NEW ORDER Had A 12″ BLUE MONDAY Today 40 Years Ago
7 March 2022
Manchester‘s electro-pop-rock giants NEW ORDER released their most famous and
most successful single ever BLUE MONDAY 40 years ago today, on 7 March 1983
through iconic label Factory Records.
The single’s unique packaging was designed by Peter Saville and Brett Wickens.
It features a die-cut sleeve designed to resemble a 5+1⁄4-inch floppy disk. It cost
so much to produce that Factory Records actually lost money on each copy sold,
nobody expected “Blue Monday” to be a commercially successful record at all,
so nobody expected the cost to be an issue.
In the UK it has sold 1.16 million copies in all formats, including the 1988 and 1995
re-releases. Sales of the original 1983 12-inch release account for the bulk of the total,
at over 700,000 copies. It has more than 370 million streams, so far, on Spotify.
The 7″ format
Bassist Peter Hook said afterward that the song was stolen from
the Donna Summer song “Our Love” a B-side that also appeared on
her Bad Girls album
.
Gillian Gilbert (keyboards) revealed in 2013: “The synthesizer melody is slightly
out of sync with the rhythm. This was an accident. It was my job to program the entire
song from beginning to end, which had to be done manually, by inputting every note.
I had the sequence all written down on loads of A4 paper Sellotaped together the length
of the recording studio, like a huge knitting pattern. But I accidentally left a note out,
which skewed the melody.”
Boom boom boom.
How does it feel
When you treat me like you do…
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