22 October 1988
If Bono in his quieter moments must feel like an unloved prophet in his own country, not to mention a ‘pox’ in his home city, how must his Killiney neighbour Enya feel? She is estimated to have sold a colossal 80 million albums in total, despite the commercial disadvantage of never having toured. At the time of writing, the official YouTube video for U2’s ‘Desire’ has had around 15 million views; the video for Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’, also a 1988 UK and Irish number one and posted on YouTube in the same year as ‘Desire’, has had over 31 million views. By any measure, Enya has racked up serious figures and built a solid global fanbase.
Yet there isn’t anything like a commensurate level of public affection in Ireland for Enya’s music, if any at all. A June 2021 article (behind paywall) by Steve Cummins in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times gives a fairly accurate representation of our lack of “cultural celebration” in Ireland for Enya, plus our tone of surprise whenever her music is sampled or cited as an influence by artists from outside Ireland. There’s good cause for this. Maybe, like Carrolls Irish Gifts, we’re not its target audience in the first place. Enya’s music generally strikes us as the sort of wishy-washy, vaguely ‘Celtic’ new age mysticism that the rest of the world may lap up as exotic but which we consider naff, touristy or stage-Irish.
In that light, I was surprised, on listening attentively to ‘Orinoco Flow’ for the first time in years, to find it a lot more solid and robust than I had remembered: its glassy pizzicatos, resounding piano chords and booming timpani drums aren’t so wishy-washy after all. Also, its travelogue of seas, ports and islands is quite global and evocative (“From Bali to Cali, far beneath the Coral Sea”) with no Irish locations. And her “sail away, sail away, sail away” is a catchy chorus. Already, though, Enya’s multi-tracked vocals are shrouded in echo: a bad omen for the dense mists that settle on her work and never lift.
So, relative to the future years of incessant new age drizzle, ‘Orinoco Flow’ has some character and oomph. As for any further listening or re-evaluation of the Enya oeuvre, I’ll take a rain check.
