Blue Monday

The most important 12" of all time?

12" single of New Order's Blue Monday

New Order

Blue Monday

Power, Corruption and Lies, 1983

Factory Records

An American man called Disco and a European lady called Electronic had brutal sex. They had a baby known as American Dance; she was gorgeous, she was slick and she was dirty.

All the boys tried to reproduce with American Dance, but eventually she fell in love and had a child of her own. The father was from Macclesfield…

New Order rekindled the ashes of Joy Division and was struggling to find its feet on the musical map. The year is 1983 and eye-liner spandex/ space suit wearing public school quiff types are the main exponents of the British dance scene.

This working class quartet with their roots in desolate post-punk grunge simply revved up their synthesisers, Moogs and drum machines to create a seminal dance symphony still held in high regard across the world.

It’s not often that musicians from this humble island manage to break into America and when they do it’s usually a result of an unprecedented hit, constant touring or spirit neutralising appearances on graveyard slots on local radio. New Order weren’t even trying; they admit the melody is out of time and they only wrote it because encores were becoming a pain.

Keyboard player Gillian Gilbert was awarded the unenviable task of

Overheim DMX drum machine

introducing the beast by programming an Oberheim DMX drum machine which pounds that distinctive semi-quaver intro before a slightly off-synch synth melody brings it to life.

Singer Bernard Sumner actually built the Powertran Sequencer used to develop the synths and the synth bass harmonies later in the song. He must have felt his work was done by this point so decided to sing the lyrics in a deadpan, atonal barritone.

And it wouldn’t be New Order without Peter Hook plastering on bass effects. He self-styles an underlying Moog Source bass track before layering his own bass leads on top which make the listener feel they’re in the eye of a cheap sci-fi storm.

Moog Source keyboard/ synthesiser

Blue Monday is atypical of most hit songs which explains it’s crossover success. It does not feature a standard verse-chorus structure and a lengthy introduction is followed by first and second verses which are contiguous, separated from the third verse only by a brief series of sound effects.

After the irreversable perpetuation of the MP3, Blue Monday will forever be the biggest selling 12” single in Britain with mass appeal elsewhere. Legendary producers such as Quincy Jones requested to go to town on the record in later years making it a mammoth hit across the musical spectra.

The record brought credibility to the dance. In Britain it took dance music off the middle shelf onto the bottom, accessible to all and now with the unbridled transnational appeal only the best records have. A dance record for guitarists to try their hand at, music oft resurrected in years since. And it doesn’t even have a vocal melody.

Made with a host of machines usually reserved for electro toffs, Blue Monday was dance music for the masses created by tech-savvy ex-punks. A guitarist from Macclesfield created his own machine to emphasise a bass line, already layers thick and played by one of the best in the business. Geeks salute New Order.