dance/DJ interview territory here but then David Holmes, though a staple on the British dance scene for nearly 20 years now, has always been something of an anomaly. Like his peers, he has a nice line in classic dancefloor fillers (Gritty Shaker, 69 Police) but he’s always been as interested in producing atmos-heavy soundscapes with melancholy, leftfield rock bands like Mogwai and Arab Strap.

Unlike the majority of his dance -music colleagues, Holmes has never been a slave to the rhythm – his internationally renowned DJ sets are as eclectic and surprising as they are effective. Perhaps because of his obsession with the cinema (his first album in 1995 was called This Film’s Crap, Let’s Slash The Seats, the third, 2000’s Bow Down To The Exit Signs, was an imaginary soundtrack for a never-made film), he has always been more interested in “making people feel, rather than just making them feel funky.”

He may have started life spinning vinyl at his now legendary club Sugar Sweet, based in Belfast’s Art College in the early 1990s and then compiling acid-house mixes for Radio 1’s Pete Tong show, but, rather unusually for a touring DJ, Holmes has made most of his money adding a little chutzpah to George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s strut with his sassy soundtracks for the Hollywood smash hit movies Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 12.

He’s lived a large part of his life at 100mph, working with U2, the Manic Street Preachers and Primal Scream, producing five albums and nine film soundtracks, including this year’s Cannes award-winner Hunger, about the death of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, and the upcoming Five Minutes of Heaven, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Troubles-based film starring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt.

He’s spent chunks of his life in London, New York and LA but now, four years after the birth of his daughter and a year after the death of his father, David Holmes has made Belfast his permanent home and has produced a haunting, elegiac album about his family, his friends and the city he grew up in.

“In theory, this album really started when I lost my mum 12 years ago,” Holmes explains as he hovers over the kettle (he drinks endless cups of tea) in the shiny, hi-tech kitchen of his very cool, and very modern, east Belfast home. “I took her death badly. I remember I came to hate Christmas after she died. On Christmas day I used to just go to her grave. I hated it right up until my daughter was born.

“My mum was so supportive of everything I did. She used to stay up till two in the morning listening to my mixes on Pete Tong and tell me how great they were. She would go to visit family in Chicago and bring boxes of hardcore dance music back for me — soul, rhythm and blues. She was just a great party woman, not through alcohol but through spirit.”

Holmes had been tinkering with ideas and sounds in his studio for years, but it was the death of his father from cancer last year which really saw the album take shape.

“Suddenly you realise that you’ve taken your parents for granted your whole life — just knowing they were there all the time,” he says. “It was such a shock. I was in the studio six weeks after my father died and I thought, right, I’m going to try to encapsulate these emotions and put them into the music. So that was the first time I’d consciously tackled those feelings and it was a brilliant experience because ... I just knew when it was right. And afterwards I realised that those tracks could never have existed if I hadn’t lost my parents.”

Some of the album’s most vivid moments are instrumental, such as the mournful, poetic Ballad Of Jack And Sarah.

But the other half of the album, including the current pounding single I Heard Wonders, is led by a softly straining voice, vaguely reminiscent of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid.

Having previously, in his own words, “rented a pop star” to write lyrics and sing over his music, Holmes realised that in this case, there was only man who could provide the words and the voice for these capsule testimonies — and it scared the life out of him.

“When I started singing I reminded myself of all the people who can’t really sing but sound really good,” he admits, grinning.

“And I thought, the most important thing is, you have to do it from your heart. I loved singing, even though I was terrified by it. It was so cathartic and liberating. It was like going to therapy.

“Every time I finished a song it was like drawing a line under it and walking away with a big smile on my face. There’s a lyric in there, ‘You’re crystallised in every drop of tear’.

“In a way I wanted to create a document that immortalised my parents, that I could keep forever.”

With both of his parents gone and half of his siblings in other countries, Holmes seems to be increasingly in love with Belfast and keen to bring his daughter up there. She has, he says, “made a man” of him and he is happier than he has ever been.

“I grew up here through really bad times,” he says. “The Ormeau Road in the Seventies was a really dark place but I even still really liked it back then. I always had really good friends, people I loved, and I still see those people. It’s always been an inspiring place for me.”

Although he denies it, he is regarded by many Belfast musicians, artists and writers as something of an inspiration or even, dare we say it, a figurehead for a new dawn in Belfast’s creative life.

He is involved in numerous local projects, whether loaning money to new talent — hothousing buildings, giving equipment to fledgling bands or working with local film-makers — he provides the music for Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s coming-of-age drama Cherry Bomb and is involved at an early stage with a script based on the life of Undertones mentor Terri Hooley, written by Belfast scribes Glenn Paterson and Colin Carberry.

It’s clear that Holmes, despite his access to the most glamorous of worlds, is now firmly ensconced in his old hometown.

“I love LA, but after three months there I want to see graffiti and have an Ulster Fry and go to the back bar in the Errigle and have a couple of whiskies with the regulars, the simple things in life,” he says dreamily. “That’s happiness to me.”