Songfacts®:

• The Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote songs about girls named Tuesday, but The Undertones came up with one about a lady named Wednesday.
  
  The Undertones came up with lots of characters for their songs, and in this one, Wednesday Week is a girl who breaks the singer's heart. It runs a compact 2:16, but is packed with ambiguity as we're left to wonder if this lady exists at all, or if she's only in his head:
  
  Wednesday Week, she loved me
  Wednesday Week, never happened at all
• The Undertones formed in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the mid-'70s, a challenging time and place for a band as their Catholic fans avoided shows in Protestant areas and vice versa.
  
  They had a series of modest UK hits in 1978 and 1979, notably their debut single "Teenage Kicks." In 1980, they released "Wednesday Week" as the second single from their second album, Hypnotised. By this time they were getting lots of positive press in the UK, who hailed them as the fresh sound of the post-glam era. They only managed one more Top 40 hit (the ambitiously titled "It's Going To Happen!") and never made inroads in America, despite tour of that country, including one with The Clash.
• Feargal Sharkey was the group's lead singer. He said that "Wednesday Week" was the first Undertones song that his parents liked.
• The song was written by the group's guitarist, John O'Neill.
• Elvis Costello wrote and recorded a completely different song called "Wednesday Week" that first appeared as the B-side of his "Talking In The Dark" single in 1978. It's likely that The Undertones poached the title from the Elvis track.