Blue Monday
By New Order
What can I write about one of the most iconic tracks of the 1980s that has not been written before? I want to focus on the meaning behind Blue Monday, the best-selling 12-inch single of all time.
Joy Division ended in 1980, right before their first American Tour, with the tragic suicide of their lead singer Ian Curtis, a story amazingly told by the 2007 movie directed by Antony Corbijn, Control. How can an iconic band end and generate an equally iconic new band? Most likely, the secret lies in the combination of the Manchester legendary music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the personal inspirations of musicians like guitarist/keyboardist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, and drummer Stephen Morris.
When Curtis died, the three remaining members kept producing music under the name New Order, with Gillian Gilbert as an additional keyboardist and guitarist. The band released ten albums between 1981 and 2015, finding the right formula for a gentle transition between the post-punk music Joy Division produced in the late 1970s and the 1980s synth-pop New Order is famous for.
This transition is noticeable in New Order's 1983 album Power, Corruption & Lies, literally a manifesto for the 1980s sound we all are now very familiar with. Their first album, Movement (1981), is a clear evolution of Joy Division's sound and remained based on guitar and bass riffs with additional drum machine beats and Sumner on vocals. When the band visited New York City in 1981, post-disco, freestyle, and electro became a big inspiration for the more considerable change of musical style they had with Power, Corruption & Lies. The band had also started listening to Italian disco to cheer themselves up, while Morris taught himself drum programming.
New Order's definitive transition to their version of dance music happened when Factory Records' nightclub The Haçienda opened its doors in 1982, becoming the first superclub in Manchester. Sumner and Morris composed a track to celebrate the opening titled Prime 5 8 6, a 23-minute instrumental piece that contained rhythm elements that would later surface on the songs Blue Monday and Ultraviolence.
Jumping back to the meaning of Blue Monday, it appears clear that we could speak about one of the first actual mainstream episodes of crossover between genres. The band's previous post-punk experience as Joy Division, combined with a dark nostalgia from the passing of Ian Curtis and the new synth-oriented styles of bands like Kraftwerk (the song uses a sample of Kraftwerk's Uranium) and producers like Giorgio Moroder. But the key to this potent mix is in the development as musicians of Sumner and Morris. A musician's vision is always the key.
The iconic melody of Blue Monday still resonates with millions of people and is still regularly played on the dance floors worldwide. Its Oberheim DMX drum machine intro, synth bass line of the Moog Source, and melody we are so familiar with became a colossal hit almost by accident. New Order never really liked to play encores at their gigs, so the song was planned to allow them to return to the stage, press play on a synthesizer, and leave the stage again. They soon understood that the song could have a different, slightly bigger destiny.
