My experience of the magic that Matthew Seager experienced at Berkeley Court stretches back even further (A moment that changed me: I played My Way to people with dementia. The effect – the sheer clarity – was like magic, 20 September). Alongside my main business of singing at weddings at parties, I have been singing in care homes for the past 16 years. I shared Matthew’s trepidation approaching my early gigs, and one of the first ones nearly put me off for good when, in a lull between songs, one resident screamed out from the back of the room: “Dear God, make it stop!”
But I persisted, and I am so glad that I did. I have shared Matthew’s sense of wonder at witnessing the effect that music has on people. Not quite on the scale that he saw at that care home in 2013, but so many individual moments. I’ve seen people who staff knew to be almost mute on a day-to-day basis joining in with every word of every song I’ve sung. I’ve seen the scowling and argumentative turn from railing against having to sit and listen to me perform to smiling and singing loudly in an instant, as if a switch had been thrown. In fact I see this at pretty much every gig I do, and I’ve done hundreds over the years.
