Enya is pictured with her Grammy for Best New Age Album but it has to be accepted on her behalf after she missed her cue at the Los Angeles ceremony.

Grammy winner misses her cue to accept award

SHE is renowned as a recluse who shuns the celebrity limelight, so when Enya ventured to Los Angeles to accept her latest Grammy her fans tuned in en masse.

But when the time came for her to step up on stage on Sunday night, the Donegal-born singer was nowhere to be seen.

Showing her inexperience, on this her debut attendance at the Grammy ceremony, Enya apparently lingered too long on the red carpet and missed her cue.

With the winner a no-show, her gong for Best New Age Album had to be accepted on her behalf.

“I was actually on the red carpet,” she explained after the ceremony. “But the news was wonderful when I heard it.”

The notoriously private singer and composer won the award for her sixth studio album, ‘Amarantine’.

She had waited six years and travelled thousands of miles to collect the honour, but a red carpet gridlocked with celebrity traffic deprived her of her moment in the sun.

This latest victory at the 49th Grammy Awards, held in the Staples Centre in LA, brings her Grammy haul to four and cements her status as the doyenne of New Age music.

She has won the same category in the past for ‘Shepherd Moons’ in 1992, ‘The Memory of Trees’ in 1996 and ‘A Day Without Rain’ in 2001.

But with a long line of honours in her wake – she has notched up six World Music Awards, a Los Angeles Film Critics Association award and been nominated for a host of Oscars and Golden Globes – missing out on personally receiving this latest gong was perhaps not such a blow.

And while the Killiney-based chanteuse was in celebratory mood following her win, Ireland’s other two hopefuls, U2 and Snow Patrol, left empty-handed.

Irish Independent (Ireland): 13 February 2007