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Enya: The making of a myth
And if Enya walks away with the Best Original Song Award for her typically haunting track, May It Be, on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack it will be the crowning achievement of an already amazing career. For the woman who was last week confirmed as the biggest selling female artist in the world is a showbiz phenomenon - celebrated as a mystical Celtic princess whose otherworldly music captures the very essence of mythical Ireland. It is a reputation her reclusiveness and almost pathological aversion to personal publicity and interviews has only cemented over the years. So complete is her packaging and so rare are glimpses of the real woman behind the facade that it is difficult to remember there is one there at all. In fact, behind the fairy princess of the record covers, lies a tale of a sad family split and hard-nosed business tactics driven by a Svengali-like manager and his wife, who have been her only close confidants through two decades of cocooned isolation and - even odder in this day and age - apparent celibacy. For, although at 41 she still professes her desire to marry and have children, Enya has never been known to have a boyfriend. And - despite a personal fortune that runs into many millions - she eschews the showbiz high life to live comfortably but modestly in a Dublin suburb, albeit in a small castle. The carefully cultivated public image is of a hermit, content to be alone with her music and her genius. But running seamlessly throughout the entire Enya story - like a marble of fat through a steak - is the unseen but ubiquitous presence of her manager Nicky Ryan and his wife, Roma. Starting off in a disused shed in the Ryans' Dublin back garden and then graduating to a purpose-build studio, the triumvirate of Enya, Nicky and Roma has single-mindedly worked for 20 years to create the myth that is Enya. For most of that time, they have worked and lived together in the same house. Cut off from the outside world for days on end, the threesome lock themselves into the studio and lay down track after track to eventually produce the extraordinarily complex musical concoction that is an Enya number. And if Enya does win an Oscar no doubt they can expect to be thanked as she graciously, mouths in her soft Donegal accent some forgettable platitudes about those who have helped her on her way. She will certainly not indulge in any of the hysterical outbursts or over emotional outpourings for which the Oscar ceremony has become synonymous. Enya could wax lyrical about her hillbilly roots in Glenties, Co. Donegal, just like Sissy Spacek did years and years ago when she picked up her award for the Coalminer's Daughter. Or she could weep an ocean a la Gyneth Paltrow for her grandparents and her parents, Leo and Baba who raised a large family of nine children, some of whom achieved prominence in Clannad. Critics may scratch their heads in bewilderment about how Enya's carefully manufactured melodic music has managed to sell 60 million albums and allowed her outstrip Britney Spears and Dido as the best selling female artist in the world. But probably a bigger puzzle is how this enigmatic personality has managed to achieve world domination without ever revealing her identity. As pop's Svengali, Louis Walsh, says: "The biggest story in Irish music is Enya. Now she is unique. There she is, holed up in her castle, no family, doesn't have to see anybody, doesn't have to do live gigs and has massive sales. She sells millions and she doesn't say a word." But at the start of her career, in the 1980s and early '90s, Enya made the occasional concession to music industry imperatives. The obligatory round of interviews attended the launch of her early albums and of her bestselling album, Watermark, which contained her first number one hit, Orinoco Flow .She sat, feet primly tucked up beside her on the couch in some anonymous Dublin hotel and talked about her work. She was shy, unnervingly quietly spoken, serious-minded and had a habit of soulfully starring out the window. Over the years that shyness has been replaced by a growing confidence. So much so that she braved the Rosie O'Donnell chat show in America; acquitting herself as an agreeable if unforthcoming guest, her strange, almost non-existent public persona remained intact. One thing that was striking about the early interviews, however, was her sense of style and grooming. It marked her out from the long-haired raggle-taggle image of Clannad, the family band of which she was briefly a member. But then Enya, who was christened and is still called Eithne by her family, was always different. While Clannad was travelling the country in their custom-made white van, serving up folk music, Enya was receiving a formal musical education. When she left school in 1981, she was anxious to perform and joining Clannad seemed the obvious thing to do. But the novelty of live gigs soon wore off. Enya was forever treated as the younger sister, obliged to dance attendance on her older siblings rather than be taken seriously. When the rest of the band flew home after gigs she was reduced to the status of "roadie", ensuring with the road manager that the equipment would travel safely by land to its destination Also, the timing for her entry into Clannad was unfortunate. The band had started touring Europe seriously, but they were pretty exhausted. Maire, Enya's older sister, recalled in her revelatory biography, The Other Side of the Rainbow, that unhappy time. "It didn't help that I had a terrible temper that flared all too easily," she said. "Playing in a family band has many advantages, but it can often mean that when the going gets tough you take it out on each other with a liberty that only family can tolerate. I suppose it had always been difficult for Eithne. "It was hard for her to infiltrate our years as a tightknit nucleus. When she joined us she found it hard. She hadn't been part of the original song-collecting days and consequently didn't share our enthusiasm for the old songs. I suppose she always felt little more than a 'guest musician'. As sisters we had always been close and talked about everything together , so I was sorry when band business caused a strain." But there was someone else who noticed the tensions in the band, Enya's frustrated ambitions and became convinced that the group's dogsbody had the potential to become its brightest star. Nicky Ryan was Clannad's sound engineer and producer, taking over as manager when Fachtna O'Kelly left to run the Boomtown Rats. A gifted music producer, Nicky had known Enya since she was at boarding school and he believed that together they could achieve something greater than Clannad. There are conflicting reports about whether Nicky resigned or was fired as manager, but the upshot was that Enya to the surprise of her family, left with him." After two years, I felt more restless musically because they were arranging Irish traditional songs and writing their own songs, I wasn't writing at that time," she said later of the event. "So I knew I was going to