08/08/2025
đ¤ WHAT ARE YOUR FAVOURITE SONGS FROM BREAKING GLASS? đ¤
Writing On The Wall / Monsters In Disguise / Come Into The Air / Big Brother / Who Needs It / Will You / Eighth Day / Top Of The Wheel / Calls The Tune / Blackman / Give Me An Inch / If Only
On this date in 1980, HAZEL O'CONNOR released the single EIGHTH DAY (Aug 8th 1980)
Eighth Day wasnât just another pop single drifting out of the Breaking Glass soundtrack â it was a cold, metallic jolt, with Hazel OâConnor standing centre stage in full Metropolis-style armour, warning of a future where mankind builds machines to do the dull work, only to watch them wake up, take over, and run the show.
Before Breaking Glass, Hazel was grafting away on the fringes â a few small acting parts here, odd music jobs there. After it, her face was everywhere. The timing was perfect, if grim. Britain in 1980 was still bruised by strikes, unemployment was climbing, and there was a real sense of restlessness. The film spoke directly to that mood â the heavy synths, the spiky clothes, the âstuff the systemâ attitude â all wrapped in a story that felt alarmingly familiar to anyone living through the mess.
In the film, Eighth Day is the big final statement. Hazelâs character, Kate, delivers it like a sermon â the crowd bathed in harsh light as she chants through a twisted creation story: God made the world in seven days; man made machines on the eighth, and thatâs when things really went wrong. Off-screen, Hazel was living her own version of that story, hitting the road with her band MEGAHYPE, chasing a breakthrough in a way that mirrored the movieâs plot almost too perfectly. She even joked about how blurred the lines had become between her and Kate.
Eighth Day didnât water itself down to get on the radio. The vocal is right in your face, the lyric pulls no punches, and the production keeps that mechanical throb going from start to finish. And yet, it still climbed into the Top 10. British audiences â already hooked by the film â pushed it there, and Top of the Pops gave it a prime slot, proving that a song with such a cold, sci-fi heart could still pull in a mainstream crowd. It also slotted neatly into that moment where punkâs raw charge was fading and sharper, more electronic sounds were taking over.
Hazel didnât stick to one tone. Within a year, she had two more big hits: Will You, a slow, aching ballad with that unforgettable saxophone solo, and D-Days, a manic, sneering new wave blast inspired by a night in a West End club full of âbizarre lookingâ characters. If Eighth Day was the cold prophecy, Will You was the emotional confession, and D-Days the sharp observational sketch.
Part of Eighth Dayâs power is its simplicity. The verses tighten the screw, the chorus hammers the point, and the synths arenât there to sound pretty â theyâre there to make you feel like youâre inside the machine. Hazelâs phrasing locks into the beat, giving the whole thing an urgency thatâs hard to shake. Itâs theatrical, but never overblown.
The theme wasnât just sci-fi fantasy. In 1980, talk of machines replacing jobs was already a pub conversation, a front-page worry, a boardroom excuse. Hazel wrapped that anxiety in something you could chant, dance to, and still feel slightly rattled by. And she did it without lapsing into jargon or losing the human side of the story.
Hazelâs connection with her audience was real. Speaking in 1981, she said: âIâm approachable and a lot of people get hopeful when they hear my songs⌠âThe Eighth Dayâ did that. Joe Bloggs writes to me and says âThis made me think a lot about nuclear weapons and Iâm going to get involved in CNDâ which I think is a good cause.â She knew some thought it was âpretentiousâ, but she didnât care â if it made people think, it had done its job.
For teenagers at the time, Eighth Day felt like news you werenât getting anywhere else. For anyone discovering it later, it still works because itâs blunt and to the point â no mystical waffle, just the uncomfortable truth that we might be building the very thing that will finish us off. The film ends, the lights go up, and you step outside into a world already full of cash registers, factory clocks and glowing shopfronts. The chorus sticks. And before long, Hazelâs back with MEGAHYPE, then Will You, then the whip-smart D-Days. Preacher, romantic, satirist â all from the same pen, all in the space of a year.
