Chicane, aka Nick Bracegirdle, helped set the template for Balearic-inspired trance in the mid 90s with tracks such as Offshore, Sunstroke and Saltwater, in the process kickstarting a career that has now lasted three decades.
Far from trading off past glories, he has been busier than ever – in 2024, he released his tenth studio album, Trampolines, following that up with a ‘beatless’ version earlier this year. Elsewhere, his 2000 single Don’t Give Up, featuring Bryan Adams, was recently re-released by Armada, alongside a new version of Oxygen with Ben Nicky & Arty.
This past summer, Bracegirdle found himself at the centre of a social media storm over a Calvin Harris track, Blessings, which may or may not have ‘borrowed’ from Offshore – a charge Harris himself has vehemently rejected.
Chicane is also still active on the performance circuit, putting together an orchestral show at the Royal Festival Hall in London earlier this year, as well as reuniting his band for a headline show at Shepherds Bush Empire in September. He’s set to perform at XOYO Birmingham on Saturday 29 November, tickets for which can be purchased here.
909originals caught up with him.
Great to chat with you, Nick. Would you believe, the last time I saw you perform was at Creamfields back in 2000. So I wanted to start by asking: how does your live show today differ from Chicane back then?
There are predominantly three shows. There’s the original show, which is me with my band. We hadn’t done it for 10 years until we played in September at Shepherds Bush Empire.
To dispel any confusion: I didn’t start as a DJ. We toured with my band for 10–12 years. It was a behemoth of a thing – approximately 15 people on the road, 15 flights, 15 hotels. You start to get an idea how expensive it was, because we had a lot of people on stage – saxophones, percussion, two singers, drummers, two guitarists, keys, backline, and so on. I come from that world; I don’t come from the DJ world at all. I’m a producer.
That became too expensive, so I started DJing, which is the second type of Chicane ‘show’. I kind of came in halfway through the CDJ world. I was using Traktor, and I continue to use Traktor. Vinyl DJing was way before my time.
And then the third show, which is fairly recent, is the show we do with the orchestra. We did a one-off at the Royal Festival Hall, which went absolutely bananas, and a lot of people have asked for it to be done again, so we’re looking at that.
I reached out to people for questions ahead of this, and one of them mentioned that your music has always had an orchestral quality to it. It often feels greater than the sum of its parts – simple in its construction, but expansive and almost cinematic in how it lands.
Yeah, it’s a widescreen approach to house music.
That’s a nice way of putting it.
It’s kind of the way I used to look at it. And when we sat down with Joe Duddell, who’s my scorer and arranger, when we did the symphonic show in London, he commented that it was written in a very orchestral manner.
I was classically trained to a point, but I’m dyslexic and mildly autistic and couldn’t sight-read. But I’ve got perfect pitch. So it was no surprise to me that it was written that way.
And funnily enough, as I’ve progressed over the last 30 years, without realising it, I do a lot of writing in my head. If I ask you to think of the theme tune to EastEnders in your head, can you hear it without humming it?
I think I can, yeah.
Okay. So you can imagine when I say I work on things in my head, I tend to have chord progressions, riffs, melodies, a bit like I do physically on an arrangement.
I tend to pop them around in my head and put them together, and funnily enough, when I play it, it doesn’t jump about. It’s a bit like I’ve got an internal tape machine. It’s a bit weird.
It’s like planning a storyboard or a novel with Post-its scattered across a desk – only here, the Post-its are audible, floating in your mind, and you keep shifting them around?
It goes on all the time. I have a very busy head. There have been multiple times I’ve gotten out of bed, gone into a quiet room and hummed a melody into my phone. And then come the morning, go, ‘What the f**k is this?’
Did you see that Aphex Twin interview where he talked about making his most creative work right after waking up, when he’s still in that post-dream state? Is it similar for you – are your melodies clearer first thing in the morning?
