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Post by dem on Mar 5, 2009 11:09:58 GMT
Susan Hill - Breaking Glass (Star, 1980) Blurb: Breaking Glass - is a group, trying to slice through the hassles and the hype of the music business and make themselves heard.
Danny - is their manager, dazzled by the rock & roll rebel dream - trying not to get suckered by the record moguls' system.
Kate - is the singer, ambitious and visionary - but the rock & roll machine could burn her out before it makes her a star...
Breaking Glass - the ultimate rock movie."He was preoccupied now as he followed a group of stragglers - a girl with blue Bride of Frankenstein hair, tartan mini-skirt and leopardskin leggings, and two boys in clowns trousers and leather jackets ....." A brief note inside the book reveals the author wrote for Melody Maker and Honey at the time, and Alwyn sheds more light on Susan Hill's career on Trash Fiction. Saw this hanging around looking lonesome on a stall the other week, remembered FM had good things to say about it (care to copy them across for us, FM?: Breaking Glass) and, a chapter in, i can already understand his reasoning. The young man doing the preoccupying is would-be music biz player Danny Price, and he's about to gatecrash the post-gig party at Finsbury Park's Rainbow Theatre - a venue which, at the time of writing, had "closed down and risen from the grave more times than Dracula". Danny has just witnessed a set by post-punk US sensation Debbie (it was the night she wore the yellow mini dress and white plastic boots ....) and he's keen to fix up a Saudi tour for her, but blows it when he tries to impress her with some of the huge megastars he's worked with and can only come up with the Boomtown Rats. Opting to leave before he's turfed out minus his teeth, he wanders into the alley and there's this sweary gal, Kate Crowley with Lucozade-coloured hair putting up posters of herself advertising her next gig. Danny goads her into giving an impromptu acapella performance of one of her "better than punk and new wave" songs, and she reluctantly obliges with Give Me An Inch. Ah, thinks, Danny. This is the usual tuneless belligerent stuff about alienation and contempt. I'll have some of that and make my millions!'
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Post by franklinmarsh on Mar 5, 2009 11:49:21 GMT
My pleasure
Breaking Glass - Susan Hill - Star - 1980
Breaking Glass - is a group, trying to slice through the hassles and the hype of the music business and make themselves heard
Danny - is their manager, dazzled by the rock & roll rebel dream - trying not to get suckered by the record moguls' system
Kate - is the singer, ambitious and visionary - but the rock & roll machine could burn her out before it makes her a star...
''See that?' said the landlord, 'I've had three smashed chairs and eighteen glasses broken.'
'Well, you did say you wanted the place livened up,' Danny said.
'I want some compensation,' said the landlord.
'And I want some money. We agreed forty quid, right?'
'You'll get nothing but a split lip if you don't piss off right now. And I'm keeping this for what you owe me.'
The landlord made to wrench the bass from Danny's grasp. Outside some early fireworks were exploding in the late October darkness. Somebody threw a banger into the saloon's open doorway.
Danny felt very, very scared as he looked up into the man's fierce, red face, now twisted and ugly with rage.
'You think I should pay for that filth, for that screeching slut, for that excrement you call music?' '
1980 is a brand new age! Would be rock hustler Danny gets chucked out of the after show party at the Rainbow for 'Debby', and bumps into Kate Crowley, busy putting up her own posters. in the alley outside. Unimpressed by his amateurism, she still invites him to see her band at The Cape Of Good Hope. He does, they're crap, but Kate has 'something.' He offers to be her manager. She's not really interested.
When weird musicians start turning up at her flat, she discovers Danny has placed an ad in Melody Maker (that has been printed a week early) and she realises he does want to help her. Recruiting two squatters on guitars, a dim but enthusiastic drummer (who has access to a van) and an older junkie saxophonist, they become Breaking Glass, and set out on the road to fame and fortune. Starting in dingy pubs full of BM skins, gradually getting good word of mouth, getting in with agents who can book them decent venues, and then the ultimate reward for hard work (and the beginning of the end) - a record contract. Danny gets frozen out, Kate is fast becoming drug dependant, the drummer and saxophonist become expendable, the USA beckons.
Standard A Star Is Born stuff with a new wave coat - I enjoyed it.
