BLONDIE – "Sunday Girl"

It’s not surprising that this is many people’s favourite Blondie track (though this demographic may not stretch to Popular); its resources of crisply-cut staccato organ and skinny tie handclaps helped form one of the central aesthetic templates for the whole Belle and Sebastian/Camera Obscura school of agreeably chirpy but spiked indie pop. But of their number ones, it’s the one which I scarcely, if ever, revisit; the new wave jerkiness redolent throughout Parallel Lines is intact, but Mike Chapman’s clean, linear production is a little too pristine for its own good; despite Debbie Harry’s typically inventive vocal acting, the mechanical approach which worked so brilliantly on “Heart Of Glass” tends to filter out any evidence of humanity (where’s the blood? The thrashing?) such that it ends up sounding not dissimilar to the cheery is-it-still-1974 capers of Racey, Chinn and Chapman’s other major product of the period (“Some Girls,” “Lay Your Love On Me”).

The song itself is, as you’d expect, not as charming as it pretends to be – the key line is “Cold as ice cream but stil as sweet” – and seems to be about a mistress who only ever gains access to her “guy” at the weekend (“Hey, I saw your guy with a different girl/Looks like he’s in another world”) and otherwise flounders in a fairly desperate emotional limbo; hear Debbie’s anguished howl of “BABY, I would like to go out tonight,” and her repeated half-teasing, half-suicidal groans of “I got the blues” – in the fadeout, the latter sounds as though she’s surfing along the serrated edge of the razorblade, and her pleas to “hurry up” turn into a 999 (or 911) call, before it’s too late. And even when she gets to be with him, expectations are usually dashed – “I stay away all week and still I wait.”

The dual conflict enacted between music and lyrics here is mildly interesting, but finally I have to fall on the side of the fence which believes that sinister lyrics need at least an element of disturbance about their musical settings to work, emotionally and aesthetically. This isn’t to say that “Sunday Girl” is a bad record because it’s a clearly astute and well-realised piece of work – although the mock-coquette French version, almost as popular as the original, doesn’t go in tandem with the song’s emotions – but there’s the general air throughout that Blondie are keeping themselves, or are being kept, in check, as though to ward off the imminent threat of the Knack.

What do you mean when you say a song is ‘pert’ (you described a song I really like in that way in one of the Now Polls)?

This just went nowhere at all, albeit in a cutesy “hurry up” manner. I shall always recall how the group around Debbie, having had quite enough of fans and jocks dismissing them as mere backing musicians to the photogenic lead vocalist, declaring rather petulantly that “Blondie is a band!” This was strictly true but the point was that songs like “Sunday Girl” and much of the remainder of the Blondie portfolio would have been completely ignored had not Debbie fronted the act. And deep down, Stein and the others knew this only fine well.

A bit of a disgrace that this twee little piece of nonsense kept “Dance Away” off the top.

Bunny’s coming for you, Punky. Boing…Boing…Boing…Boing…

Nice but a bit too fluffy, it’s like ‘Denis’ without the thumping Spector-ish production. I did like the French version though which seemed to suit its slightness a whole lot better as if it was some cute France Gall record.

it’s a shame that this kept ‘dance away’ off the top – perhaps roxy seemed like yesterday’s men compared to blondie who were absolutely flavour of the month – even with slightly insipid material like this. Every party I went to at this time featured ‘Parallel lines’. Good to recall ‘Pop muzik’, one of the first songs I bought as a 12 inch single. I seem to recall there was some gimmick where there were two versions of the song on one side – like the Python ‘Matching tie and handkerchief’ LP although my memory could be playing tricks on me.

BTW there’s a roxy special coming up on bbc 4 on Friday (19th September) and on iplayer later

thanks mark – i’m glad my memory was correct

i’m intrigued to read on wikipedia that tricky did a version of pop muzik – has anyone heard that?

#4 – this is a really good question! I won’t have time to answer it until tomorrow evening or Thursday though (it will give me time to prepare a justification).

“Splat” had lots of sound effects.

Unfortunately, it was a crap single.

Right, that’s two ‘double groove’ records mentioned, and I’ve got both.

OK, how about The Sensual World, Kate Bush. That had one vocal version and one instrumental version. So, they were both the same length, so no ‘waiting for all the silent grooves to finish’ problems. And I don’t got that one.