No, not particularly. I’m one of those guys that will hear two notes on a TV programme or just a tiny thing, and it unfolds rapidly in my head. It does that very, very quickly. Sometimes I’ve done it in about 30 seconds, and I have to go off and write it down.
It’s a bit like when you have multiple thoughts at the same time – let’s say you’re driving along, you see a woman with a dog, and you’re thinking about the dog, ‘where does that dog live? does it understand Spanish?’ – and your head’s gone. It does that, but with music, and I have to sometimes try to rationalise it.
It’s a bit like a portal. I’ll hear something from anywhere – an old record, a new record, anything – and it’s like I go down this wormhole, and straight away I’m off somewhere. And that’s how things start for me.
One of the things I wanted to ask was about your workflow. Trampolines was your tenth album, right? I was wondering whether there’s anything consistent in your production approach across your work – or is what you just described essentially it? Have most of your albums, productions, and singles come together through that same process?
Yeah, I think some of the stuff very, very early on were almost happy accidents. I’m talking pre-Offshore. Funnily enough, that early time with the early kit was an extremely frustrating time – because you had what you wanted and then you got what you got. And there was also the time it took to get there, which meant you were kind of tired about it. The stuff we do now is just ridiculous. It’s crazy.
In terms of the realisation of the idea?
Yeah. You can really hammer something out quickly. You can take a beat and stretch it. I mean, we used to f**k about for days, trying to time-stretch a loop to get it here, and some drums, and then you spend all day doing it, listen to it and go, ‘No, that’s shit.’
But if you want to know what the process is and what hasn’t changed – what hasn’t changed is I write my music 100% for me.
You don’t have an audience in mind. It’s personal.
Yeah, it always has been, to be perfectly honest. And that’s why you get certain albums – if you look at my discography, some of the stuff like Come Tomorrow, they weren’t a reflection of what was going on at the time. I was doing songs, mixed in with dance, because that’s what I was interested in.
Rick Rubin said something really interesting not that long ago, and I completely concur – ‘When you’re writing, if you start writing records for radio, for anybody else, it’s commerce. If you’re writing for yourself, it’s art.’
So, in terms of the things that have been constant throughout my career: everything is melody-driven. The whole thing is about melody and mood. The genre can change, the tempo can change. And I write it for myself.
And as you said, that’s been consistent for 30-odd years, now. You mentioned ‘happy accidents’ when you were starting. Because obviously, when people think of Chicane, they think of Offshore, Saltwater, the singles that defined your sound at the start. I mean, was there an element of luck about it as well, Nick?
No. I can explain that to you very easily. It’s all wrapped up with who I am as a person, part and parcel. I am what you would call an ’11’ – there are very few things that I do ‘just a little bit’. I have a strong obsessional element to my character.
So the way the music happened was, when I realised I had it – it was always in me. It’s very hard to explain; it was just in me, right? And I knew I could do it as well. But what you don’t hear and what you didn’t see was the relentlessness of it.
I was gifted with some talent – some understanding of mood and melody – and I was absolutely ruthlessly relentless in the pursuit of it. I wrote another one, and another one, and another one, and another one. That is how it works.
That’s what I lecture people about – those who really want to make it in the industry and be a success: you have to have an unbelievably resilient dedication. Relentless is the word. When you get a bit of talent and a bit of relentlessness and put them together, eventually you’ll crack a nut, or crack it just a little bit.
In my case, it was a record called Right Here, Right Now [as the Disco Citizens, alongside Leo Elstob]. It was a tiny little crack, and I pushed it right open and climbed through that crack.
And I always say, when people ask me, ‘what’s your most favourite memory in the recording industry?’ It was the moment that record went Top 40. I was in my mum and dad’s dining room, sitting there crying. I was crying because it can be done. And I was this hard-to-teach, dyslexic, backward, quite shy, awkward boy who couldn’t talk to people very well. But I was absolutely driven to do this thing.