Wish the fillum was available. It covers an important part of my life, and the bloke with the black spike and donkey jacket who walks out of the lift in the block of flats is Womble
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Post by dem on Mar 5, 2009 19:33:51 GMT
Thanks FM. It's a quick read, too, ain't it. 145 pages if you skip the song lyrics at the back. Thought the ending was a little abrupt, but it certainly captures some of that that early 'eighties London gloom.
After witnessing the disastrous gig supporting Sinus at the Cape, Danny decides that the only way his protegee stands a chance is to quit the band, keep her songs and start afresh with an entirely new line-up. After the Melody Maker ad, Kate furiously rushes around to his office (it just had to be above a sex shop off the Charing Cross Road) where Danny confesses he's merely a record plugger, but he believes she has something and wants to manage her. Despite the fact that she reckons he's a cocky bugger with a face like a stoat, she goes along with his ideas.
Striking train drivers, power cuts, media-fuelled racial tension, police brutality - Thatcher's Britain PLC, 1980. The Groovy Age may or may not have ever really existed beyond Carnaby Street, but even there it's certainly dead by the time Breaking Glass take their first tentative steps toward stardom with the nation glumly conscious of that ominous date looming on the horizon - 1984. As a copper tells Danny while he's conducting a raid on their rehearsal room because he can: "If you know what's good for you son, you'll shut up, and just in case you were thinking of citing your rights, you can shove your civil liberties up your arse." The new, improved Breaking Glass's response to this is to marry the idealist Kate's cod-punk and bleedin' awful lyrics about Big Brother to a cod-futuristic, no wave backdrop and crack the London pub circuit.
The first year ends happily enough with Katie and Danny sharing top bunk on a grounded Inter-city express at Stoke on Christmas Eve - he even proposes marriage, but the thought of becoming Katie Price doesn't appeal - and when they arrive back home there's a letter addressed to the pair of them. Steve Barker, the head honcho at Smashed records wants to sign the band! Almost! His first suggestion is that she ditch the group and take over as lead vocalist with one of his established acts who've recently parted company with their singer. He's also invented a conceptually solid new name for her - Crystal Nacht! Kate is so angry, she goes home and writes a new song about the experience, Shoot Suits. But it's only a matter of time. After triumphing in the face of adversity at a chaotic Music Machine gig, Breaking Glass are snapped up by the mighty Overlord records with whom Danny has a little previous shady business. Of course, there will have to be some changes. Much as important record executive Giles Davis reckons he admires Kate for being such an 'anarchist', "you can't have songs with words like 'arse'. We'd never get airplay ... I've discussed it with our house producer and he suggests you could substitute 'bum'. How does that grab you?"
It doesn't grab her any more than Steve Barker's tasteful idea, but she's weary, depressed, compromised ...
Breaking Glass set to work on their debut album. They sell out big venues. They make the bill for the traumatic Rock Against 1984 festival. They go in for extravagant stage shows. And then - the wheels fall off!
Evil old music biz triumphs again.
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Post by franklinmarsh on Jul 30, 2016 15:30:23 GMT
Wish the fillum was available. It covers an important part of my life, and the bloke with the black spike and donkey jacket who walks out of the lift in the block of flats is Womble Woo-hoo! Turned up a (legit) copy complete with 24 page booklet. Looking forward to this immensely. Saw Haze live supporting pub rock bores (as DB would have it - I liked 'em)The Stranglers at the Lyceum* (apparently Huge Cornball was (ahem) 'seeing' Ms O'Connor at the time) - she had the black and white dress and the fuzzy hair. Saw her once more at the Guilfest circa 2009 or so - just her and another girl performing slow, poignant, acoustic versions of the songs. *A little googling has revealed this was 27th July 1980, and bottom of the bill, beneath The Stranglers and Hazel O'Connor & The Fundamentals, was - Martian Dance! So I saw them three bloody times! Gah! |
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Post by ripper on Jul 31, 2016 12:43:03 GMT
It's a great film. Very much of its time but none the worse for that. I think I bought the novelisation but lost/loaned/gave it away years ago.
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Post by franklinmarsh on Oct 4, 2016 8:32:43 GMT
Finally watched the film again. Superb nostalgia for a lost era of chart fixing by buying loads of records at chart return shops, punks and skins on the streets of London, never ending industrial unrest. A host of unexpected actors - Gary Holton in Kate's original band, Richard Griffiths as a put-upon recording technician, Jim Broadbent as a British Rail porter, the man from The Bill and Quadrophenia as Breaking Glass' guitarist...Nice to see the Hope and Anchor, but a bit gutted I never got to the Music Machine or the Rainbow.