Following on from Desmond Dekker at the Lewisham Peoples’ Festival 1994 and Boney M at Royal Holloway College Students’ Union 1997, Blondie (or at least Harry and Stein) are the third Popular act that I’ve seen live (at the Brixton Academy, 1990)

The tickets were notably more expensive than other, more contemporary, acts that I’d seen in the same place – over £10! – and the audience was older and more full of tourists than at other gigs I’d been to. I would have probably enjoyed hearing Blondie singles being played in public just as much as seeing them live. The highlight was actually ‘Bright Side’ from her new album, which genuinely did seem to slow the room down and glow strangely. When they had played, some Australian women complained that they hadn’t done ‘Sunday Girl’.

Picture This
Hanging On The Telephone
Heart of Glass
Sunday Girl

I think ‘One Way Or Another’ was a single in the US.

Interesting to see there that at this point a band could become more successful with the later singles from their album. All sorts of reasons for that I suppose but it seems a lot less likely by the end of the 80s.

I’m used to seeing a pop sensation make #1 with their debut (going straight in with it – but in 1978 this was still unheard of and would remain so for some time, as far as distinct artists would go at least) and can’t remember the last time a pattern like that Blondie one was achieved by anyone.

A similar thing happened with ELO’s “Out of the Blue” when the relatively weak “Turn To Stone” was put out as the first single, before the much stronger and obvious “Mr Blue Sky”, “Wild West Hero” and “Sweet Talking Woman”, so it wasn’t unknown even back then.

Sometimes it can backfire if the record company wait too long – e.g. Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday”.

I always quite liked “Sunday Girl” – I mentioned in the HOG thread that I’d rather given up on Blondie after seeing them support Television rather poorly, but by now I was back on side. This was pleasant enough pop, and I would concur that it seemed to strike a chord with girls in particular. Myself, I’d probably rather they had put out “One Way Or Another” instead – now that was a cracking track!

Surely all the fans go out and buy the album rather than the first single taken from it…

The first single from ‘Thriller’ was ‘This Girl Is Mine’!!!

I bought ‘Turn To Stone’ and was a bit let down by it at the time, took a while to grow on me. But it’s no ‘Sweet Talkin’ Woman’

‘Picture This’ felt a little underwhelming at the time too, it got mixed reviews (I preferred the b-side ‘Fade Away and Radiate’) and was out before ‘Parallel Lines’ (which I remember got a bad review in Record Mirror who thought they’d gone too ‘pop’)

#30 – I guess the label thought that Macca was a big enough draw to justify “The Girl Is Mine” being first. Also I guess it was priming the market in a “here be crossover” sense!

LondonLee @ 30: I can’t see Fade Away And Radiate as an obvious number one single, exactly. When I first bought Parallel Lines I didn’t like it much, probably because it was different from everything else on the album in both tempo and mood. Much more album-tracky than everything else. But thirty years on, now that everything else on the album has been done to death (and survived the assault remarkably well, imho) it feels like the outstanding track.

Mike #27: yes, you could win bets on this, “Old Before I Die” was the highest-charting single from the album, as well as being (useless information ahoy!) the last Number 2 single to date under a Conservative government. Much more on Robbie in a few years’ time.

re Marcello #35. Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” would have been a stick-on for number one if it had been released six months earlier. (You could argue that it’s late appearance as a single helped the album, as undoubtedly many thousands of people bought the album because of that song – every mobile DJ needed it, for example.)

Motown had history with Stevie on this sort of thing. How many weeks would “Isn’t She Lovely” have spent at number one if they had released that as the first or second single from “Songs In The Key Of Life”? In this instance they totally missed the boat as David Parton’s rather awful cover would have affected sales, were they to later release the original, which is probably why they never did.

So, if he has a mind to, Stevie can look back on his UK Chart career and see that a film song, a dodgy duet and an ensemble charity song are the only number one singles he had.

It could have been so different.

and heres a link to some mp3s of Blondie live from 1977 when they still sounded spiky

http://www.bigozine2.com/archive/ARrarities06/ARbldfrisco.html

Critic watch:

Blender (USA) – Standout Tracks from the 500 CDs You Must Own (2003)
Blender (USA) – The 1001 Greatest Songs to Download Right Now! (2003)
Bruce Pollock (USA) – The 7,500 Most Important Songs of 1944-2000 (2005)