I have never known how to listen to music, but I envy those like the Marsh family who find solace in it

I saw some big bands as a teenager but mostly I was cruising around trying to find someone to snog, writes Jenny Eclair

The Marsh family went viral with a lockdown ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ (Marsh Family/YouTube)

Families divide into two camps, the musical and the non-musical. Musical families have pianos with open lids in their homes, their kids go to school (back in the day) carrying strangely shaped instrument cases and, during global pandemics, they sing in close harmony en famille and upload the results to the Internet.

Hail the Marsh family from Kent who last week clocked up their third lockdown viral hit with a cleverly re-worded and timely Bonnie Tyler number.

Sadly, however, some of us come from non-musical families. Neither of my parents played an instrument, we talked, we fought, and we laughed a lot, but I can’t remember ever listening to music together, never mind singing. Now and again my father would throw his head back and warble Perry Como’s “Tulips and Heather” but none of us kids had a musical party piece, we weren’t that kind of a family.

My parent’s vinyl collection was tiny with favourites that included the Sound of Music soundtrack, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water and Helen Reddy’s Free and Easy, which was probably quite daring back in 1974.

Ours was not a home where classical music was discussed, jazz never crossed the threshold and although my sister and I had our own record players, neither of us were committed musos.

OK, here’s a thing, I have never really known how to listen to music. I tried very hard as a teenager because all my friends did, but I still recall now the agony of boredom as I sat cross-legged trying to really get into a certain artist or album. I went out with boys who could literally zone out for hours, rolling joints and nodding along to heavy metal or American rock bands played at full volume, while I would itch with a sort of claustrophobic loathing of being trapped in a bubble of noise. All that listening and not talking, what was that all about?

I’ve never really been a great gig-goer either, I’ve always preferred to be on stage than in the audience. To my utter shame, I never pursued opportunities in the past to see really great performers like David Bowie live, I have no anecdotes about the time I first saw the Sex Pistols or followed The Pogues around the pub circuit before they were famous. That said, I occasionally saw some great bands by accident when I was a drama student in the late Seventies. The University of Manchester’s students’ union bar and city club scene was full of “this time next year they’ll be huge” bands, but I didn’t take much notice. Mostly, I was cruising around trying to find someone to snog rather than listening to the music.

If I’m honest, the best gig I ever saw was the Bay City Rollers at Preston Guild Hall, I was 15 and managed to sneak past the bouncers into the backstage area. My cunning plan was to surprise guitarist Eric Faulkner in his dressing room but a security guard found me and chased me down a corridor. For many years this remained one of the highlights of my life.

As for sitting and listening to an orchestra play live, I’ve never done it, my head feels tight at the thought, I cannot imagine anything worse than listening to something that doesn’t contain any words.

I am not proud of this state of affairs, I realise there is a fundamental part of me that is missing, as a grown-up woman I still cannot hand on heart recognise any of the big-name composers.

I’ve never really voiced it out loud before, but the truth is, music doesn’t play a huge part in my everyday life. Even when I’m on long drives, I’m more likely to listen to a book on audible than a music station, although when I went through my short-lived jogging phase, I did listen to my iTunes collection on shuffle, if only to drown out the wheezing.

As a performer, my life would have been much easier had I been graced with any musical ability whatsoever, but even when I did panto and the musical director promised that it didn’t matter how tuneless I was and that I “couldn’t be that bad”, they ended up cutting my song.

I’m bringing this up now because during lockdown I realise that for some people music has been a massive solace and even I, the most unmusical of the unmusical, get incredibly moved by families like the Marsh family who can make music and have the guts to share their efforts with the rest of the world. As we all know, social media can be merciless. Fact is, all six Marsh family members, mum dad and four kids, are fantastically musically gifted but, what’s more, they seem to really enjoy each other’s company. Happily, their posts manage to be clever and likeable without crossing the line into unbearably smug. That said, as someone who feels their life has been blighted by an inability to play an instrument or sing, I can’t help spitefully imagining there’s a fifth Marsh sibling confined to the kitchen for being tone-deaf.