English 80s band New Order recounted their behind-the-scenes stories for hit “Blue Monday” on the Song Exploder podcast, covering the song’s conception to release.
LISTEN NOW: New Order unpacks the making of 'Blue Monday' 40 years later on 'Song Exploder' podcast
While it may not seem believable, “Blue Monday” wasn’t meant to be anything special. In fact, the song began as a way to get out of performing an encore when they didn’t have enough original music. The band considered having their own synthesizers "perform" playoff music for them at the end of the show. “That was where the idea came,” recalled bassist Peter Hook, “from having a keyboard that when you press the button, it played this instrumental for 10 minutes and then hopefully everyone would be happy and they'd stop moaning at us to do an encore.”
The idea sounds simple enough from a 2023 lens, but for a live band in 1983, it was quite the undertaking. The effort it would take to make this song already started differentiating it from something to simply help the concert end. New Order’s keyboardist and guitarist Gillian Gilbert told host Hrishikesh Hirway, “It was a bit like an adventure ‘cause 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?”
The band explains in the podcast that, through the use of loops, the newest synthesizers and a guitar-like bassline, they were able to have the upbeat instrumental play itself. The length of the song, at 9 minutes, would make it a stand alone single, but there was one thing missing: a singer.
“It was a song that wasn't really a song,” drummer Stephen Morris recalled. “It was just a lot of electronic things that sounded good.” The lack of a vocalist was an extremely sensitive topic, given the passing of Ian Curtis just three years earlier, back when they were Joy Division. But eventually, the singing leadman role went to Bernard Sumner. Morris said the deciding factor was Sumner’s “kind of half-hearted, disinterested way” of singing, which turned out, “somehow quite charming.”
And thus, one of the most popular 80s club hits was born. “Now you can lift the lid of a laptop, and you could be doing a track like ‘Blue Monday’ within, God, five minutes?” Hook acknowledged. “But the most, I suppose, unique thing about 'Blue Monday’ is the mistakes… once those are all pushed up together, they do give off a kind of magic.”
Check out the full Song Exploder episode for free on the Audacy app, where the musicians specifically dive into that “magic.”
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