Claire Hamill
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Claire Hamill (born Josephine Clare Hammill, 4 August 1954 in Port Clarence, Middlesbrough in northern England) is a British singer-songwriter.
[edit] Biography
Claire Hamill was active in the music business since age 17. In 1970, she was launched as one of Britain's first female singer-songwriters and compared by several commentators to Joni Mitchell.
Her debut album was One house left standing, whose cover photo showed the singer in a backdrop of her home town. Soon afterwards, she went on her first UK tour supporting John Martyn. By 1973 she had toured the United States with Procol Harum and Jethro Tull and came back to Britain to record her next album October at Richard Branson's Manor Studio in Oxfordshire, the same Manor studio which Mike Oldfield was using to compose what became Tubular Bells. She next toured with King Crimson.
In 1973, she met Ray Davies of the Kinks, who signed her to his Konk label for her third album Stage Door Johnnies, an album which included her first covers. 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 album of the 70s and the second one for Konk, titled Abracadabbra. In the early 1980s she supported Wishbone Ash and joined the group for a short while.
Hamill had always been regarded more as an album artist but in 1980 she cut a single called "First Night in New York," which gained favourable reviews. She formed a group, Transformer, which released one now-rare single.
In 1981, she appeared on the Jon and Vangelis album The Friends of Mr. Cairo and also sang with British jazz/funk/fusion group Morrissey-Mullen, appearing on their Life on the Wire album (1982). In 1983 Hamill recorded a cover of Gene Pitney's "24 hours from Tulsa", produced by the American musician Richard Niles who would later go on to arrange for many heavyweight names such as Paul McCartney. Another single, "If You Would Only Talk to Me", suffered from a lack of radio exposure.
By the mid 80s Hamill reinvented herself to embrace New Age music, which gained her a new audience along with commissions from the BBC and Channel 4. Her first album of the 80s, Touchpaper, was followed a year later by the album which pitched her into the realms of true critical acclaim, if not the music charts. The album Voices was all Claire's own work and similar to what would later be recorded by Adiemus and Enya. The label Coda was run by her then husband Nick Austin and had many different New Age acts recording for it. Her music was used by the BBC for a program called "Domesday," and her version of "Jerusalem" was issued as a 12-inch single.
After the next album, Love in the Afternoon, she cut a version of 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 one featuring the instrumental version of Pachelbel's Canon, with scenes of Arctic penguins, was voted by viewers as the favourite.
In 1992, Hamill went to live in Hastings, found a new partner in Andrew Warren, and cut a new album called "Summer" at the end of the decade.
Recently, she has released two further albums and a compilation (2007). Her song "You Take my Breath Away" caught the attention of Eva Cassidy, whose recording of it was used in a movie soundtrack.