This is how the industry works. If you’re not that character, you don’t last. To be still here 30 years later, people go, ‘Oh, how’s that?’ That’s why. Because the relentlessness never stops.
When you talk about churning out music and just keeping at it, I start imagining an electronic Motown – that same idea of a signature sound you keep pushing out. And then I think about today’s scene, where plenty of artists make it big without much talent. So when you’re giving people advice from your 30 years in the business, do they actually listen?
As I used to say – although I haven’t said it for some time – was ‘How bad do you want it?’
This applies to any discipline in life. Unfortunately, we live in a culture where people think ‘there’s a hack for that’. But there is no hack for this. There is no hack to be a brilliant Formula One driver, golfer, tennis player, snooker player. They all require obsessional levels of dedication. And that obsession bleeds into other things.
I had a problem with alcohol because I never drank like a normal person. I would just drink an enormous amount and then fall over. I work with people in recovery and addiction here on the Isle of Wight. I’m just one of those people that does everything to the maximum.
I mean, that approach, in other walks of life and in other sectors and in sport, as you say – that intensity – often comes across as, you know, I won’t say aloofness…
Ego, or arrogance sometimes.
Would you define yourself like that?
I would say yeah. It will get misconstrued, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m normally right.
This is a business of belief and desire, and you get beaten down all the time – now even more, with today’s judgmental social media kind of stuff. You have to be in such a place where you are mentally resilient and strong.
You know, I had to deal with a terrible amount of shit with the Calvin Harris thing. I had a hundred thousand trolls descending upon me, you know. And you have to be in that place where you go, ‘no, no, no – you don’t want to f**k with me’. And that can carry you a long way.
Since you brought up the Calvin Harris episode, let’s talk about it. Do you have any regrets about setting off the reaction that followed, or did you feel it was something that simply had to be said, regardless of the consequences?
Yeah, but I didn’t start it. I started getting some strange messages from people, and I was like, ‘yeah, whatever’. It must have gone on for a week or two. And then I was like, what is this? What’s going on here? And I started getting people saying, ‘oh, I love your new track with Calvin’.
I do try and not get involved with social media as well – it’s just such a toxic place. But then I started getting these messages rom Chicane fans, saying, ‘I keep putting messages on [Calvin Harris’] Instagram and he keeps deleting them’. There was a lot of those. And at that point, ‘I was like, what’s going on here? What the f**k is this?’
Heard the thing and went, right, that’s interesting. I made a jovial comment along the lines of, ‘thanks very much for making me current again’. And then I posted something on his Instagram, which he deleted. And I was like, ‘what are you doing? What’s going on here?’
So here’s the problem – or here’s his problem – as musicians, the last thing you ever want is for your new baby, when you unveil it, for everyone to go, ‘That’s great. Sounds like blah, blah, blah’. That’s the f**king last thing you want. You’re like, ‘oh f**k, does it?’ And that’s the mess he found himself in.
Whether he was doing this intentionally or it wasn’t intentional, it doesn’t matter. You have a situation. That’s the problem that arose. It had f**k all to do with me. The problem arose because it got noticed really, really quickly.
And it got noticed really quickly for a number of reasons. Predominantly, there is no lineage of this sound or Balearic-type vibe in any of his music. This record arrives, it uses a very similar sound. It uses the same chord and bass progressions.
So I went and had a look at it, and I looked at his record, and I looked at my record, and then I realised that if you chop the backhand of the Offshore riff and move it one beat across, it’s exactly it. The problem is that the riff loops around with a similar sound, with exactly the same chord and bass modulations. That said, they’re not in the same key, which is telling.
This is like when you buy Rice Krispies from like Aldi and they’re called Rice Crunchies in exactly the same box.
So, at this point, I think he was rumbled. He goes on Danny Howard’s show on Radio One. And he’s got Clementine Douglas with him, who’s a tremendous singer and writer. But they didn’t start with any of that. What they started was, ‘Oh yeah, I came up with the idea for the riff a long time ago, a couple of years ago’. I was listening, and I was going, ‘why are they talking about how you made the riff’?
