About Broadcast Music, Inc.

BMI collects license fees on behalf of songwriters, composers and music publishers and distributes them as royalties to those members whose works have been performed.

Join BMI

Get paid when your music gets played.

I am a…

Get a BMI License

Enter your business type below.

Examples: Bars & Restaurants, Retail, Local Government Entities (LGE), Venue, TV, Radio

New Media

Examples: Website, Mobile

Close Broadcast Music, Inc. collects license fees from businesses that use music, which it distributes as royalties to songwriters, composers & music publishers.
 

March 28, 2002

MusicWorld, Film-TV, Musicworld, Hitmaker

David Holmes

Photo


David Holmes's first album of trip-hop dance music was entitled This Film's Crap, Let's Slash the Seats, inspired by a friend's comment while watching a bad movie in a seedy Amsterdam hotel room. This might give a timorous film producer seeking to hire someone to score their own movie a moments pause. Fortunately, Jersey Films had no such qualms, and Holmes's soundtrack for Steven Soderberg's Out of Sight - an infectious brew updating '70s soul - paved the way for his latest collaboration with Soderberg, the equally funky score for the all-star Rat Pack remake Ocean's 11, music The New York Times' Elvis Mitchell praised for its "popping freshness."

"The goal was to be Vegas but not obviously Vegas," explains the Belfast-born Holmes, in Los Angeles for his film's premiere, adding that he turned down no fewer than 60 film-scoring jobs after Out of Sight. He's signed on to do Confessions of a Dangerous Mind next, making three of his five movie jobs George Clooney vehicles (his music is the equivalent of Clooney's self-assured swagger). He also scored Buffalo Soldiers, the buzz-heavy film at this year's Toronto Film Festival.

Holmes - who numbers Herbie Hancock's Death Wish Quincy Jones's $ and Lalo Schifrin's Bullitt among the scores that most influenced him, as well as obscure French and Russian film compositions - says, "Everything I've done through music has been influenced by cinema."

He even includes dialogue from the films on the soundtrack releases, a practice inspired from his albums Let's Get Killed and Bow Down to the Exit Sign; the former included snatches of random dialogue, the latter featured lines scripted by a friend of Holmes.

"When I make records and add dialogue, they become cinematic," Holmes notes. "It lets people see the film, but through music." He adds, however, that he's been-there/done-that and has will move in a different direction on future albums.

Written by David Kronke

In this story: Herbie Hancock, David Holmes, Lalo Schifrin


Most Recent