‘Sunday Girl’: The Blondie song Chris Stein wrote for Debbie Harry’s meowing melancholy
Blondie is a band, not a person. But even still, the group’s energy has always been reflective of Debbie Harry’s own, whether that be in her rousing rock tunes that speak to strength and power or, in this case, sadder moments with honouring odes written by the other members in an attempt to lift her spirits.
“My character in Blondie was partly visual homage to Marilyn [Monroe] and partly a statement about the good old double standard,” Debbie Harry once said when explaining who Blondie is. People often forget that Blondie is a band and not just Harry as the group’s resident blonde and lead singer. But even though it involves the talent of all its members, the group is informed by this character Harry steps into on stage.
“My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up, yet I was very serious,” she explained, seeing her persona as a stab at the ‘dumb blonde’ stereotype from her position as a punk leader.
But while Harry contributes the voice of the band and helps set the tone in terms of their energy, her old partner, Chris Stein, is just as essential. The pair started the band together after leaving an earlier group to go it alone, just the two of them. Throughout the band’s early career, until the last 1980s, Harry and Stein were a couple too, living together as well as working together. As the band’s principal songwriters, that meant that their tunes were often in dialogue with each other or about one another.
In one instance, one of the band’s biggest songs was written as a gift from Stein to Harry in an attempt to cheer her up. In the ‘70s, Harry had a beloved cat, but during one of the band’s tours, it went missing and was never found. When she returned home, Harry was devastated.
“The cat ran away we were very sad,” Stein recalled, mourning the kitty they called Sunday Man. In an attempt to cheer up his then-girlfriend, he wrote her a tune and called it ‘Sunday Girl’. “It was just a sort of plaintive, evocative number,” he said of the song that now sits on all their greatest hits playlists.
But at the time, Stein was nervous. While he was no stranger to songwriting, ‘Sunday Girl’ was one of the first tracks in the band for which he took sole credit. “I wrote that one all by myself, but I was so nervous about having my own song,” he said. He even tried to get the spotlight off him as he remembered, “I asked [Debbie Harry] to put her name on it,” but she wouldn’t, as he said, “We left [the credit] to me in the long run.”
Listening to the finished track, no one would ever guess the song started as an ode to a lost cat. However, it’s easy to see why the tune would cheer Harry up as it exists as a whimsical ode to dreamers and feels somewhat like a theme tune, letting Harry take on the role of the song’s main character at a time when the world, and her missing cat, was getting her down.