So then he goes onto MistaJam’s show on Capital Radio, and does the same thing, but this time, MistaJam says, ‘It sounds like Chicane…’
He said the thing that wasn’t supposed to be said.
And it was all a bit awkward. So then I did a video, and I said, ‘look, this is what it sounds like’. And he did exactly what he shouldn’t have done, really. He made this eight-minute rant. He called me a c**t, told me that he lives and breathes music, that nobody’s listened to my record in 20 years.
Across the music business, it was widely panned – there were so many professionals in the business going, ‘What the f**k is this guy doing?’
When everything started blowing up, was there any effort on either of your parts to step in and say, ‘This is ridiculous, what are you doing?’
I reached out to him through a mutual friend and said, ‘he needs to give me a call because this is about to get out of hand’.
So there hasn’t really been any resolution on this. Nick, for you, did it have any positive knock-on effect? Like, did it bring attention to Offshore as a seriously great record?
There was a lot of that. There were a lot of people that gave him a really, really hard time.
He went on at the end of the video to say that I had stolen Offshore from Tangerine Dream’s Love on a Real Train, which is bizarre. So that was even worse. So instead of just denying it, he tried to find a record that he thought I’d stolen it from.
What happened from that is we then got all these 12-year-old kids who don’t know shit, telling me that I stole it from someone in the first place. And it went on and on, and then it went into the tabloids, and it was all over the national press. And I’m thinking, what the f**k?
And I come back to what I said right at the beginning – it’s just like this: if your new record sounds like something else, you’re in trouble. Whether it was intentional or not, you have an issue.
The thing to do would be for him to turn around and say, ‘I’ve always been a fan of Nick’s music…’
I’ve made a point in my career of interpolating everything from Moya Brennan to God knows what. Dance music is all interpolation. So I can tell you, even this year, Jody Wisternoff approached me and said, ‘I’ve done a track which has got a riff a bit like Offshore’, played it to me, and I went, ‘Yeah, it is a little bit, but I don’t mind’.
Ben Hemsley did a record, which was a remix of Rui Da Silva’s Touch Me, and it was a lot like Offshore, and I said, ‘That’s okay, I’m good with that’. Ben Nicky did a version of Don’t Give Up. And everyone approached me about it, and blah, blah, blah.
If our arrogant friend had just gone, ‘Do you know what? Yeah, I love that record, it was a big record, it inspired me’, it would’ve gone a long way.
I laugh about it, because I guess forever and a day, when Blessings comes up, people will go, ‘Oh, you mean the Chicane track?’
Speaking of inspiration — for tracks like Offshore or Saltwater — you mentioned having melodies floating in your head. But thinking about the artists who influenced the development of the Chicane sound… was Calvin right to some extent in suggesting that Tangerine Dream played a part in there somewhere?
Potentially in its mood. But not in its construction at all.
The Tangerine Dream riff he refers to is a single-note thing, which does something very, very different. But it’s just a moody piece. I grew up on Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre and all that kind of thing.
I often talk about tracks like Boys of Summer, moody records – records which have that feeling about them. And if you listen to Offshore, it has that sadness in it. It has that melancholy thing.
I would have put it as a more optimistic track than melancholic.
I live on the Isle of Wight. My mum and dad were university lecturers and I had these six-week holidays here. And I live here now. It was written about being the last kid on the beach, and it was getting into September, and it was getting cooler. And, of course, we put this ridiculous spin on it that it was about Ibiza. It wasn’t – it was about the Isle of Wight.
Okay, I see what you mean now with the autumnal aspect. There’s a great Brazilian song, Águas de Março, which is about the end of summer. It’s one of those go-to samba tracks — poppy and upbeat, but with a touch of melancholy because summer is over.
Offshore was a down-tempo record; it wasn’t a dance record. The original record is a breakbeat kind of track. It was really a genre-changing record at the time.
