Song Exploder - New Order - Blue Monday

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

In May 1980, the band Joy Division was devastated by the death of lead singer Ian Curtis. The three remaining band members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris, decided they would keep making music together, and a few months later, Gillian Gilbert joined them. They called the band New Order.New Order is one of the most influential bands of the last four decades. Their song “Blue Monday" came out in 1983, and it holds the record for being the best-selling 12-inch single of all time. Rolling Stone put “Blue Monday” on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and Pitchfork included it in its top 5 best songs of the 1980s.To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of “Blue Monday,” in this episode, New Order discusses how they created the song. This episode was produced in collaboration with Transmissions, the official New Order and Joy Division podcast produced by Cup and Nuzzle. We’ve put together this story out of the hours and hours of interviews they’ve recorded, along with a new interview I did with Peter Hook. As you’ll hear the four of them explain, nothing about Blue Monday’s success, or really, even its existence, was something that they planned for.For more, visit songexploder.net/new-order.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. In May 1980, the band Joy Division was devastated by the death of lead singer Ian Curtis. The three remaining band members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris, decided they would keep making music together, and a few months later, Jillian Gilbert joined them. They called the band New Order. New Order is one of the most influential bands of the last four decades. song Blue Monday came out in 1983, and it holds the record for being the best-selling 12-inch single of all time. Rolling Stone put Blue Monday on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time,

and Pitchfork included it in its top five best songs of the 1980s. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Blue Monday, in this episode, New Order discusses how they created the song. This episode was produced in collaboration with Transmissions, the official New Order and Joy Division podcast, produced by Cup and Nuzzle. We've put together this story out of the hours of interviews they've recorded, along with the new interview I did with Peter Hook. As you'll hear the band explain, nothing about Blue Monday's success,

or really even its existence, was something that they planned for. What does the band that used to be Joy Division do now that you're no longer Joy Division? That's drummer Stephen Morris. Obviously, you're a bit numb, really, emotionally. Here's bassist Peter Hook. Rather than deal with the grief around Eve, and death, we just threw ourselves into recording and writing. We just got on with it, and it was a real struggle.

It wasn't anyone's particular fault. This is guitarist and vocalist Bernard Sumner. It was just a difficult transitional period, but it was necessary, you know. The three of us, we were playing together really, really well. But the main problem was that if one of us was going to sing, we had to sing and play at the same time. Bird of the Nooky couldn't do it. So we got Julian in playing guitar and eventually keyboards. Here's Julian Gilbert.

We went to New York. We played at like these really dark clubs with no air conditioning on a tiny little stage. And then we'd go out clubbing after we'd finish because the clubs were out until 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock in the morning. We used to listen to Italian disco, European disco. And it just seemed a lot more fun. Bernard in particular was very excited by all this. I started hearing frequencies that I'd never heard before. A lot of sub-base.

And his ambition really was to make disco records. So the songs that he was hearing, particularly when we were in America, were the ones that he wanted to emulate. So when we came back, we thought, well, why can't we do a track like that? We wanted to hear our song in a sort of disco clubby environment instead of like an alternative band. Blue Monday from start to finish took nearly a year. It started as an instrumental

because we didn't believe in encores. We were so young and idealistic that we thought we've played our set, we've played the songs that we've worked on. Why should anybody want anything else? And then someone came up with an idea of what about if we played the synthesizers after we'd gone off? It was a bit like an adventure because we thought, can we do it,

chain all these parts together, and just have a song that just plays on its own so we could walk off stage. And that was where the idea came from having a keyboard that when you press the button played this instrumental for 10 minutes and then hopefully everyone would be happy and they'd stop moaning at us to do an encore. It was quite exciting though, programming everything.

That's a Moog. This was very much Bernard de Baby. He had the idea from a few disco records, and programmed it because he wanted to hear it programmed. This was in Britannia Row, which was considered to be the state-of-the-art studio in 1981 when we recorded it. In those days, the equivalent, equipment was difficult, shall we say.

You could never imagine how difficult it actually was then, doing the wiring, really nups and bolts of getting things ready. It was a totally mad idea, because we started off with huge sections, and then we didn't have the technology at the time to sequence them altogether. Everything had to be programmed in one massive loop. I saw Blumondy more of a machine

and the different rhythms with it. in it are different gear cogs. So you've got hyats that are going tt, and you've got triplets that go in, and I wanted this sharp clap sound that I'd heard on disco records from the 70s. And then you got the beat. That's the engine.

