“I signed her as an artist with no commercial potential at all. I was just a fan.”

“I heard the soundtrack to the Celts TV programme, which Enya had done, and I thought “what’s this magical music?”, and it was such an antidote to the, sort of, the day’s work, that every night I went home and played the soundtrack from The Celts. And then I met her in Ireland and she was telling me how she was signing to another record company, I went “no, no, no, no, you can’t do this, you must sign with us.” And I did it really just as a self-indulgence, that I thought this was beautiful music and wanted to be associated with it, there wasn’t really a kind of commercial edge to it at all.”

“As a Clannad fan of the old school, I’d heard about the Celts album which Enya had done. I’d loved it so much that I played it every night before I went to bed. So when Enya joined us, I just said ‘I’ve fallen asleep to your music every night for the past three weeks.’ I also explained that it was something coming out of Ireland that I’d be so much more interested in than the kind of thing we’d had before. As it turned out, Enya was free to negotiate a deal and so we jumped on it.”

“Sometimes the company is there to make money, sometimes it’s there to make music. Enya was the latter. I would have been a genius if I knew this was going to sell millions of records. I just wanted to be involved with this music.”

“Enya and her team record and we stay in touch until there is something for me to listen to. I then provide an outside view. She is a genius in the studio, comparable to somebody like Brian Wilson, but she and Nicky can be their own worst enemies at striving for personal best all the time. I guess that’s the price of perfectionism.”

“There’s something about Celtic mythology which is deep in the soul, and I just think that somehow she has tapped right into it.”

“She isn’t the sort of artist who needs development. She’s complete as she is. I find her mesmerising in the same way that The Cocteau Twins can be, but it’s no use explaining that to her and it would be foolish to make her listen to the competition. She’d only feel that what she was doing might be derivative.”

“You tend to behave yourself in her company. Make even a small joke about her songs and she gets angry. And she does have a peculiar effect on men. I’ve watched normally sane journalists waxing metaphysical when they meet her.”

“With Enya, we never expected any singles — although it became a kind of a standing joke between us. Every time I’d heard something new I’d say ‘Yeah, that’s wonderful — but where are the singles?’ As it happens I think the joke may have inspired them because I think we do have a potential hit in ‘Orinoco Flow’. But in Enya’s case, that’s a bonus.”

“It’s not that it’s a one-man crusade, everyone else in the company who listened to the Celts album thought it was beautiful and that we should go with the project. But I began to hear more and more material as the album progressed and when you get close to people in that way, you tend to want to oversee the whole project — to ensure that we wouldn’t stray from the original vision.”

“There’s a dedication there to music, which is above and beyond the call of duty. Their life is music. They [Enya, Roma and Nicky] are also very unified in their approach. They may argue among themselves, I don’t know, but they’re always of one mind when they present something to us. Enya is happy to be produced by Nicky, who’s happy that Roma write the lyrics. The three of them are happy to be creatively involved together. At the same time, they’ve allowed us to have a real say. It’s been a shared road in every way, with respect being given from both sides and received.”