It’s kind of funny because I can look back fondly at it now, but I never enjoyed it at the time because I was always driven, panicking to write the next thing, do you know what I mean?
Obviously, as well as making music for 30 years, you’ve had a fan base for 30 years. And with every artist, it’s always about moving forward – it’s always about the next thing, not dwelling on the past. You have people coming to see Chicane who want to hear everything up to around 2000, while at the same time you want to bring new fans into the fold. You don’t want to become a nostalgia act. So, Nick, how do you find that balance – pushing forward and appealing to new listeners while also maintaining the legacy that made Chicane what it is?
I overhauled all the classics recently, so they are all up to date sonically, and drum-wise.
What do you actually do when you do that? I’ve asked other artists about it — when they update or rework a track…
Well, actually, I’m terrible at it because – and I say this all the time – there are records that, even going back many years, remain quite fluid. have versions of stuff which I tweaked after they went out because I was still mucking about with it. I don’t know why that is, but they remain in a jelly format in my head.
When you build them, they’re built in a way to be taken apart if needed later, rather than being the ‘final version’, where touching it again would just disrupt the energy?
They’ve not been fossilised by time – although they were done on an Atari ST in 1996, and it was a nightmare. They’re still alive.
I have quite a problem wrenching the records away from myself. In my head they’re never done. They’re always gelatinous, always alive a little bit.
So I guess they’re only really done when there’s a deadline, like, ‘We need this today, Nick — that’s it.’
No, that’s just a version. So, for instance, I go back and fiddle around a little bit, and bring them out and go, ‘okay’. But it’s also very important when you update these things and muck about with them that you do them in the right way, that you haven’t lost the essence of where they were. What I mean by that is: suddenly not doing a grime version of Offshore, just to suit the current trend.
The most important part of building longevity into the records is never veering too far into any fly-by-night genre or whatever. I tend not to do that too much. I might have a little drum ’n’ bass flirt from time to time, or something I’m interested in, but those records, interestingly, still sound almost playable now – that shouldn’t be possible. You shouldn’t be able to play those records in a club 30 years later.
That they still resonate with the ‘sound of now’, or whatever?
And I don’t do that consciously. That’s how they are. They have a long gestation period, and they live for a bit. There were a couple of tracks on Trampolines which had been kicking around for a good couple of years.
You look at them, and it’s a bit like bodies in the morgue – you pull them out and slide them back in, pull the drawer out, slide them back in.
Except they might not be decomposing, I guess.
And now, the beauty of modern tech is, unless you’ve really f**ked it up, they’re still there, as they were. Before, everything ran live. The whole studio ran live. So you pressed play and hope to f**king hell that the SH-101 does what it’s supposed to.
I’ve got a big thing full of DATs, and I might pull out the Saltwater stuff. There’s probably about 10 Saltwater DATs, and there are about 20 takes, and they’re all different. It was such a different time.
It’s more organic songcraft, I guess, compared to the fully digital setup we have now, where everything’s already linked and synchronised.
Kind of, yeah. I guess it’s the same for people like Jody Wisternoff, Brian Transeau, Armin van Buuren, Ferry Corsten – we’re all the same kind of lineage. It’s a very different knowledge and wisdom that you have about production.
I tend to hate most things, really. There are very few things I like. I’m terrible, really.
There are some geniuses out there doing some great stuff, but also, one of our big problems right now is this confusion that we’ve designed through social media – that you’re confused about your place in life and where you are, because technology has allowed you to stand on the shoulders of giants in some fashion.
Let’s just take DJing, for example. Let’s not talk about production because production is far too in-depth to explain why. But in DJing, we have people who become very popular or trending – they’ve got 200,000, 500,000 followers on TikTok or whatever.
So the logic is: the promoters look at that and go, ‘okay, they’re doing great’. We’ll grab them and put them on, in the idea and hope that those followers will come to the show. And that’s fine, but it takes a long time to understand how really good DJing works.
