Breaking Glass

Kate is a punk singer playing pub stages in London and writing angry songs. A man called Danny finds her and becomes her manager. Kate rises fast: small clubs first, then a record company, then big halls. Something is lost as she rises. Her band is gradually left outside, the songs are arranged by other people, and the only one left alone on the stage is her. Hazel O'Connor, who plays Kate, wrote and sang every song in the film herself; the album did big business in Britain and is better remembered than the film. Brian Gibson directed. Phil Daniels plays the manager, with Jonathan Pryce in an early part. The film is about how the music industry took a singer apart at the start of the eighties, and it also shows punk's contradiction with itself: what happens when music that opposes the system is sold to the system? A hundred and four minutes.