Is it really 30 years since this was released??!!
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Years ahead of its time really. To me it’s still sounds fresh as it did the day i first heard it at a school disco aged 12!!
I could honestly say that it’s been present at very point of my life through at the school discos, house parties, roller discos, Birmingham Alldayers at various locations, Acid House parties, Remixed on the odd occasion for raves and clubs , edits galore.. However nothing ever beats the original! And I still have my copy from the eighties although not the original artwork sleeve a repress i believe (can’t have it all!!)
At nearly seven-and-a-half minutes, "Blue Monday" is one of the longest tracks ever to chart in the UK, and is the biggest-selling 12" single of all time.
Despite selling well it was not eligible for an official gold disc because Factory Records was not a member of the British Phonographic Industry association. According to the Official UK Chart Company (UK Singles Chart), its total UK sales stands at 1.16 million, and "Blue Monday" came 69th in the all-time UK best-selling singles chart published in November 2012.
The song begins with a distinctive miquaver kick drum intro, programmed on an Oberheim DMX drum machine.
"Blue Monday" was described by the BBC Radio 2 "Sold On Song" feature thus: "The track is widely regarded as a crucial link between Seventies disco and the Dance/House boom that took off at the end of the Eighties."Synthpop had been a major force in British popular music for several years, but "Blue Monday", by encouragement of the band's manager, Rob Gretton, was dance record that also exhibited influences from the New York club scene, particularly the work of producers like Arthur Baker (who collaborated on New Order's follow-up single "Confusion").
According to Bernard Sumner, "Blue Monday" was influenced by four songs: the arrangement came from "Dirty Talk", by Klein + M.B.O.; the signature baseline with octaves came from Sylvester's disco classic, "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)"; the beat came from "Our Love", by Donna Summer; and the long keyboard pad on the intro and outro was sampled from the Kraftwerk song "Uranium", from the Radio-Activity album. The band claimed to have written the song in response to crowd disappointment at the fact that they never played encores.[citation needed] This song, they say, allowed them to return to the stage, press play on a synthesiser and leave the stage again. However, the band since have become noted for playing Blue Monday as an encore.
The artwork is designed to resemble a floppy disk. The single’s original sleeve, created by Factory designer Peter Saville and Brett Wickens, was die-cut with a silver inner sleeve. It cost so much to produce that Factory Records actually lost money on each copy sold. Matthew Robertson's Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album notes that "due to the use of die-cutting and specified colours, the production cost of this sleeve was so high that the single sold at a loss." Tony Wilson noted that it lost 5p per sleeve "due to our strange accounting system"; Saville noted that nobody expected "Blue Monday" to be a commercially successful record at all, so nobody expected the cost to be an issue.
There is a separate reason why New Order probably saw little profit from the single's success, namely the fact that an investment in the Haçienda nightclub swallowed much of the money they made from their hit.
Thanks wiki
