‘Whenever I went to see my grandma,” says Hannah Peel, “we always had the same conversation. She would ask me who I was and what I did, and I would say that I was a musician, that I played the violin – that she’d actually given me her younger brother’s violin. I would tell her how she and my grandad used to sing together. And she would always just smile, nod, and say, ‘Mmm, oh, I love you.’ She had no idea at all what I was talking about.”
Peel, a musician known for her work with the Magnetic North and a variety of ambitious solo projects, had been watching her grandmother slowly slip into dementia for years. From the early befuddlement of lost objects, items she thought stolen, to the run of confusions and contradictions that led to her eventual diagnosis, it was a deeply distressing experience for the family.
Then one Christmas, having read about the positive effect music can have on people with dementia, Peel wondered if she could connect with her gran through some of her most familiar songs. “I said to my dad: ‘Why don’t we sing to her and see what happens?’ And from a place of not knowing us at all – from giving her Christmas gifts and her saying, ‘Oh thank you, what’s this for?’ – she completely woke up and started singing the lyrics. She was aware of what was going on around her. As we left she said: ‘Happy Christmas!’”
Peel found the effect so overwhelming she began to write a song about her gran. That one song led to her new album, Awake But Almost Dreaming – in part an exploration of dementia, but also a celebration of her gran’s life and of the wonders of the human body. As well as referencing Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, it features contributions from producer Liam Howe and Hayden Thorpe of Wild Beasts, a cover of Cars in the Garden by the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan, and recordings of those circuitous conversations she had with her gran.
“All the tracks lead us into her world and wondering where she is,” says Peel. “And so that became the record, starting with the youthfulness and slipping into that world and the rabbit hole of dementia.”
There are 850,000 people with dementia in the UK. By 2025, this number is expected to pass one million. It is now the leading cause of death among British women. While a cure has yet to be found, much has been discovered about the effect that music can have on sufferers, even when the disease is at its most advanced stage. As the neurologist Oliver Sacks said: “Music evokes emotion, and with it memory. It brings back the feeling of life when nothing else can.”
Several viral videos have captured this feeling of life: the sheer delight music can bring. Recently, there was the joyous footage of Ted McDermott, a 79-year-old former Butlins Redcoat who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s three years ago, being driven around by his son as he sang along to Quando Quando Quando. There has also been a raft of projects – from English Touring Opera’s Turtle Song, a songwriting programme for sufferers and their companions, to Arts4Dementia and Music for Life, a long-running scheme at London’s Wigmore Hall that brings together musicians, dementia patients and carers.
Because music requires little mental processing, relying instead upon the motor centre of the brain, pairing it with everyday activities can enable patients to develop a rhythm that helps recall the memory of that activity, and improve cognitive ability. Researchers have found that playing music from someone’s young adult years, from around 18 to 25, is likely to provoke the strongest response. As patients enter late-stage dementia, music from their childhood may prove more powerful.
Peel found this to be the case with her gran. “She used to sing around the house when she was younger,” she says. “Apparently, she would sing WB Yeats’s poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree. My father couldn’t remember the melody, but he used to recite the words and say, ‘Mum, can you remember them?’ and she would just recite them. Later, she wouldn’t get that far – but if it was Christmas carols, she would sing along.”
The theory is that the auditory system is the first part of the brain to fully function, meaning that from 16 weeks old you are receptive to music. “So anything you hear early on is soaked into that part,” says Peel, “and that’s the last part of the brain to be affected by dementia. They think, because it’s right deep down in the centre, it’s the last thing to be touched.”
Peel wanted to understand the science behind the disease, and turned to Selina Wray, a fellow Barnsley native who works at the Institute of Neurology at University College London, researching dementia for Alzheimer’s Research UK. “I grow cells in the laboratory from patients who have dementia and those who don’t – and look at what it is that leads them to die,” says Wray. “We’re trying to understand the very earliest things that go wrong, with the idea that if we can discover what those things are, we can stop them happening.”
For Peel, visiting Wray’s laboratory and seeing dementia cells up close was a chance to find unexpected beauty in the disease. “They take on these complex structures,” says Wray. “And because every cell is made up of thousands of proteins and quite often we’re interested in one or two, we use colours to label them. They look a little like fireworks.” Peel recalls: “As soon as I saw them I thought, ‘It’s like the stars! It’s like astronomy!’ It felt like an awakening – how it all connected, in a scientific and artistic and musical way.”
Peel is about to perform Awake But Always Dreaming at a special event at St Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch, east London. “It feels really fitting,” she says, “because it’s not the perfect church – it’s got flaking walls and the pews are a bit rocky. It just feels as if it encompasses everything the mind is.” The evening has been put together with Alzheimer’s Research UK, and there will be readings by the actor Christopher Ecclestone, film and poetry from Lavinia Greenlaw, and new work from the director and choreographer Shelly Love, all tackling dementia. The idea is to show “there is hope and it can be beautiful, because you can still find connections with people through music and poetry”.
This Christmas, Peel’s music also appears as part of Alzheimer’s Research UK’s charity appeal, animated by Aardman and narrated by Stephen Fry. She has also launched Memory Tapes, a project inviting participants to make playlists of their lives. “I think of it like a time capsule,” she says, “so that, if ever I fall into dementia, there would be a mixtape of the songs that connect for my children and grandchildren.”
Peel’s gran died earlier this year, at the age of 98, seven years after her diagnosis. “We had to stay with her for nearly two weeks, essentially just watching her breathe. And then she faded away.” Best to remember her as Joyce Peel, the “beautiful soprano” who moved to County Armagh to marry an organist, who loved music and her family and singing in the choir her husband conducted.
The experience has changed Peel’s relationship with the people she loves. She calls home more often, does not take her parents’ presence for granted. Do they, I wonder, discuss the music that binds them? “My mum doesn’t like my music and never has quite got it,” she says frankly. “She’s very direct. I’d do a gig and after she’d say: ‘It’s not my cup of tea.’”
Peel gave her the new album with some trepidation – not even telling her that it had been inspired by her gran. “She rang after about three weeks and said, ‘I’ve been listening to your record every single day.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my god, what’s she going to say?’ But she said, ‘I cannot stop listening to it – it’s the most beautiful thing you have ever done. Every day I discover something more in it.’ She’d never said anything like that before. That’s a kind of breakthrough.”
• Awake But Always Dreaming is out now on My Own Pleasure. Hannah Peel plays St Leonard’s Church, London, on 24 November, in conjunction with Alzheimer’s Research UK and The Vine Collective.
Awakenings: Hannah Peel on how she harnessed music"s power to cut through dementia
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