If you were in Ibiza any time in the late 90s, the chances are that you would have spent part of your evening/morning dancing to music produced by Nick Bracegirdle – aka Chicane. Songs like Offshore, Sunstroke and Saltwater beamed out from every beach bar, sound system and hotel balcony, a blissedout soundtrack of Balearic beats and addictive hooks.
These were high times for dance music. The superclubs were doing brisk business, musicmaking technology was becoming affordable and trance was about to conquer Europe. For the next five or six years, the charts were packed with quality tunes like Three Drives On A Vinyl’s Greece 2000, Energy 52’s Café del Mar and Binary Finary’s 1998. And Offshore, of course! Some people even began talking of a third summer of love. Hyperbole? Exaggeration? The drugs talking? Possibly. But few people would disagree that trance music left an indelible impression on dance music. As Ferry Corsten pointed out when we interviewed him in 2020, “You pick any big festival from the last 20 years and you’ll find a trance stage”.
“The curse for any artist who has a modicum of success with a particular genre is that you are expected to stay within the confines of that genre for the rest of your life,” says Bracegirdle with a wry smile. “And I get that. I understand it. If I play a live show, people want to hear Offshore. But this is my 26th year as a working musician. I’ve done rock, pop, ambient. My last album, Everything We Had To Leave Behind [released last year], was number one on the dance charts in 18 countries.
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