Chicane: "Early"

Nick Bracegirdle has been a returning comet in the dance genre since its rise throughout the ‘90s, unfairly eulogised as a cheese machine by the highfalutin buffs from Planet Stylus. Many thought he helped push the club phenomenon to the masses with his hook-laden hits—try finding a Ministry Of Sound mixtape that doesn’t credit him somewhere in the liners—and that his overnight dalliances with big-name vocalists was tantamount to common prostitution. With Bryan Adams, Tom Jones, Moya Brennan, and Keane all signing their crosses on his bedpost, Chicane helped lure a lot of people into the superclub arena who might otherwise have been content to home-listen. Add that to the fact that he once had to shelve an entire album of material due to his management taking a dim view of leaking, and you’ll understand why he’s keen to compile this delayed Best Of. If nothing else it’s probably just to convince his dear old folks that forsaking his classical music roots was the right thing to do.

The peak of Chicane’s chart success came probably with “Offshore ‘97,” and at that time I was a footloose and centre-parted school-leaver, hungry for a fresh disc to load into my newly acquired Mini System. This, then, was where the lights turned green for me: track one from the first Chicane LP, aglow with a plaintive contemplation that would go on to eclipse his club hits and continue to be used to this day in comedown montages galore. I can still remember my first real soak of “Early”: lying fully clothed and skull-fucked on my mate’s mum’s sofa, magma in my bladder and not a single clue as to were the toilet light switch might be. As I fished out my silver slimline Walkman and pressed play while huddling in the sleeping bag, this beautiful, luscious swoon began to smudge away the wreckage in my nervous system, working in sync with the grey halo slowly filtering its way past the curtains. It felt like Vangelis making coffee with Moby and convinced me more than anything that music would forever be my fry-up. So it seems fitting that Bracegirdle’s remastered the track to round off his freshly released epitaph, showing us that, as Billy Corgan would go on to state the same year, the end is the beginning is the end. Here’s to you, Mr. B., and all the dawn crawls to the station you helped a bleary spod to accomplish. I could never afford the ticket to Ibiza but I always left the house with full batteries.