move on at that stage. That's when I got talking to Nicky about the multi-vocal idea. He was curious to see what would evolve." To the band, her premature departure seemed like high treason and they were forced to find a replacement. But over time Enya's relationship with her close-knit family survived the split, although, she was never again to compromise her independent streak. As a teenage schoolgirl, Enya learned self-reliance early and it was a habit she was loathe to surrender. Her unhappy treatment in the band must have seemed like a regression to her childhood and she found it intolerable." I have always been a very independent person and I attribute that to having gone to boarding school," she said. "I was the fourth youngest in the family and up until then I had my sisters always answering for me. In boarding school I was the one making the decisions." This determination to go her own way again prevailed in her dealings with the music industry. When she signed to her record label she asked "to be left entirely alone". Over the years, she has constantly refused to play to any other timetable than her own. She works painstakingly, at her own pace on each album. And if her record company get exasperated by the five-year delay between albums, then it's an observation that is never relayed to the creative force that makes them multimillions. That creative force came together when Enya moved in with her mentor Nicky, his wife Roma and their young children to their modest house in Artane. The trinity's symbiotic relationship gave Enya so much security that over the years she has often declared that as a musical entity, Enya wouldn't exist without all three .Indeed, attempts made over the years to introduce outside musicians into the unit have often proved disappointing. There are other drawbacks to their collaborative methods with Robin Dickins, chairman of Warner Music, talking of their "creative isolation". Also, it can be difficult to reconcile the different aspects of the triumvirate, which despite its spiritual New Age base, is a vast moneymaking machine hawking undemanding, repetitive symphonies to the suburbs. The hardheaded business acumen of Nicky Ryan, navigating a musical industry that in the early '80s was still only in its infancy in Ireland, also makes Enya's soft breathy delivery seem phoney. Situated beside the Artane roundabout, the Ryans' home was indistinguishable from any grey suburban home except for one thing. In the garden he had transformed a scout shed into a functioning, if makeshift, studio. "I remember you had to walk through the house to get to the studio," recalled one visitor to the house. "The kids were young then so the place was strewn with toys but the set-up suited everyone. They'd have breakfast and Enya would head off to the studio. A pattern emerged that Enya would write the melody, Nicky and she did the arranging and Roma who was a poet in the early years, wrote the lyrics. "From the beginning, they were a very tight totally self-contained unit and they still are. They create and manage the act from beginning to end and they are actually very nice people. They are old style musicians and producers in the sense that they are good without making a song and dance about it." But the unorthodox domestic set-up gave rise to rumours of a ménage a trois of which it has to be said there was never a scintilla of evidence. Indeed, as soon as the money poured in from Orinoco Flow, they bought their separate homes: Enya purchasing a penthouse beside Fitzpatrick's Hotel in Killiney, the Ryans buying an imposing residence beside Ballybrack village. But two commissions - to write the music for the BBC series The Celts, and the score for David Puttnam's The Frog Prince - paved the way for the Enya explosion which ignited on her signing with Warner Records. However, awards, sales and success did nothing to dispel the mystery surrounding this enigmatic figure or to separate tales of reclusiveness and a hermit-like existence into myths or reality. Aside from splashing out E2.5m on Ayesha castle, a 19th century castle on over three acres of woodland overlooking Dublin Bay, Enya lives quietly, avoiding the inevitable trappings of rock star success. She shops largely unrecognised on Grafton Street and drives herself home on her frequent trips to Glenties, a rugged outpost of north-west Donegal. No-one knows what she does with her fortune other than buy paintings and travel widely. Her only other pursuit of which we are aware is looking out over the water, a past-time she began as a youngster surveying the Atlantic from her Donegal home and for which the turrets of her refurbished castle, complete with library, music room and atrium are ideally suited. But her unspoilt, solitary image although in keeping with the ethereal spiritual of her music creates unease even among her admirers. "She's always very polite but airy fairy. You don't get the feeling that there's much substance there, it's like you're dealing with a chimera and that can be annoying ", says one admirer to whom Enya after twenty years acquaintance is as elusive as ever. Despite her protests to the contrary she appears friendless and despite rumours about Spanish boyfriends , just is never seen on her rare public appearances with someone on her arm. And she is an oddity in the pop world, achieving fame and fortune without a hint of scandal, outrageous behaviour or hype. Indeed on a Late Late Show appearance some years she hinted that she considers such behaviour inappropriate when she talked about the importance of good manners and how she considered it unladylike to eat food on the street. While she's working she withdraws from all distractions and society, remaining cloistered in her studio . Her reclusiveness during these extended periods plus her spiritual leaning sand avowed love of staring out over water gives rise to intriguing speculations about her life. She says that when she is not working , she lives like most people but admits that her single minded focus has taken its toll on her relationships." When I'm working hard it's too much of a strain on the relationship. I find a man has to understand that if things are to work out. Men demand a lot of your attention and I can't give it to them. Sadly that's the way it is." At 41 she is still hopeful of having children. '"I feel like it's going to happen as far as children and stuff are concerned...I know it will happen someday." But in the absence of a family of her own, she still has the intensely loyal Ryans and her own Brennan family to fall back on. Nicky Ryan who is still protective of her gets angry with suggestions that she is a recluse. 'She does have a life", he said in exasperation during a recent interview. "All this bloody stuff about her being a recluse has been cultivated by the press and it annoys her a lot". Her sister Bridin has also sprang to her defence . "She's definitely not what I'd describe as a hermit. The media just haven't seen the other side of her". And that seems to be just the way Enya wants it. |
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Enya
- Magic & Melody |
