Weekend Intermission and Midweek Intermission are occasional features where we look at an artist or band not from the Nordic countries, just to mix things up a bit.
We haven’t done one of these since July 2025 and it was during the same ‘shut down’ period for Scandinavian music during that summer. That has come to an end now this year and there is a tsunami of releases stacking up for this coming weekend so best to get this out of the way now.
I must be honest and say that I didn’t particularly follow Hazel O’Connor closely during her most active years in the 1970s and 80s. She didn’t exactly pass me by altogether but I viewed her incorrectly as a punk act and punk was rapidly putting paid to the prog rock movement that I adored but which admittedly had grown so bombastic that it had disappeared up its own backside.
In reality her genres were New wave, alt-pop and new age.
Having run away from her Coventry home when she was 16, she toured the world doing odd jobs, all the time realising that her appreciation of singing meant she was destined to end up doing that as a career eventually.
Through strange turns of fate she ended up in a film called ‘Breaking Glass’ playing the lead role of Kate – and writing all the songs for the movie.
It was Hazel’s breakthrough moment, winning her the Variety Club of Great Britain Award for ‘Best Film Actress’. She was also nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Film Music. The film’s soundtrack album featured songs written and performed by her and reached number 5 in the UK Albums Chart.
It had a 38-week chart run and was certified Gold by the British Phonographic Industry. Several tracks from the album were released as singles, the most successful being ‘Eighth Day’ and ‘Will You?’ (Sometimes it is spelt with a question mark, at other times not).
When she toured the UK to promote the album, the opening act was a then-unknown group called Duran Duran. It was the band’s first opportunity to play to large audiences throughout the UK and gave them the exposure they needed to secure a recording contract.
My personal exposure to this song came only a few years ago when I was invited to an event – ‘An evening with Hazel O’Connor’ or something like that and which featured a showing of Breaking Glass followed by a live concert.
I remember that the film has a sequence which is an aerial shot of West London taken from a helicopter I suppose (they didn’t have drones then) and which passes close to a sparkling new Grenfell Tower which was then only six years old. There is a certain poignancy about that moment.
Only then did the depth of ‘Will You?’ hit me. The song is notable both for an utterly brilliantly written ballad and the famous extended sax solo that plays it out.
The lyrics, in which the singer hopes against hope that the desired one (or her) will “make a move” before it is too late and has to leave, reads like poetry, meaning that it could stand alone without the music and be equally effective.
It is a situation that will resonate with just about every single person listening to it and invokes even more pathos with lines like,
“I move a little closer to you, Not knowing quite what to do and I’m
Feeling all fingers and thumbs, I spill my tea, oh silly me.”
We’ve all been there.
And even more so with,
“And then we touch, much too much,
This moment has been waiting for a long, long time,
Makes me shiver, makes me quiver,
This moment I am so unsure,
This moment I have waited for…”
because while it seems as if a breakthrough has been made the final refrain suggests that it was a false dawn.
The other part of the song, one which takes up half the entire song in this full length version, is the astonishing saxophone solo by Wesley Magoogan.
Hand on heart I can’t think of a better, more evocative sax solo on any song and only ‘Baker Street’ even gives it a run for its money in my book.
It’s as if Hazel O’Connor gave him free rein to translate the complex, contradictory emotions on display in the song onto his instrument. And boy, did he do it.
In the performance I watched, Claire Hirst was the tenor saxophonist, once of The Belle Stars and she did a fabulous job.
The person who made the video here wrote in the notes, “Hazel O’Conner who wrote, sang and performed all of her own songs is one of the greatest singer/ songwriters of all time and her music stands as a testament to that.”
At one time I might not have been convinced by that. I am now.
Find her on:
Website: https://www.hazeloconnor.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HazelOConnorOfficial
