After Joy Division came to an untimely end following the sad death of its chief, Ian Curtis, a new band rose from the ruins. New Order featured former Joy Division members Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris, alongside Gillian Gilbert joining on keyboards. They would come to epitomise the passion and creativity of the Manchester music scene, continuing the legacy left by their era-defining predecessor.
But New Order became far more than just another band; they fronted a movement – placed front and centre in the Factory Records catalogue – while almost single-handedly bank rolling the inspirational (but ultimately ill-fated) Hacienda nightclub.
Despite many tales and tall stories, they also hold the record for the biggest selling 12” single of all time… or do they?
We’re actually old enough to remember hearing the very first play of Blue Monday by John Peel, on his late night Radio One show. An industrious and forward-thinking friend even had the good sense to record it to cassette, so that we could hear it on a loop the very next day.
Blue Monday was the single that really brought New Order to the attention of the mainstream, but it did so at a cost.
Firstly, the band did not want to truncate the track, leaving it in its full 7:29 state for release. There was no way that this would fit on a 7” single, so it had to be pressed to a full 12” single instead.
While the release is generally recognised as the biggest selling 12” single of all time, Factory Records were an independent label, and without membership of the British Phonographic Institute (BPI), their sales record could not be acknowledged officially.
But at least the record company were making serious profits? Right?
Not quite! The initial release of the 12” single featured a silver cardboard inner sleeve, with a black outer sleeve, made to look like a computer floppy disk, complete with three cut-out holes to mimic a disk’s design.
Ironically, the cutting of these three holes upped the cost-per-unit for each record sold, meaning that with the sale of each record, Factory Records made a 10p loss.
While undeniably a creative powerhouse, business acumen was not a Factory hallmark.
This also explains why later releases of the single moved to a one-sleeve black cardboard design, with no cutouts.
But what price is art, we hear you cry? The storied making and production of Blue Monday was replete with a number of genuine mistakes and happy accidents, along with a sizeable amount of inspiration from other artists and records.
We have to begin with the drum track, programmed by drummer Stephen Morris, who was (and continues to be) incredibly proficient when it comes to music technology.
That being said, it seems that the best version of the track was wiped when the mains cable was… er… accidentally yanked out from the rear of the Oberheim DMX Drum Machine by Stephen’s foot…
“He spent all day programming a backing track and then he caught a power cable to the DMX drum machine with his bloody foot,” Bernard Sumner recalled in an interview with GQ in 2012. “He ripped the power cable out and lost all the drum programming. So we had to start again on the drums. We managed to get most of it but we lost the original drum for Blue Monday. It was different. It’s funny that it’s become one of our most famous songs”
Even so, the drum track is heavily influenced by the work of Giorgio Moroder, and specifically the Donna Summer track, Our Love (released as the B-side to Sunset People in 1980).
Moroder employed a delay to create a 16th note kick drum effect, which is recreated at the beginning of Blue Monday, but in a fully programmed form.
Listen to the kick sound carefully and you can hear a short and subtle reverberation of the sample. The kick element was played out through the main monitoring at Britannia Row studios, before the room’s reverberation was captured via microphones.
The legendary bass sound on the track is supplied by a Moog Source synthesizer. Released in 1981, the Source was the first synth to use digital parameter access, allowing easy storage of patches, while maintaining a sound which was unmistakably Moog, albeit with only two VCOs.
“It was an exploration into pure electronic music, so we took the machines to the limit to see what we could do with them,” Bernard Sumner told GQ. “What we could do with them was very basic at the time, so it was making the most out of what little gear we had.”
The bassline itself does sound characteristically familiar, in part thanks to its tight programming alongside the drums which was inspired by numerous disco and club recordings.
Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel from 1978, was clearly an inspiration here, sporting an exceptionally similar bass part. The Blue Monday bass part begins with a F, to a C and finally a D, before altering the sequence slightly, replacing the note F with a G.
If we think about the harmonic structure of the song, there is an argument that the song remains on a single chord of D minor for its entirety. The movement of the bass part below it merely helps to maintain interest, as does the directly associated line, which is played above it.
According to keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, she made a subtle error in the programming of one of the upper synth parts, which resulted in the part being slightly out of sync with the bass and drums. Nonetheless, it was left as-is to make a characterful part of the final arrangement.
Blue Monday is also one of the first commercial releases to take advantage of the E-mu Emulator 1 sampling keyboard. Offering a mere 4 seconds of sampling, the band used the Emulator at key points in the track. Apparently the first thing they sampled was… you guessed it… a fart! So much for artistic credibility and intent.
The infamous thunderclap that we hear halfway through the track, emanated from the Emulator. More contentiously, the beautiful choir sound, which we hear at various points in the song, is a direct sample of the electronic choir sound from Uranium by Kraftwerk.
The original motivation behind Blue Monday stems from the band’s desire to get around the problem of an encore when playing live.
Much like the concept where Kraftwerk had imagined that robots would perform their concerts for them, New Order came up with the idea of walking on stage at the end of a show, pressing a button, and letting the machines play an encore, while they went back to their dressing room to enjoy a beer.
Of course, this was reliant upon technology, which left bassist Peter Hook out in the cold.
His musical contribution was inspired by Ennio Morricone, and specifically the score to the film A Few Dollars More. In typical Hook style, he treated his bass like a semi-acoustic guitar, adopting a similar musical poise to the Spaghetti Western score.
In terms of melodic content, Blue Monday shares many traits with previous songs, and even New Order releases. Just listen to one of their previous singles, Everything’s Gone Green, to hear the similarity in the melodic line, alongside other elements of this song.
As the song climbed the UK charts, it was merely a matter of time before the BBC TV show Top of the Pops came calling. But, in typical New Order fashion, they weren’t prepared to simply mime in this post-punk TV world.
After weeks of back-and-forth, the BBC finally relented to the band playing Blue Monday live, in what has gone down in history as one of the most enigmatic and un-energetic performances in pop history…
To make matters worse, their aforementioned thunder and choir samples were loaded into the sampler in the wrong order, meaning that instead of hearing the thunderous clap at the appropriate point in the song, we heard an off-key choir instead! The band’s reaction? They just laughed it off and put it down to experience.
“Blue Monday has a sonic impact that very, very few records have,” Peter Hook told NME. “It really was a gift, and it was quite ironic – and quite sad, really – that we stole it off a Donna Summer B-side. It is a weird song. It’s become one of Manchester’s greatest records.”
