Chicane, the music of Nick Bracegirdle: hits, albums and cars
Chicane is the stage name of Nick Bracegirdle, the English producer and songwriter from Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, who made “Offshore” (1996), “Saltwater” (1999) and the 2000 UK number one “Don’t Give Up” with Bryan Adams. He has released ten studio albums from Far from the Maddening Crowds (1997) to Trampolines (2024) and still tours: in August 2026 he marked 30 years of Chicane with an orchestra at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The name comes from the tight bend on a racing circuit, his label Modena Records shares its name with Ferrari’s home city, and he has owned a Ferrari F355, Lotus Esprits and an Audi RS4 tuned past 600bhp.
Who is Chicane?
Chicane is a one-man project: Nicholas Bracegirdle, working with a changing cast of singers and session players. Billboard in July 2007 called him “the musician who essentially is Chicane”. As a composer he writes the music; he also handles the production and runs his own record label, Modena Records, and since about 2011 he has played DJ sets as well as live shows. His first alias is Disco Citizens, the name on his first chart record. The Electricity Club noted that he has also written songs for other artists, Cher and Paul Young among them (“I am a songwriter at heart,” he replied), and MusicRadar reported in July 2014 that he had written the theme for the remake of The Odd Couple starring Matthew Perry.
The Chicane sound, in his own description to Essentially Pop in November 2014, is “a widescreen approach to dance music”: melodic Balearic trance and chill-out, the music that Armada’s biography ties to “the Ibiza of sunsets and sunrises”. “Every piece I write I do so to provoke an emotional response,” he said; “anything less is just ‘lift music’.”
Early life in Chalfont St Giles
Bracegirdle was born in Chalfont St Giles, England, as The Electricity Club and Armada both record, and made his first hits in a spare room at his parents’ house there. He told MusicRadar the room was full of “crackly and out-of-tune hardware” and that he mixed down on his father’s old hi-fi amplifier; the magazine noted the yellow Ferrari parked in the front garden. His first single was mixed on a Boss BX16 mixer “with just treble and bass EQ”, he told The Electricity Club in May 2014.
Sound On Sound’s profile of May 2000 describes him as one of three brothers classically trained in guitar and piano, and a former design student whose teenage inspirations were Vince Clarke, Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis. Jarre, he told The Electricity Club, was “the first electronic music I heard”, and the cover of Thousand Mile Stare (2012) is a homage to a Jarre sleeve. His first record in the charts was “Right Here Right Now” as Disco Citizens, number 40 in July 1995 according to the Official Charts Company; speaking to SkiddMark in 2010, he called it “my single most defining point in music” because it took him “from bedroom composer” to a commercial success.
Other names, remixes and collaborations
As Disco Citizens, the alias he first shared with Leo Elstob, Bracegirdle had two more UK chart singles after “Right Here Right Now”: “Footprint” (34, April 1997) and “Nagasaki Badger” (56, July 1998), according to the Official Charts Company. Sound On Sound’s 2000 profile says his remix production by then covered everyone “from B*Witched to Bryan Adams”. Armada’s biography lists his collaborations with Bryan Adams, Tom Jones, Natasha Bedingfield, Adam Young, Cher, Kate Walsh, Christian Burns, Paul Aiden, Lisa Gerrard, the Maltese singer Joseph Aquilina and the Icelandic band Vigri; the Dutch trance producer Ferry Corsten worked with him on “One Thousand Suns”, a 2009 single that Armada later re-issued with Christian Burns singing.
Why is he called Chicane?
A chicane is the tight S-bend put into a racing circuit to slow the cars, and Billboard’s 2007 profile opens by saying the act is “named after one of the obstacles found on a motor racing circuit”. His label is Modena Records: Enzo Ferrari was born in Modena in 1898, and the house he was born in has been a museum since March 2012, as Classic & Sports Car reported at its opening. A 2010 SkiddMark report describes the label as named “after Ferrari’s hometown”.
Modena Records began in 1996, he said in the same 2010 interview, as “a vehicle to get myself noticed”: he pressed 1,000 records, released them on the label and was signed by a bigger company on the strength of them. By 2000 he ran the label and licensed his records to the independent Xtravaganza, Sound On Sound reported, and his records of the last decade have come out on Modena through the Dutch company Armada Music.