There are very few times I can think of that I’ve gone into a gig where I had what I thought I wanted to play from beginning to end. In fact, I don’t think that’s ever happened.
Because I’ll play something and go, ‘shit, that’s not working tonight. We’ll mix out of that’. But also, the ability to watch the crowd, look at the crowd, and take them on enough of a journey that comes up, goes down, comes up, goes down, crescendos at the right moments, is key.
Not starting off your show at 142 BPM, flat out – it’s like, ‘where do you think you’re gonna go with that?’ You’ve left no space.
It seems to me there’s a generation of DJs that never realised that music was fast back in the past, and it wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
I grew up in rave culture, where it was going at that speed, you know? I remember Dream Frequency, The Prodigy tracks, The Ragga Twins – all that stuff. It was going like the f**king clappers, hardcore and all that.
The problem when it’s going so fast is you can’t get detail or groove into anything. There’s no room for feel and shuffle.
But the thing is, DJing is a trade. And it’s learned. I found myself in Poland last weekend, playing a show for 3,000 lunatics in this club. They wanted me to play for an hour. I was like, ‘that’s a long way to go for that’. But within that hour, they wanted to hear those big records. And it’s really, really difficult to do that without it turning into Stars on 45.
But what I mean by that is, you can’t just go in there and play wall-to-wall bangers. This is what the juvenile DJ mind thinks: ‘I’m going to go in there, I’m going to play Café del Mar, some Ferry Corsten, blah blah blah’, and within three anthems back-to-back, you’re like, ‘f**king hell’. Everything has to breathe.
You’ve got to find the space to do it. I played Café del Mar once this year, the Three-In-One mix. Because you can only play it once in a blue moon, and you can only play it at the right moment, when there’s enough space and you’ve left enough room for that record to happen, because it’s such an enormous sounding thing. These are all things that this kind of ‘there’s a hack for that’ bedroom DJ doesn’t understand.
You apply the same principles to production – I hear some records out there and think, ‘it sounds like cheap shit that was done in four hours on a laptop’. It won’t have any longevity. Right now, there’s an emphasis on cheap-sounding records – it’s weird. It’s almost become trendy to be shit.
Going back to the question about reaching a new audience — you want to attract new Chicane fans, without alienating those that got you to where you are today.
It’s just a careful balance. It’s a bit like Oasis back in the day. I’m not sure which album it was – maybe the second album – they’d finished it but it wasn’t really out yet, and they started touring it.
It had some of the biggest records the world had ever seen, but no one had ever heard them. But they’d been living with them for a good while and knew how big they were.
No one has ever heard Saltwater, Don’t Give Up, Offshore, as many times as I have. No one’s ever going to catch up with me. And every now and again, I play them, and I ‘hear’ them.
Right – as in, you hear what they meant to you, you get it?
I get it, yeah.
So, I guess with that in mind, that’s what you aim to instill — a timeless appreciation of the music. You want both new and longtime fans to come along for the journey. You’re not just playing songs; you’re sharing little emotional time capsules, in a way.
Yeah, I guess so. You bring the new stuff in gently, a little bit. Trouble is, it depends. Like I said earlier, it depends on which rabbit hole I decide to go down. It might not fit with everyone, but I have to just do it for me. It’s a very selfish process.
The key ingredient, though, is that I don’t think I’ve ever gone down a rabbit hole where there’s no emotive, melodic engagement within the records – even when I’ve done kind of that rock-hybrid thing with Come Tomorrow.
But if you listen to a record like Come Tomorrow, the songcraft is really good. I went back and listened to it the other day – it’s completely out of context for what was going on, had no relevance at all – but I went, ‘oh, I hear that, I hear that.’
What was making me tick was strong – how it worked and how it went. I wasn’t really interested in the genre I was ‘supposed’ to be paying attention to.
Yeah. And as you said earlier, your ultimate motivation is for yourself. They say the same about writers — you write for yourself. If someone reads it, great, but the work starts with you.
