I was up early again this morning listening to music and while watching the video ‘Will You’ by Hazel O’Connor realised I had not seen the film ‘Breaking Glass’ for donkeys years something I was hoping to rectify with a search of the internet.
Danny (Phil Daniels) is trying to gain a foothold in the record industry by becoming a manager, but this is easier said than done as the best he can muster is being paid to buy singles to fix their chart positions for a record company in London.
He meets a young woman Kate (Hazel O'Connor) after being kick out of some music event for people in the industry as she is pasting up posters for her own gig on the walls.
With Danny now representing her the first thing he does is chuck her present band out the window and recruits a new band, Breaking Glass. The plan is simple in Danny’s eyes to highlight the anarchist-type tendencies of Kate. The streets of Britain are getting meaner with the end of Jim Callaghan's government, industrial disputes and strikes everywhere and high unemployment, and collapsing public services all part of the time.
Left and right organisations clashing at concerts and in the streets with the police on hand to mix it up with both. A mad time for those who lived it. In the film a developing love affair between Kate and Danny always looked doomed. A tour of the country for the being to build a fan base and attract slippery music promoters all feature prominently during the ensuing events but at the heart of the film is the increasingly futile attempts to maintain a semblance of control over her career.
A major music manager played by Jon Finch, Woods, marginalises Danny and the band begins to fall apart despite becoming more and more successful. On tour again, the agents start sowing seeds of discontent among the band, hinting heavily that Danny is the problem. This leads to a confrontation on the tour bus after which Danny storms out and quits. Woods now moves in as the band's manager and becomes Kate's new lover.
Record company pressure sees Kate give in to demands to change lyrics to avoid offending people before spiralling out of control. That leads to a mental and nervous breakdown and the final scene shows Kate recuperating at a hospital, Danny comes to visit her and to bring her a synthesizer.
Breaking Glass is undoubtedly representative of certain elements of social unrest in 1980, and the music business story lines of manipulation and commercialisation of young artist’s dreams are depressingly familiar in rock history right back to the 1950s. I cannot remember the last time I have seen it on TV but I enjoyed the catch up this morning.
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