Claire Hamill

In 1973, she met Ray Davies of the Kinks, who signed her to his Konk label for her third studio album Stage Door Johnnies. She toured America for the second time that year and went on another UK tour supporting Gilbert O'Sullivan. In addition, she recorded what would be her final studio album of the 1970s and the second one for Konk, Abracadabra (1975).

In 1979, she provided lead vocals on the song "Look Over Your Shoulder" on Steve Howe's second solo studio album The Steve Howe Album. In the early 1980s she worked with Wishbone Ash, appearing as a guest performer on their studio albums Just Testing (1980) and Number the Brave (1981) and joining the group for their 1981–82 tour. She returned as a guest on Bare Bones in 1999.^{[citation needed]}

In 1980, she released a single called "First Night in New York", which gained favourable reviews. She formed a group, Transporter (which took its name from Tees Transporter Bridge), which released one single.^[3]

In 1981, she appeared on the

By the mid-1980s, Hamill had reinvented herself as a new-age artist, which gained her commissions from the BBC and Channel 4.^{[citation needed]} Her first studio album of the 80s, Touchpaper (1984), was followed a year later by Voices, which featured all her work. Her music was used for the five-part BBC1 series Domesday, broadcast in November and December 1986. Four tracks ("Glastonbury (Jerusalem)", "Tides", "Spring: Awaken Lark Rise" and "Stars") were issued as the Domesday EP on Coda Records, a label featuring many new-age artists and run by her then-husband Nick Austin.

After the next studio album, Love in the Afternoon, she recorded a version of Johann Pachelbel's Canon in both instrumental and vocal versions, the latter featuring her own words as "Someday We Will All Be Together". Both this and the Voices album were used extensively by Channel 4 for a series of music videos collectively titled The Art of Landscape and shown every morning in the early 1990s. The video for the instrumental version of Canon, with scenes of Antarctic penguins, was voted by viewers as the favourite.

In 1992, Hamill went to live in

• One House Left Standing (1971)
• October (1973)
• Stage Door Johnnies (1974)
• Abracadabra (1975)
• Touchpaper (1984)
• Voices (1986)
• Love in the Afternoon (1988)
• Summer (1997)
• The Lost & the Lovers (2004)
• The Minor Fall the Major Lift: the Best of Josephine Claire Hamill (2007)
• The Meeting of the Waters (2012)
• When Daylight Arrives (2015)
• Over Dark Apples (2019)
• A Pocket Full of Love Songs (2022)

References