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David Holmes likes to joke that he lives just outside Hollywood. He waits to be asked about his LA pad, then feigns surprise. “No, Holywood – one L,” he says. “Holywood, County Down.”

In fact, the 39-year-old lives in his beloved Belfast, where he grew up the youngest of 10, began his career as a club DJ at 15 and has been instrumental in the musical side of the city’s post-Troubles transformation. The Hollywood quip comes from his later unlikely transition from techno musician to top-end soundtrack composer.

Having scored Steven Soderbergh’s stylish crime caper Out of Sight, Holmes hit pay dirt with the same director’s remake of Ocean’s Eleven. He went on to soundtrack both Ocean’s sequels, as well as Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46. This year, he has composed the music for Hunger, the debut feature from the Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen, which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, and for the current iPhone advert, directed by Fight Club’s David Fincher and voiced by Robert Downey Jr.

Suggest for a second that Holmes is a soundtrack celebrity, however, and the scruffy, unshaven redhead practically growls. “Bullshit!” he spits, in a soft, Irish burr, reaching for his beer. “I’ve never been part of any celebrity scene. One hint of that and my wife would tell me to stop being silly. I love going to LA, but after two months on a movie, I can’t get out of there fast enough.”

His affection for home has never been more pronounced. For his last three film soundtracks, he rejected Hollywood in favour of low-budget projects shot in Northern Ireland. Eighteen months ago, he set up a film production company in Belfast with two childhood friends and recently completed the score for its first full-length feature, due next year. Most importantly for the musician who still spends weekends DJing locally, September sees the release of his first solo album in eight years. The Holy Pictures takes in space rock, rhythmic psychedelia, synth-pop and even a piano ballad; borrows from the Jesus and Mary Chain, early Brian Eno and Daniel Johnson; has Holmes on vocals alongside Suicide’s Martin Rev; and charts his relationship with his home town from the acid house era to today.

A lengthy labour of love, it grew gradually from snippets of lyrics he began writing after his mother’s death 12 years ago. The push to complete the album came when his father, a former bookie, passed away last May. “The songs were a means to channel my emotions,” he says. “I was devastated when my dad died, although I was closer to my mum. Losing them both, becoming a father myself and realising I was now head of my own family was a lot to cope with. There are incredibly melancholy moments on the album, but I didn’t want anyone reaching for the razor blades. Mostly, it’s a positive record about love, my life in Belfast and the people who continue to inspire me.

“My mother was an amazing woman, full of energy. In her late thirties, she started a Beatles tribute band on pots and pans and got all the kids in the neighbourhood to join in. She would sit up until 3am listening to my mixes on the radio — usually hours of relentless acid house — and tell me how great they were. It was her spirit I wanted on there, her unfailing optimism at a time when there wasn’t much to be optimistic about.”

Holmes had initially intended to hire guest singers, but so personal were the lyrics, he attempted most of the vocals himself. “I had never sung in my life — except very badly around the house,” he laughs. “I didn’t take lessons. I thought if I sing from my heart, that’s what matters. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. I don’t sound too bad.”

On the gritty, claustrophobic title track in particular, he captures the atmosphere of the Belfast of old, but that’s not quite how he remembers it. “I enjoyed Belfast in the dark days,” he insists. “The Troubles gave it an edge. I wouldn’t change the way it is now, but it wasn’t until the Troubles finished I realised what an incredible era we had been through. I used to run clubs in the art college, and the sense of escapism was electric. Kids from different religions came together to listen to music and get off their heads.”

On nights he wasn’t allowed out, Holmes would soak up soundtracks to the likes of Quadrophenia, Once upon a Time in America and Midnight Cowboy. When he began incorporating snippets from the scores into his sets, friends suggested he do so on record. His debut single was De Niro. His first album, This Film’s Crap, Let’s Slash the Seats inadvertently launched his soundtrack career when Lynda La Plante asked to use several songs on a TV drama.

He had yet to hire an agent when asked to score the Irish-set Resurrection Man. Then Hollywood came calling. “Having a huge budget is a luxury,” he admits. “Once on Ocean’s, I had Elvis’s harmonica player, Alice Coltrane’s double bass player, Sly Stone’s alto sax player and Frank Zappa’s trombonist and trumpet player in the same room. But most I’m offered, I turn down.”

Instead, Holmes uses Hollywood to fund his work on films like Hunger, McQueen’s unflinching biopic of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. “I went after that job, but when I read the script I told the producer it didn’t need music. He said, ‘Okay, that’s interesting. We should talk.’ In the end, we used just one instrument — a hurdy-gurdy. By a mile it’s the best film I’ve worked on.”

He recently completed the score for Five Minutes of Heaven, a drama set in 1970s Northern Ireland, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose film Downfall was Oscar-nominated. His next will be for Good Vibrations, about music in Belfast, the first feature from Canderblinks Film, the company he set up with his friends. “The three of us used to talk about the music and movies we’d make when we grew up. Usually, those conversations come to nothing, but we’ve made it happen. That’s the main prize right there. F*** Hollywood.”

The Holy Pictures is released on Sept 8; Hunger is released on Oct 31

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