Recording that as a backing track was very, very arduous. And that's me, that's the bass. It's a six-string bass guitar that I started using in Joy Division. It's actually tuned the same way as a guitar. It's an octave down from EADGB. That's why a lot of early New Order, when we used to play, everybody used to think that those lines were guitar. That's my direct lift from Ennio Morricone.

Eni Morricone was the composer for some of the most iconic spaghetti westerns, including the movie for a few dollars more. Someone was playing it in the rec room, and I heard it. down, down. And I thought, I'll try that. That was the first use of the Joy Division style bass over the synthesizers. We got an emulator, which was like the first.

I'm tempted to say affordable, but it wasn't affordable. It was very expensive. It was a big thing that you could record any sound into. I think you had two seconds of sample. So you could record any sound. up to two seconds and then it would loop the sample. So we recorded farts and sneezes into it and laughed and oh this is fantastic. It was literally the first thing that we did was to sample a fart and go up and down the keyboard.

But that's the sample of a voice, which we liked because it sounded like a melitron. And that's the prophet synthesizer. It was a song that wasn't really a song. It was just a song. song. It was just a lot of electronic things that sounded good. Rob Gretton, our manager, was adamant that we needed to put vocals on it, adamant. And we fought valiantly not to do it. When we lost Ian Curtis, we lost a lot, because he was so good at this, and words came to him so easily and so naturally, he really was the champion of it.

The thing about it is as a band, you've got a position. And we're happy with those roles. And the one job that nobody really wanted suddenly became vacant. It takes a lot to be a singer, particularly there's a singer and then there's a frontman. And Ian was kind of like that. And then when all of a sudden us three had to do it, it was hell. We all had goes at singing sometimes And Bird was quite good

Because you could tell he didn't want to do it But he did it in a kind of half-hearted, disinterested way That was somehow quite charming How does it feel To treat me like you do When you've laid your hands upon me And told me who you are So Bernard ended up getting the short or longish straw

and inherited the curse of the lead singer. Thought I was mistaken. I thought I'd heard your words. Tell me how do I feel? Tell me now, how do I feel? The lyrics were all written together by me, Barney and Steve. It was always the last thing that we did was the voice. vocal and the last thing that we'd do would be the lyric.

And Bernard would actually be in singing while me and Steve was still scribbling lyrics down for him to try. Try this. Try that word. Try this. And I still find it so hard to say what I need to say. But I'm quite sure that you'll tell me just how I should feel today. And then the effect that you're here.

here on Blue Mondi is we would send it through a little bit of spring reverb and then pump the whole lot through the speaker and record it back onto the track. I was mistaken, heard you speak. Tell me how do I feel? Tell me now, how should I feel? Once that was done, it was more or less finished and it was the song. Rob, our manager, Rob Gritton, said, this is going to be a hit.

And we were like, I don't think so. Because we could imagine it at the time. So we didn't recognise or think that Blue Mondi was any different to any of the other songs in stature. The only thing that was different about it was the length. We didn't want to shorten the song into three minutes because we had this song that we thought was just complete. We kept it nine minutes and we were happy to do that.

But of course we couldn't put Blue Monday on the LP. One thing about vinyl was that with albums, you're obviously limited to how much time that you could put on those albums. So it was usually four tracks aside. So it suggested that it should be a standalone single. 12 inch gave you the possibility of having a higher fidelity on the record. And we really went into that detail on Blue Monday. We went into the science of the fidelity of getting as much power and punch on 12.

final as possible. We were aware of the importance of putting a record on in a club and it's sounding really punchy and louder than the other ones. It got voted the number one song by a thousand DJs to rescue a night. If they're having a bad night and they wanted to go off, they put Blume under you. I was in a club in Berlin once, not so many years ago and they were playing a lot of techno and stuff and people were dancing and then they put Blue Moon Monday on and everyone got up. So I've witnessed that. I mean that is such a compliment. Now you can lift the lid of a laptop and you could be in doing a track like Blue Monday within God five minutes. But the most suppose unique thing about Blue Monday is the mistakes. That gave it its unique

edginess. It didn't follow a normal song format. But once those are all pushed up together, they do give off a kind of magic. And now here's Blue Monday by New Order in its entirety. More, visit SongExploder.net. And check out the podcast Transmissions, the definitive story of Joy Division and New Order. I'll link to it on the Song Exploder website, where you'll also find links to buy or stream Blue Monday. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full-length.

And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, her way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast,

like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners.

on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, Rishikesh.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks.

This episode of Song Exploder was made by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Special thanks to Frank Palmer and Cup and Nuzzle and Stuart Wheely and Warner Records. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at SongExploder.net. slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.