Aunt music: how the lost sounds of Great Aunt Mirry were unlocked | Music

The musician Tom Fraser’s memories of his Great Aunt Mirry are few. “I remember her once on the sofa, just sort of being quite a jolly little old lady,” he says. “And I went to her funeral, I remember that.”

It was a long time after her death that he came to learn of another side of Mirry’s life. A box of belongings, left on the street outside his grandmother’s house in Notting Hill, held a record that suggested she was more than just a jolly little old lady.

This was 1985. Fraser, then captivated by the Cure, found little of note in the scratchy, lo-fi piano recordings in a brown paper sleeve. “I thought it was terrible,” he says frankly. “But then I listened to it about 10 years ago, and things had changed.”

Now curious about the woman who had composed and recorded this material in the 50s and 60s, he began to ask his family about Mirry – his mother, his aunts and particularly his Uncle Geoffrey, who it transpired had been responsible for making the recordings.

For much of her life, Mirabel Lomer had been a carer for her parents in Ireland. “Two people who basically didn’t get on,” Foster says darkly. Her father, who had been in the army, had wooed her mother, a trained concert pianist, but soon after their marriage insisted she give up playing. “He found music depressing,” Foster says. “He just didn’t like it, so he moved the piano as far away as possible from him.”

Not a great deal is known about Mirry’s life in Ireland, though it seems likely that despite her father’s wishes she was taught to play piano by her mother. Later, in her 50s, she would move to the UK to work as a paid carer for another elderly couple in Wiltshire. “And then when the lady died, this old man, now in his 80s, married Mirry, and they lived together for a few years and she looked after him,” explains Foster. “She was just constantly looking after people.”

If her life seems one of constant drudgery, the recollections of those who knew her, alongside the recordings, photographs and Super 8 footage Fraser has subsequently found, suggest otherwise. “She was jolly in a way that my grandmother wasn’t,” he says. “Mirry loved a tab, whiskey or sherry or whatever, always smoking and drinking and laughing, and just having fun. My aunt was saying she was very fun and kind. And I think when people wanted to escape, they would run to her for a break, a bit of jollity really.”

Among those who visited were his Uncle Geoffrey, and it seems it was on one of these visits that “Geoffrey and Mirry just start mucking about, they start filming each other, setting up scenes, and at the same time she’s working constantly on these pieces of music,” Foster says. “There are a lot of pictures and videos of her, just playing away; this quite old lady just banging away at the piano incredibly fast, fingers flying everywhere, and totally getting into it. And there’s another recording of her singing and then losing her part and cackling with laughter … ”

Over the summer, Fraser played Mirry’s recordings with his brother-in-law and fellow musician Simon Tong, best known for his work with the Verve and the Magnetic North. “She didn’t have many tunes, but the bits she worked on she just continued working on all of her life and refine them and refine them,” Fraser says. “They’re very dense, nothing gets repeated, it’s blisteringly fast and complicated and incredible really.”

Tong was struck by the “romantic and very warm sound to them, very crackly and very old-fashioned”. They reminded him a little of the music from Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. “Of a world that’s familiar even though you’ve never experienced those times.”

It just felt right, playing on this woman’s music who I’d never met, from over 60 years ago

Together, they began reworking Mirry’s music, passing the recordings back and forth, adding guitars, organ, strings. Tong speaks of how frequently he was “almost brought to tears, because it just felt right, playing on this woman’s music who I’d never met, from over 60 years ago. The ghosts or spirits, or whatever the energy that can still travel over the years … the music itself that retains some kind of energy. It didn’t feel like we were making it into something that it wasn’t supposed to be. It felt like it was being respectful, I suppose.”

Tong enlisted the curator Kirsteen McNish, who since March has herself been a full-time carer for her disabled daughter, to help build Mirry into a multimedia project. She commissioned the director Camilla Kirk to rework the found video footage, and introduced Fraser and Tong to Rupert Morrison, who would release Mirry on his label, Dutchess. For McNish, the project became about more than just an album release, but about the often invisible lives of carers, and “the moments we seize in order to try to make creative work however restricted in circumstances”.