Chicane: 'It was completely Jean-Michel Jarre's fault that I'm doing this'
As an internationally renowned producer and DJ of 30 years standing, Nick Bracegirdle – also known as Chicane – has played his fair share of all-night clubbing events in Ibiza, Australia and the USA.
Recently, however, he’s noticed a growing trend for day parties – of which his upcoming set at the Electric Studios in Sheffield is one.
“I think probably 50 per cent of the stuff I’ve done this year has been like that,” he tells The Yorkshire Post.
The earlier start time does mean, however, that he’s had to modify his setlist. “It’s interesting because some things – as in tracks – work well and some things don’t work as well (particularly) end-of-the-night stuff. If you’re playing a festival, everyone’s going for it and it’s a bit different – dropping Saltwater that always works whatever environment you’re in – but there’s certain things I’ve played where I’ve gone, that’s just too heavy for them, it’s not going to work.”
One track that has been going down well, though, is a taster for his new album. “I’ve been playing it for about a year, it’s an overhaul of The Waterboys’ Whole of the Moon, which is completely left of field but it’s been absolutely massive, it’s been my biggest record,” he says. “(Fellow DJ) Tall Paul badgered me to give him a copy the other day, and a couple of other DJs heard me play it and said, ‘what’s that?’ – then you know you’re onto something.
“I didn’t really think it was something that I was going to release as a single, I made my own personal bootleg thing, but Mike Scott loves it – and he’s notorious about things like that. We may well be releasing it next year, which is great.”
As well as DJ sets, 55-year-old Bracegirdle has also been marking his 30 years in music with a couple of full-band gigs. The first was at the Royal Festival Hall in London and featured an orchestra – “So that cooked my biscuit,” he says – while the second is due to take place at the Albert Hall in Manchester on November 28. He recalls that for the first 10 years that he performed, he had a regular group but it “became too expensive” to fly them around the world. “It was 15 or 16 people, so it was 15 or 16 flights, blah blah, blah, so I slipped into DJ-ing,” he says. “But it’s always great (to play a show) and I do actually have pretty much my original band with me. They’re all jobbing musicians, I’m just really fortunate that they’re all available.”
It was the work of Jean-Michel Jarre who swayed him towards electronic music when he was growing up. Yet he was amused that at a recent show in Edinburgh the promoter had taken his rider request for a photo of the French synthesiser pioneer literally. “There he was on the wall as I walked in,” he chuckles. “I said, you do realise that’s a joke.”
Others he liked included Vangelis, composer of the soundtrack to Chariots of Fire, and Vince Clarke. “All that synth-y stuff,” he says. “Although I did early piano and classical lessons, I was dyslexic so sight reading was a problem, but it was this that I heard and I thought, wow, what’s that? I do my radio show (Sunsets) every week and I still play Oxygene and Equinox and I make a point of saying, you do realise this was made in the ’70s, I have no idea how he did this. Yeah, it was completely the Frenchman’s fault (that I’m doing this).”
He also had a taste for Simple Minds and Tears For Fears. “We don’t have it as much now in our musical culture, melody-driven songs,” he notes. “My grounding in the ’80s was definitely Tears For Fears, Simple Minds, Duran Duran – and when you look at those songs from the ’80s they were all melody. It was the thing that wove those things together. I really miss that. Every so often I still watch a John Hughes movie, (such as) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or The Breakfast Club with Simple Minds and it starts with the drums, I love all that, it really is part of my DNA, it’s so ingrained in me.”
Offshore launched Chicane into the dance music scene in 1997 and Bracegirdle would become the UK’s leading exponent of trance music. Among his famous collaborations are Saltwater, with the late Maire Brennan of Clannad, and Don’t Give Up featuring Bryan Adams. Rather than simply grooves, he always erred towards songwriting. “You can teach engineering, you can teach music production, writing is a different thing,” he says. “It’s hard to articulate, but I came out of the box with it...I knew I could do that somehow. It’s a weird thing but it was already in me.”
Brennan re-recorded her vocal from the Clannad hit Theme From Harry’s Game for Saltwater. Bracegirdle says that he revisited the stacked harmonies from both tracks for his recent performance at the Royal Festival Hall. It was, he says, “a nosebleed” to recreate. “Theme From Harry’s Game was a six-part harmony – it was Enya, Maire and her brothers and a synclavier keyboard and some other stuff that went in to make that. As well as my regular singers, we (made) that stack and performed the whole thing.
“I listened to Harry’s Game and I listened to Saltwater and I was thinking, why the hell have I put this deliberately in a different key? Then I remembered the Harry’s Game key is very low, I don’t know if it was the relative pitch between the male and female vocals and where they sat, but I can remember the sketch I sent to Maire was the sample of Harry’s Game with the rough Saltwater thing but it was very dirgy so we shifted it up three or four times for the original. I did some new toplines and bits. Looking back at it, I guess the sketch worked but, as I said in the social media post after Maire passed, how grateful I was to have been allowed to work with those guys and cannibalise their song. When I did that, I didn’t want to feel as though I was passing myself off as them. Involving the original writers is critical in something like that.”
Don’t Give Up knocked Madonna off number one in the UK in 2000. Bracegirdle recalls they had become “chummy” after he remixed Adams’s song Cloud Number Nine. “I think Bryan was in a place in his career where a bit of a reinvention was welcome,” he says of their collaboration. “I already had Don’t Give Up done and it just came to me this interesting left of field thing, so I got him to sing it and I put quite a lot of vocoder on it and disguised it and then we decided not to tell anybody it was him because then there would’ve been some negativity attached to it. I remember there was some particularly p***ed-off coolheads that we playing it and then they found out it was him.”
Chicane plays at Electric Studios, Sheffield on November 7.