Grammy-winning Canadian pianist Chilly Gonzales went down a lot of wrong paths, taste-wise, in his life, he told Seán Rocks on Arena, but Enya was not one of them. Indeed, as if to prove this, Chilly’s new book is actually called Enya and is subtitled A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures. When Seán plays a little extract from the Donegal New Age queen's chart-topping Orinoco Flow, Chilly remembers the young Gonzales being struck by the unfamiliar sound:
"It didn't sound like anything that was out at the time. You know, the eighties was a time of music videos and Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Cyndi Lauper – very extroverted pop music. And there was something about that song. You couldn't really quite understand the words. It was very mysterious, it sounded a bit witchy, like there was some sorceress that was singing."
The song also impressed Chilly because it used a lot of modern technology, like synthesizers and multi-layered vocals, but still somehow managed to sound like folk music. That grabbed the 12-year-old Chilly and it still grabs him. But he wrestled for a long time with the fact that his contemporaries would deride his love of Enya as being uncool:
"It took me a while – maybe till my late 20s – till I could really own the fact that I loved music like Enya. That I loved reassuring, maternal female voices. That, in essence, I have the musical taste of a MILF."
A child just decides if he likes something or not, according to Chilly. It's a simple "goosebumps or not" response. As we get older, we decide we need to like some things to differentiate us from our siblings, or to align ourselves with our friends or, you know, the cool kids. And those decisions can lead to guilt:
"A guilty pleasure is when you say, 'I like it, but I know I shouldn't.' And too often people sort of have those categories, when in fact it should be as simple as saying, 'I like bananas or I don't. I like Enya or I don't.'"
In Chilly's case, he doesn't care for bananas, but he loves Enya. Artists, he believes, should strive to get to the instinctual place that children start from, where they don't know what they're going to draw until they start drawing. "That's where you want to be," Chilly says. But Enya's huge success is part of the reason the kids think she's uncool:
"We sort of mistrust commercially successful things because we think they're somehow desperate to be liked."
The irony of this, Chilly argues in his book, is that Enya's career is a punk rock career, as she someone who doesn't tour, doesn't do anything to please her record company and she does very little promotional work. So, forget your Kanyes and your Grimeses:
"Enya truly is that industry bad ass who doesn't give a blank about what anyone would think."
Chilly Gonzales loves Enya, and he doesn't care who knows it. You can hear Seán's full chat with Chilly – including how Enya and Jean-Claude Van Damme are connected – by going here. And you can get details of Chilly's seasonal show, A Very Chilly Christmas, featuring pals Jarvis Cocker and Feist, by going here.
Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures is published by Rough Trade Books.
Niall Ó Sioradáin