You do, yeah. And if you don’t, you are commerce. It’s exactly what Rick Rubin said. You start writing for the audience, and then it’s a different thing.
I can remember doing various things – one of them was a project for Matthew Perry, of all people. I had some very funny conversations with him. He wanted me to do the theme tune for his remake of The Odd Couple, which was a f**king diabolical film.
How did that come about?
My manager literally rang me and said, “You’re going to get a strange phone call tonight.” I went, “Okay.” He said, “Chandler from Friends is calling you.” I went, “What?” And he went, “Oh, but he’s a super fan.” So I ended up doing the theme tune for The Odd Couple.
But that was commerce, and it was a nightmare. I ended up trying to appease ten different people. It was music by committee – a f**king shit fight. That’s not who I am. I don’t like getting involved in that.
I’m doing records at 125 BPM at the minute. I am not getting involved in that faster and faster, ‘where are we going’ type of thing. It just sounds cheap.
In the same way that Mark Kinchen [MK] stayed true to the house thing he was doing – he went right out of fashion and then came back in.
He plays stadiums now. It’s wild.
No one could have given a f**k about that guy a while back. Am I wrong?
No, you’re absolutely right. When he started to come back, it was like, ‘Oh, it’s great that MK’s making music again.’ But really, he never went anywhere.
It’s exactly the same Masters at Work and Danny Tenaglia and all those kinds of guys, you know? They keep at it.
I pride myself on trying to be a fairly honest individual in life. I’ve been through my struggles – I had an alcohol problem, which I had to get on top of. Life’s been brilliant since. I haven’t drunk for years, but I understand an awful lot from going through that process and journey.
That’s all about being an honest individual and understanding that we have our failings. I try to be honest about the music, and I just dislike the disposable era we find ourselves in.
The commoditisation of music.
It’s just naff, you know? And I also think we are in a terrible place with how we’re selling music – the streaming era. People will look back at this and I reckon they’ll describe it as the ‘confused era.’
I read somewhere that it wasn’t until around 1922, or the mid-’20s, that the last remnants of the previous century were finally washed away. We’re kind of in that same transition into a new century, and we don’t really know what it means, what it does, or how to navigate it. As you said, we’re in a confused era.
People are confused about their place as well. What I mean by that is that people are confusing followers with actual substance – believing they’re a brand, a DJ, a producer, or even a film director. There’s this weird ideology that followers represent a currency of substantiality. And you come a terrible cropper because it doesn’t really work like that.
There were a lot of people getting upset about that ‘Ibiza Boss’ character. That’s a great example of nothing being celebrated – it’s just hilarious.
But it’s funny how quickly it all comes and goes, you know? It used to last maybe a month, then two weeks, then a week.
We are moving at a ludicrous speed. Everything is going too quick. There are a lot of things wrong with social media, in terms of the dopamine it releases in the brain, because we’re not flicking through pictures of wildlife or a nice landscape – it’s someone being blown up, someone getting their tits out, or some ridiculous nonsense.
Every post is competing. Every post is judgmental. It’s like this deranged serotonin trip into dopamine land.
Like the bit in Clockwork Orange where he’s got his eyes kind of like open and he’s forced to watch these crazy videos in quick succession.
Do you remember Blipverts from Max Headroom? The original film had Blipverts – these one-second adverts that just blew your f**king head up because there was too much impact, you know? We are literally in the Blipvert era, and it’s weird. But it’ll probably blow itself out.
At some point, someone will just go, ‘What the f**k is this about?‘
It’s good to see a lot of clubs putting stickers on phones. I read a really interesting post today about how the DJ was traditionally just a machine who played these things. And somewhere, I don’t know where the line changed, a generation went from watching bands to watching DJs in the same way they watched bands.