Offshore and Far from the Maddening Crowds
“Offshore” was the first Chicane hit, entering the UK chart in December 1996. The Official Charts Company records its UK peak as 14, in a run of eight weeks from 21 December 1996; a re-release with Power Circle’s vocal, “Offshore ’97”, reached 17 the following September. The Disco Citizens remix by Bracegirdle and Leo Elstob is the dance-floor version that made it a hit, according to the RacingSoundtracks.com artist notes.
Asked by The Electricity Club about a Tangerine Dream influence, Chicane said: “Not so much for ‘Offshore’, maybe ‘Sunstroke’”; “Offshore” was “more inspired by Don Henley’s ‘Boys of Summer’”, alike “in terms of mood and sentiment”. In a track-by-track guide to the first album for Hot Press, he called it a record about summer’s end, and the magazine counted it on 47 compilations.
“Sunstroke” followed in June 1997 and reached 21. The debut album, Far from the Maddening Crowds, entered the albums chart in November 1997 and peaked at 49. Hot Press printed his notes on each track: “Early” is about surfing first thing in the morning, “Lost You Somewhere” about a break-up, and the closer, “The Drive Home”, was written after a night at Mr C’s club The End in London, driving home across the Thames as the sun came up.
Saltwater and Clannad’s Theme from Harry’s Game
“Saltwater” (1999) is built on the melody of Clannad’s “Theme from Harry’s Game”, with new vocals for Chicane from Máire Brennan (Moya Brennan) of the Irish Celtic band Clannad, and it reached number 6 in the UK in June 1999 with 13 weeks on the chart. Chicane rejects the idea that he is a sampling act. “Moya Brennan from Clannad came and re-sang the core melody of ‘Theme From Harry’s Game’,” he told The Electricity Club in 2014. “But what was important, was we then wrote new melodies on top and gave the piece a whole new identity.”
Asked by SkiddMark in 2010 how “Saltwater” balanced art against commerce, he answered “50/50 … more of a personal record than anything.” A re-issue charted again at 43 in February 2003, and in April 2026 the original reached 77 on the Official Singles Sales Chart.
Don’t Give Up with Bryan Adams
“Don’t Give Up”, sung by Bryan Adams, reached number one in the UK Singles Chart in March 2000 and is Chicane’s only UK number one. Sound On Sound, which visited his home studio that month, records how it came about. Chicane had remixed Adams’s “Cloud No. 9” into the UK top ten, and the two were working on “bits and bobs for each other” in London; when other singers failed on the track, he asked Adams to try. The pair rewrote the verse lyrics, recorded the vocal at Mothership Studios, and Chicane then put it through Steinberg’s Orange Vocoder plug-in so that it would not sound like “a ‘danced-up’ rock record”. The Electricity Club recalled that Adams was not named as the singer when the record first went to DJs. In Europe, Billboard’s 2007 profile adds, it went top ten in Finland, Greece, Hungary, Norway and Spain and on Billboard’s European Top 100 Singles chart.
Both singles are on the second album, Behind the Sun, which he recorded on Cubase VST at home, through a budget Spirit mixer and a Technics hi-fi amplifier, Sound On Sound reported. It entered the albums chart in April 2000, reached number 10 and stayed 12 weeks.
Easy to Assemble, piracy and the Ferrari he sold
Chicane’s third album was never released. Chicane signed to WEA in 2002; in Billboard’s account, Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s buyout of Warner Music then took away the people who had signed him, he bought himself out of the contract, and Easy to Assemble leaked online before he could put it out himself. One Russian counterfeiter, Billboard reported, sold thousands of copies with a doctored sleeve taken from an earlier album. “Love on the Run”, with Peter Cunnah singing, reached 33 in March 2003.
The comeback was paid for with a car. “I’ve invested close to $400,000 so far, raised by selling my Ferrari and remortgaging the house,” he told Billboard in July 2007, adding that the band and crew cost $8,000 a show. Somersault followed on Modena on 23 July 2007.
Stoned in Love, Poppiholla and Giants
“Stoned in Love”, with Tom Jones singing, entered the UK chart in April 2006, peaked at number 7 in May (Billboard dates the peak) and stayed 17 weeks, the longest run of any Chicane single. The pair played it live on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, and Chicane told SkiddMark about the warm-up: Jones walked out and said “Let’s play something,” and the band jammed James Brown songs in front of the studio audience.
