Northern Ireland has so much history you could pulp the Brazilian rain forest and you'd still only have enough paper to write the preface. You could choose from the Nationalist, Republican, Unionist, Loyalist, Marxist, Revisionist or Anti-Revisionist stories. And, as I heard at a party in Belfast for the opening of DJ David Holmes's cafe, there is now the chemical theory of history. A smartly dressed, long-haired Celtic web designer explained that the downturn in violence had coincided with the emergence of a rave and club culture in Belfast.
David Holmes was initially a techno DJ, but he has re-invented himself. His last album, Let's Get Killed, was glowingly received. Holmes's soundtrack for Lynda LaPlante's Supply And Demand led to him scoring the film Resurrection Man, and Danny DeVito has hired him for his next film project, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Out Of Sight. And the extraordinary Arab Strap, Delakota and Mogwai remixes of his single Don't Die Just Yet are not just CD fillers. He is prolific.
The music press, BBC Radio and MTV were all in Belfast for the opening of David Holmes's new Mogwai cafe. The trip, in the hands of Holmes, promised to be as much an education as a PR exercise. Holmes welcomed us at Aldergrove airport, and we were taken sightseeing through the outskirts of Belfast. The coach snaked down into the Falls Road and the Shankill Road and we crawled past the loyalist Red Hand murals and the republican equivalent.
Belfast at the moment seems like any other British provincial city, with occasional bursts of shamrocks. The oddest places are the in-between streets, the roads that straddle the ethnic divide. Birthright has produced a clear division of labour, so that one side of the street has shops with names such as Hamilton and Kilfedder, while the other is strictly Donnelly and McMahon. And then you have Belfast's contribution to 20th-century urban architecture, the flat-capped derelict observation posts on the roofs of flats that peer over the city. But the sectarianism of the Falls and the Shankill pales in comparison to the truly eccentric number of Protestant churches ringing the city, devoted to multiple sects and denominations. If theological hair-splitting is a sign of being part of the elect, then Northern Ireland is a split-ends heaven.
When the coach finally arrives at the hotel, Holmes gives me a helmet and we hop on a Vespa to head off to the cafe, near Queen's University on University Street. Holmes's friends and partners in the cafe, Jay and Barbara Ann, busily prepare for the opening.
I mention the guided tour of Belfast hot-spots to him. "Belfast really has to be given a chance. And that's why I decided to bring people through the Shankill and the Falls. They can see what's going on in one respect, but they see this other side that's flowering. If people could see that it's probably less dangerous walking down the Falls Road on a Saturday night than it is walking through Elephant and Castle . . . You have head cases in every city. A lot of people have this preconceived notion that it's like Beirut."
Later on that evening we ate in a Spanish/Mexican restaurant nearby. Except for the lack of combat casuals it could have been Islington, proving that money can translate any political difference into a desire for better Tapas.
Holmes's cafe is a collaboration with friends. "I could live anywhere in the world. I have my friends here. Because it's a vibe. If I went to London I'd just be another DJ/producer being influenced by the same things as everyone else. Every city I visit around the globe has 20 of these cafes where young people can go and congregate and talk about art, music, sex."
His tapes will provide the mood music. "You know the biggest irony about Amsterdam is? It's got this amazing weed, these brilliant coffee shops - then you go in and all you hear is Bob Marley, God rest his soul."
Northern Ireland has a tradition of producing spiky, punky pop, from Stiff Little Fingers to The Undertones and Ash. Was there anything about his music that is unique to Belfast? "I had this real advantage growing up where I had eight or nine brothers and sisters who were in bands, DJ-ing and stuff. I had one sister who was a DJ and she used to go out with Rory Gallagher back in the 1970s. I had all these hand-me-downs. When I was six or seven, I had a Sex Pistols collection."
Holmes first became known a few years back for his Detroit techno in clubs such as Voodoo and the Orbit. The sequencer patterns have given way to the softer and warmer funk of Let's Get Killed, which is much closer to his roots. "I've been DJing since I was 15, playing soul and rare groove and really obscure American R&B from the 1960s. In Belfast we used to have what we called `rhythm and soul' clubs. We were into the whole Mod scene, but not in the Quadrophenia sense."
Both his albums, This Film's Crap Let's Slash The Seats and Let's Get Killed, gesture towards the cinematic. Holmes says Let's Get Killed aims to have the inclusiveness of the epic, with its range of grooves and rhythms. But there is also a sort of ambient pressure, a low-level terror. Monologues drawn from a random anthropology of New York life punctuate each track. "All the people are people I met. They are not sampled from TV, or the radio, or movies. We interviewed them while we were tripping. People were melting in front of us. The reason there is a Serge Gainsbourg cover, Don't Die Just Yet, on the album, is because we used to sit in Washington Square Park listening to tapes, and that was the tune."
Holmes smiles: "A cop came over and asked us `Are you smoking marijuana?' - and we said, `We're just over from Ireland for a few days.' So he said, `Have one on me, buddy.' Because we're Irish they turn a blind eye."
What does seem Irish about Let's Get Killed is the way in which Holmes transforms instrumental grooves into an opportunity for storytelling. The music becomes a soundtrack to the lives of characters such as street-astrologer Rodney Yates: "You judicial genius, I'd advise you to become a lawyer because you are going to have to represent yourself some day."
If there is a dramatic edge to Holmes's work, it is at odds with his Belfast insouciance. I ask him again about the Troubles. "Growing up, you have this attitude: `There's a bomb scare. Hang on and I'll drink my pint.' Belfast has always been like that. You didn't give a fuck. There are some areas you go into and if you were seen hanging round with someone of the opposite religion you'd be in trouble. But one thing I would say about the club scene in Northern Ireland which politicians fail to recognise is that it's the one thing where religion doesn't matter."
The idea that music transcends all boundaries, even if it is true in this case, is also a romantic notion. From an Irish perspective, what's different about Holmes and his friends is that they are not sleepwalking through what Joyce called the nightmare of history. They are creating positive choices in a world that is ostensibly antagonistic. The sleeve notes to Let's Get Killed offer one prescription for a route out of the past: "One version of a choice - either see the world as a vast cacophony of voices, indifferently hostile, or yourself at the centre with the vast responsibility of interpreting your own fate."