AN EXHIBITION marking the extraordinary life and career of the musician and actress Hazel O’Connor, who has family roots in Galway, will run in her native Coventry City’s Music Museum until the end of the year.
Pink, Lady Gaga and Kylie Minogue have all hailed her as an inspiration.
She was forced to take a step back from the spotlight after a bleed on the brain in 2022, and has been slowly recovering.
Hazel first burst onto the scene with her performance as a drugged-up singer in the smash-hit film Breaking Glass. It won her plaudits from Cannes’ notoriously fickle film critics when it premiered at the prestigious festival back in 1980.
Hazel Connor in 2010 (picture Danny Simpson, Wikimedia CC BY-SA 2.0)The film portrayed the life of a young punk singer whose meteoric rise to fame led to her personal disintegration. But, as the singer, who lived for many years in County Wicklow, once told me, it was very much a case of art imitating life. Though only 25 years old when she made the film, she had already experienced poverty and rape, and enough of her own addiction to drugs to draw on for her brilliant portrayal of a character heading towards a complete breakdown.
“I’ve had a very raucous life,” she said. “But I wised up one day,” she recalled.
For the sake of her own health and sanity, she went to Germany and joined a three-piece all-girl group
Hazel has always lived on the edge. She dropped out of school at 16 and ran away from home to travel the world. At one time or another, she lived in an Amsterdam squat and did her driving licence in bullet-ridden Beirut. She was almost killed by a land mine in North Africa and was a troupe dancer in Japan.
At first, she said, the “scariest thing” during her five-year-long travels around the world was witnessing the bombings in Lebanon, but then mid-conversation she went further by astonishingly confessing to having endured the horrifying ordeal of being raped twice. “When I was 16 and living in Amsterdam I had been raped by a Hare Krishna,” she said, adding that she was also still only 16 years old when the second sexual assault happened.
Take, as an example, what happened to her in Algeria. Her boyfriend Adrian accidentally camped overnight on a minefield.
“The next morning at about six we were woken up by workmen going to work on the main road and they shouted that we were stupid. Didn’t we know we were in the middle of a minefield that hadn’t been disassembled since the civil war?” she said.
“I thought, ‘We’re going to die. We’re about to get blown up. If I’m going to go I’ll go with my boyfriend,’ because I really did love him. So our other mate was walking in front of the Land Rover and I sat with my boyfriend ready to die with him. I was lucky.”
After five years of living dangerously, Hazel was struck down with malaria and returned to England. “I reached 21 and I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do. And then I thought, ‘Well, what makes me happy? What do I want to do with my life?’ I remembered the thing that gave me the greatest joy was singing and playing music with my brother. It did something to me inside that made me feel well. So I thought, ‘I’ll do singing.’”
But her life remained turbulent, especially in relationships. After leaving her drug-addicted boyfriend and renouncing drugs, she started a relationship with a man who turned out to be violent. “He hit me twice. I had to lock him out. He was a serious head case. Oh, he was horrible,” she recalled.
As an afterthought, she added, “And then I got famous after that,” and smiled, as if to say that the best revenge is living well. It was her next step that changed her life – for both good and bad – when she signed up to a small independent record company.
“It was January ’78. The record company had nobody to man the telephones because the girl had gone on holiday. I said, ‘Can I do her job for two weeks?’ she said. “And on the first day they’d all gone out to lunch and this call came through. Somebody wanted to talk to the bosses and I said, ‘Can I help?’ And they said, ‘We’re looking for this girl called Hazel O’Connor.’ And I said, ‘That’s me.’ I was amazed that anyone would really know that I existed. They said they were auditioning for this new film and would I like to meet the director tomorrow? And I said, ‘Sure, yeah.’”
A mural of Hazel O'Connor (picture AJ Paxton, geograph.org.uk CC BY-SA 2.0)Astonishingly, not only was Hazel offered the lead role in the landmark 1980 film Breaking Glass, alongside Jonathan Pryce, but she also persuaded the producers to let her – a then totally unknown musician with no track record – write and perform its soundtrack. It included several hit singles, such as the classic Will You?, and went double platinum, reaching number five in the UK charts, where it remained for 28 weeks.
But despite the overnight success, Hazel was struggling financially because of the frugal deal she had signed with the small record company. She had a falling-out with the record company and they refused to release her from the contract.
“I was down on my uppers after being with the record company and being ripped off, and then they sued me. Then I ended up in court cases for years. I was very poor,” she said.
After a long, drawn-out legal battle, Hazel finally started to get royalties from Breaking Glass. She might not have been rolling in it, but Hazel really had the music world at her feet after Breaking Glass first came out – with Duran Duran supporting her on tour and performing at the first ever Slane concert with U2 and Thin Lizzy.
However, she was totally uncomfortable with her newfound fame.
“It’s inhibiting. If you take a girl like me who had been free and had been gypsy-like and suddenly my world becomes super small because I can’t get on the bus! It’s not about music and it’s not about talent, it’s about that whole celebrity culture. I found it very, very, very scary and not nice and not suited to the way I am. I’ve always been an insecure person.”
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