The Best of Chicane reached number 10 in October 2008, and “Poppiholla” reached 7 in July 2009. The Electricity Club noted that “Hiding All the Stars” (2009) reworked Gary Numan’s “Cars”. The fourth album, Giants, entered the chart in August 2010 at 35; its single “Middledistancerunner”, sung by Adam Young, reached 26 on the Official Dance Singles Chart and 18 on the Official Independent Singles Chart. Speaking to SkiddMark that year, Chicane said Giants marked a return to dance music after Somersault, which “didn’t connect with certain people because they couldn’t understand me leaping genres”.
Chicane albums from Thousand Mile Stare to Trampolines
Since 2012 Chicane has released an album every three years until 2021, then Nevertheless in 2023 and Trampolines in 2024, all on Modena with Armada Music. Thousand Mile Stare reached 37 in April 2012, The Sum of Its Parts (2015) reached 44, and Twenty, the twentieth-anniversary hits set, reached 40 in August 2016. The Place You Can’t Remember, the Place You Can’t Forget (2018) and Everything We Had to Leave Behind (2021) followed, both listed on Armada’s artist page.
Sources number those two albums differently: Armada’s newsroom, announcing the compilation The Greatest Misses in late 2023, called Nevertheless his ninth studio album, and Electronic Groove called Trampolines the ninth a year later. In March 2024 he released Far from the Maddening Crowds (Symphony Rehearsals), the debut album re-scored and conducted by Joe Duddell and played by the Hallé and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, according to Armada’s release of 1 March 2024.
Chicane studio albums
| Year | Album | UK peak | Weeks on chart |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1997 | Far from the Maddening Crowds | 49 | 2 |
| 2000 | Behind the Sun | 10 | 12 |
| 2007 | Somersault | – | – |
| 2010 | Giants | 35 | 2 |
| 2012 | Thousand Mile Stare | 37 | 2 |
| 2015 | The Sum of Its Parts | 44 | 1 |
| 2018 | The Place You Can’t Remember, the Place You Can’t Forget | – | – |
| 2021 | Everything We Had to Leave Behind | – | – |
| 2023 | Nevertheless | – | – |
| 2024 | Trampolines | – | – |
Chicane songs in the UK singles chart
In the UK singles charts Chicane has had 16 top 75 singles, 11 of them in the top 40 and four in the top ten, with one number one, according to the Official Charts Company.
| Chart entry | Single | Featuring | UK peak | Weeks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 1996 | Offshore | 14 | 8 | |
| Jun 1997 | Sunstroke | 21 | 4 | |
| Sep 1997 | Offshore ’97 | Power Circle | 17 | 4 |
| Dec 1997 | Lost You Somewhere | 35 | 3 | |
| Oct 1998 | Strong in Love | Mason | 32 | 2 |
| Jun 1999 | Saltwater | Máire Brennan | 6 | 13 |
| Mar 2000 | Don’t Give Up | Bryan Adams | 1 | 14 |
| Jul 2000 | No Ordinary Morning / Halcyon | 28 | 5 | |
| Oct 2000 | Autumn Tactics | 44 | 2 | |
| Feb 2003 | Saltwater (re-issue) | 43 | 2 | |
| Mar 2003 | Love on the Run | Peter Cunnah | 33 | 2 |
| Feb 2004 | Don’t Give Up 2004 | 43 | 2 | |
| Apr 2006 | Stoned in Love | Tom Jones | 7 | 17 |
| Sep 2008 | Bruised Water | Natasha Bedingfield | 42 | 4 |
| Jul 2009 | Poppiholla | 7 | 11 | |
| Oct 2009 | Hiding All the Stars | 42 | 2 |
Is Chicane a DJ or a live band?
Both, though for most of his career Chicane was a live band of rotating singers and players. In 2010, in his French studio, he told SkiddMark the band was “a knee-jerk reaction to the whole DJ sort of thing, there’s a huge amount of people that still think I’m a DJ.” By November 2014 he told Essentially Pop he had been DJing “constantly for the last 3 years or so … instead of playing live”, at Space and Café Mambo on the island of Ibiza and the Ministry of Sound in London.