So we had this peculiar splinter off into the performance DJ, who was uncomfortable just standing there – ’cause there’s f**k all that we do, really, for quite a long time, unless you’re Masters at Work and you’re four‑deck mixing or doing some crazy scratch stuff. So, now we have a climate where people are expecting a level of performance from the DJ – looking like he’s flying a 747, which is hilarious. You see it all the time.
We’ve grown this weird thing where we watch the DJ as if we were watching a performing band or artist. And that’s not what they are.
To wrap things up: what else is on the agenda for you?
It’s been absolutely mental since the summer. We’re finishing off in Birmingham, then I’m going to have a couple of weeks off. I’m in the Philippines, then we’re going down to Australia for a tour in February. It’s the 30th year, which is really trippy stuff.
Are you planning a 30th‑anniversary retrospective or anything like that? Like you mentioned, re-releasing some of those unfinished jams — maybe a kind of Chicane Anthology?
I’ve probably got a new album in me. I’ve got nine tracks at the minute in a semi‑stage. I did an album for the 20th where we rehashed a lot of stuff. I don’t really want to do that again, and I think it’s becoming quite f**king tired, really – constantly getting new mixes.
I’m more interested in doing the symphonic show again – but it will be the first album, then a bit of an interval, then the second album. So it’ll be Far From the Maddening Crowds and Behind the Sun. And Behind the Sun will probably be with the band as well.
When I did the first show this year – I’ll just share this with you, because this is what you should never f**king do, right? Never DJ live with an orchestra.
And what I mean by that is, we performed the album from start to finish exactly as it plays, and it was incredible. It was genuinely moving for a lot of people, and for me as well. There were moments where we just looked at each other in disbelief at how powerful it felt.
After that, I DJed for about an hour. And because of how these shows work, we’d never had the chance to properly rehearse. We did everything on the day – a four- or five-hour rehearsal and soundcheck. We didn’t have the budget to hire a space and run it properly.
But that’s when we discovered something important. I played tracks like Saltwater and the other anthems that are on that first album, and I played them live. And then I realised something: whether it’s Pete Tong with his orchestra or those Gatecrasher orchestral shows, everything is pre-set. No one is actually DJing live. And there’s a reason.
We’re used to using pitch control when we DJ. You can’t use pitch control with an orchestra, so I had to use Traktor to lock the tracks to the original pitch with real-time time-stretching.
The real issue was this: the orchestra counts bars. And I told Joe, my arranger, ‘my transitions won’t be the same each time. I’ll loop the drums on the outro of Saltwater and bring something else in. It’s never identical.’ He looked at me, I looked at him, and we both realised the problem at the same time.
What we had to do – on the fly, was after I finished a mix, I’d look at him and give him a countdown, ‘Three, two, one, go.’ That was the cue. The orchestra had to stop on that beat. There was no way to restart if we missed it.
So there were moments of silence where the orchestra was waiting for my signal. They had all the tracks and the written scores, so they knew the order. But the transitions were live, and honestly, it was chaotic. If I missed the cue, the entire track was lost. You can’t bring an orchestra back in.
In rehearsals we messed it up more than a few times. On the night, I just had to trust that I knew where I was in each mix and hope the cue landed at the right moment.
And you managed to get away with it on the night?
We got away with it on the night. And I remember thinking, on the last track, ‘f**king hell’. So yeah—here’s a tip, kids: don’t do that.
So the orchestral shows you do now are a lot more predictable.
It’s just how they work. My first experience working with an orchestra a long time ago was very interesting. I said to them, ‘Oh, can you just play that a little bit like this?’ And they looked at me blankly. If it’s not written down in front of them, they ain’t going to play it.
Yeah, I guess you didn’t see Mozart changing the notes halfway through. Thanks Nick, it was great to talk to you – and thank you for your honesty. It’s great to speak to someone who actually gives a sh*t, as opposed to just selling themselves, you know?
It’s just who I am.
Chicane plays at XOYO Birmingham on 29 November – tickets are available here. Keep up to date with his latest releases and tour dates here.
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