With the moody music for The Celts already under her belt, Enya and her co-conspirators Nicky Ryan and Roma Ryan had established the blueprint. But the release, in 1988, of the finely wrought and hugely impressive Watermark lifted the Donegal chanteuse into the stratosphere. The debut single from the album, the haunting pop masterpiece ‘Orinoco Flow’, which had many a hardened rock critic reaching for the superlatives, steadily climbed to number one in the UK – and thence to a similar exalted position in charts all over the world. It represented the definitive arrival of a truly remarkable Irish phenomenon. Since then Enya and the Ryan team have scaled the heights again and again. She has sold an astonishing 60 million albums over the past 14 years. With the success of ‘Only Time’, a track that captured the imagination of audiences in the US in the wake of the September 11th massacre, her latest album A Day Without Rain is on course to become her most successful to date.

Hot Press: 27 Jun 2002