Chicane tour dates
Chicane played Port Beach Brewery in Fremantle on 1 March 2026 and Kings Beach Tavern in Caloundra, Queensland, on 7 March, then, back in England, NX Newcastle on 25 April and Manchester Barton Aerodrome on 3 July, where his set included “Saltwater” and “Offshore”, according to setlist.fm’s record of his concerts.
The orchestral shows
Chicane played the Royal Festival Hall in London with an orchestra on 29 March 2025, and We Rave You reported in March 2026 that the show had sold out. He went back on 22 August 2026 with a full orchestra and live band for 30 years of Chicane. The setlist.fm record of that night opens with “Early” and “Offshore” and runs through “One Thousand Suns”, “Autumn Tactics”, “No Ordinary Morning” and “Halcyon” to the Disco Citizens mix of “Offshore”.
Sun:Sets
Sun:Sets is Chicane’s radio show and podcast, running since 2013. He described it to We Rave You in January 2018 as “one foot in dance anthems and the other in beautiful chillout music … a virtual journey from the beach to the dancefloor”, then drawing 10,000 downloads a day on more than 70 stations; that January he had taken the show live to Café del Mar in Sydney, Australia. Knights of the Turntable put the figure at more than 12,000 a day in November 2025, ahead of his DJ set at XOYO Birmingham on 29 November.
Chicane and cars: Ferrari, Lotus and Audi
MusicRadar’s 2014 profile places a yellow Ferrari outside the Chalfont St Giles house where he recorded “Offshore” and “Saltwater”; Billboard’s 2007 interview has him selling his Ferrari to fund Somersault; and he told Sound On Sound in 2000 that he checked mixes in the car he drove while making the album, whose acoustic shelf let the boot work “as the bass bin”, so that he “could really gauge bottom end on it”. The models come from a 2010 SkiddMark interview: a Ford Fiesta XR2 as his first car, then hot hatches and BMW M3s, a Ferrari F355 Berlinetta, “about six” Lotuses and an Audi RS4. Asked there whether he had wanted to race, he said he did not know whether he would have had “the 10th degree of talent to be successful in it”.
The Ferrari F355
The F355 Berlinetta was unveiled at Fiorano in May 1994. Ferrari’s own record of the car gives its mid-mounted 3,496cc V8, with five valves per cylinder, 380hp at 8,250rpm, a six-speed manual gearbox and a top speed of 295km/h. Chicane, who put it at “400bhp”, said it “liked to dance on anything other than a bone dry road”, and that after a late gig “you didn’t need music playing in that car!” Ferrari’s looks went wrong after the 355, he told SkiddMark, and he called the 458 Italia “the first really good looking Ferrari in a very long time”.
Lotus Esprits
Lotus made the Esprit from 1976 to 2004. The S4 of 1992 had a 2.2-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine of 264hp and a top speed of 165mph, and only 625 were built, according to RM Sotheby’s catalogue for a 1992 car. Chicane’s Esprits of the 1990s were tuned beyond that: the 2010 interview mentions 190mph cars, one of them half written off on a roundabout, and the old joke that Lotus stands for “Lots Of Trouble Usually Serious”.
The 600bhp Audi RS4
The first Audi RS4, the B5 Avant of 2000, was an estate built by quattro GmbH, with the S4’s 2.7-litre twin-turbo V6 reworked by Cosworth Technology to 381PS and 440Nm, Auto Bild recorded in December 2025. Chicane’s red B5, his everyday car in 2010, made more than 600bhp on hybrid turbochargers, a bespoke engine map, uprated intercoolers and a Milltek exhaust, with stiffer suspension and the later RS4’s brakes. He kept the standard clutch and seats (“I’m not going down the Recaro route”), got through three clutches a year, and said he would never sell it.
Chicane music in racing games
EA Sports used Chicane on the menus of F1 2001: “Sunstroke”, “The Drive Home” and a Chicane remix of Disco Citizens’ “Nagasaki Badger” play on the front end of the PC, PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions, and the same tracks returned in F1 2002, according to RacingSoundtracks.com. His remix of William Orbit’s “Purdy” is on the in-game radio of Test Drive Unlimited 2.
Questions
What is Chicane’s real name?
Chicane’s real name is Nick Bracegirdle (Nicholas), an English producer and songwriter born in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire. Chicane is his stage name, not a group, though he has toured with a live band.