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Post by dem on Oct 4, 2016 11:50:01 GMT
Glad you mentioned the Music Machine, Franklin, because you'll never guess who I saw there! Or rather, you won't until you reach chapter 381, footnote 18, 477 of my That Time I Saw Martian Dance At The Music Machine (Extreme Strobe-Light Abuse Press, forthcoming). Also got dragged along to see some new wave lot so boring I genuinely can't remember who they were. The one saving grace of that night was meeting Steve Jones and Paul Cook at the bar. Saw my first ever gig at The Rainbow - Mott the Hoople, the Ariel Bender years with the fledgling Queen as support (hated them even then) - plus Jethro Tull circa Warchild, introduced by Sterling Moss and supported by Fanny and Pans People IN THE QUIVERING FLESH!
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Post by franklinmarsh on Oct 4, 2016 19:41:51 GMT
Great days!
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elricc
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 100
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Post by elricc on Oct 4, 2016 20:32:51 GMT
Just seen you mention the Music Machine, what about the Electric Ballroom and the infamous back stairs
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Post by dem on Oct 5, 2016 5:31:59 GMT
Just seen you mention the Music Machine, what about the Electric Ballroom and the infamous back stairs Oh yes! Christ, but Skeleton Tree is a harrowing listen. |
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Post by franklinmarsh on Oct 5, 2016 5:40:44 GMT
Four quid?!!? I saw Martian Dance at the Electric Ballroom. Supporting Adam & The Ants. Some skinhead with a tattooed face burst his glue bag over the queue outside. Frightening for a hick from the sticks. Particularly as the older chaps we'd gone with told tales of people roaming the outside and shooting you through the hand with air pistol if you didn't have an Ants tattoo. Gullible youth!
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elricc
Devils Coach Horse
Posts: 100
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Post by elricc on Oct 5, 2016 20:26:37 GMT
I probably knew that skinhead, as I was one and hung around a lot at the electric ballroom.. as well as Lyceum on a Sunday night and a very peculiar club called the Mews run by a huge black rasta called baby, who use to sit outside on a milk crate. Also the Hope and Anchor and the euphemistically named "the carnaby sporting club" .. those were the days.
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Post by helrunar on Jun 20, 2022 20:13:26 GMT
Love this thread. I stumbled upon the trailer for Breaking Glass this morning on y.t. and I'm afraid I found it all a bit of a laugh. I had no idea just how much violence, sleaze and all-out carnage the scene involved--this thread gives me at least a few hints.
I found this 1989 memento from Hazel O'Connor (born 1954) on an internet encyclopedia:
I ran away from my home in Coventry when I was 16, [...] made and sold clothes in Amsterdam, picked grapes in France, joined a dance troupe that went to Tokyo then onto Beirut (escaping the start of the civil war by one month!) traveled West Africa, crossed the Sahara, sang with a dreadful singing trio for the U.S. troops in Germany and came home to "settle down". Through all this experience of life and the world I realized that singing always cheered me up. I decided to be a singer. Through strange turns of fate I ended up in a film called 'Breaking Glass' I also ended up writing all the songs for the movie.
Even though I thought her hair and makeup were way over the top in the trailer I viewed, I couldn't help finding Hazel's energy and presence fascinating. I've heard very mixed reviews of Breaking Glass. Also appearing was Jon Finch, one of my fave raves--loved him as Jerry Cornelius in The Final Programme.
Hazel had what sounds like a stroke this past January and I don't see any more recent news of how she's doing. She is said to divide her time between Ireland and France (where the latest election news is not good).
H.
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Post by Shrink Proof on Jun 21, 2022 7:12:12 GMT
Saw my first ever gig at The Rainbow - Mott the Hoople, the Ariel Bender years with the fledgling Queen as support (hated them even then).... |
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Post by dem on Jun 21, 2022 7:25:33 GMT
Saw my first ever gig at The Rainbow - Mott the Hoople, the Ariel Bender years with the fledgling Queen as support (hated them even then).... The Rainbow gig finished in a mini-riot as management lowered the curtain as the band came back on for an encore, and Hunter wasn't having any of it. All good practice for punk and, especially, the Birthday Party and early Bad Seeds gigs. Mott were brilliant! |
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