What does the word chicane mean?
A chicane is a tight S-bend added to a road or racing circuit to slow traffic down. Billboard’s 2007 profile of Bracegirdle says the act is named after it.
Who sings on Saltwater by Chicane?
Máire Brennan of Clannad, also known as Moya Brennan, who re-sang the melody of Clannad’s “Theme from Harry’s Game” for the record. It reached number 6 in the UK in June 1999.
How many number ones has Chicane had?
One in the UK Singles Chart: “Don’t Give Up” with Bryan Adams, in March 2000. The Official Charts Company credits Chicane with four top ten singles and 11 top 40 singles in all.
Where does Chicane live?
In 2014 he told MusicRadar: “I’ve got a place in the Alps and a place up in Scotland, with a studio in each.” He grew up in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, where he made his first records at his parents’ house.
Is Chicane still touring?
Yes. In 2026 he played Fremantle and Caloundra in Australia in March, NX Newcastle in April, Manchester Barton Aerodrome in July and an orchestral show for 30 years of Chicane at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on 22 August, according to setlist.fm. His Sun:Sets radio show and podcast continues.
Sources
- Official Charts Company, Chicane: full Official Chart history, with the pages for Chicane featuring Bryan Adams, Máire Brennan, Tom Jones, Adam Young and Disco Citizens, read October 2026: every chart position, date and week count.
- Sound On Sound, “Nick Bracegirdle: recording Chicane’s ‘Don’t Give Up’”, May 2000: training and influences, Xtravaganza, the “Cloud No. 9” remix, the Adams vocal and vocoder, the home studio, the car used to check mixes.
- Billboard, “Chicane takes self-financed route back to stardom”, 13 July 2007: the name, Easy to Assemble and the piracy, the Ferrari sold to fund Somersault, band costs.
- SkiddMark, “Music and cars: SkiddMark meets Chicane”, 10 August 2010: the cars he owned, the RS4’s modifications, Modena Records, Disco Citizens, the live band.
- MusicRadar, “Chicane on switching to software and the state of trance”, 21 July 2014: the Chalfont St Giles studio, the yellow Ferrari, The Odd Couple, the Alps and Scotland.
- The Electricity Club, “Chicane interview”, 3 May 2014: birthplace, influences, “Offshore” and “The Boys of Summer”, the Boss mixer, “Saltwater”, “Don’t Give Up”, Cher and Paul Young, “Hiding All the Stars”.
- Essentially Pop, “Essentially Pop meets Chicane”, November 2014: the Chicane sound, DJing instead of live shows.
- Hot Press, “Special extended play”: track-by-track notes on Far from the Maddening Crowds, 47 compilations.
- Armada Music, Chicane artist biography, read October 2026; “Chicane reimagines debut album Far From The Maddening Crowds in symphonic adaptation”, 1 March 2024, with its newsroom item on The Greatest Misses; “One Thousand Suns”.
- Electronic Groove, “Listen to Chicane’s ninth studio album Trampolines”, November 2024.
- setlist.fm, Chicane concert setlists, read 28 October 2026: the 2025 and 2026 concerts and the Royal Festival Hall setlist.
- We Rave You, “Exclusive interview: Chicane discusses new Sun:Sets 2018 compilation album”, 18 January 2018; “Chicane celebrates 30 years with orchestral show at Royal Festival Hall”, March 2026.
- Knights of the Turntable, interview ahead of XOYO Birmingham, 28 November 2025: Sun:Sets downloads.
- Ferrari, F355 Berlinetta, read October 2026: launch, engine and performance figures.
- Auto Bild, Audi RS4 Avant B5 anniversary feature, 8 December 2025: quattro GmbH, Cosworth, 381PS and 440Nm.
- RM Sotheby’s, lot r0112, 1992 Lotus Esprit S4, Fort Lauderdale 2016: Esprit production years, S4 engine, speed and numbers built.
- Classic & Sports Car, “New museum opens at Ferrari’s birthplace”, March 2012: Enzo Ferrari’s birthplace in Modena.
- RacingSoundtracks.com, Chicane, read October 2026: the Disco Citizens remix of “Offshore”, F1 2001, F1 2002 and Test Drive Unlimited 2.