On March 7, 1983, one of the greatest New Wave songs of all time was released. And it shipped in an unusual record sleeve shaped like a floppy disk, complete with cutouts so the record could show through like the floppy part of an 8- or 5.25-inch computer disk. The song was Blue Monday by New Order.
The sound of Blue Monday
Blue Monday has a distinctive electronic sound. Originally New Order intended it as a programmed instrumental piece. New Order didn’t play encores, which frustrated the audience. Their goal was to create an encore they wouldn’t have to play themselves. They could simply reappear on stage, take a bow, press a button, and slip back off stage.
Unfortunately for New Order, the technology wasn’t quite ready for that. The necessary technology, MIDI, was in development but wasn’t released yet.
Working before MIDI instruments were available, New Order had difficulty getting all of the various instruments playing different parts to synchronize. The need for human intervention led to Blue Monday becoming a song instead, complete with lyrics.
As an electronic song, the sleeve’s resemblance to a floppy disk is appropriate. Rumor had it cutting out the openings on the sleeve was so expensive that their label, Factory Records, lost money selling the record. Later editions skipped the costly cut-out openings. It’s quaint today, but in 1983, the floppy disk represented very high technology, something more people had read about than used at the time.
Blue Monday was a nontraditional pop song in every sense, with long vamping as a result of originally being an electronic piece with no lyrics. In addition, its lyrics have a nonstandard structure, eschewing the normal verse-chorus-verse.
What Blue Monday’s lyrics meant
The lyrics are ambiguous, so searching for their meaning is difficult. Frequently that’s true of great songs. Leaving them ambiguous makes it possible for the listener to fill in the gaps and make the song relatable. The song could be about a romantic relationship ending or already over and in the aftermath stage. Or it could be about a friendship. Arguably it could even contain references to Ian Curtis and Joy Division. Many New Order songs seem to have vague undertones mourning the loss of their former bandmate and friend.
The ambiguity in the lyrics didn’t hurt sales. Blue Monday became the best selling 12-inch single of all time, and in 2021, Rolling Stone ranked it number 235 out of the 500 greatest songs of all time.
Joy Division
Before New Order there was Joy Division, a punk band that took a dark turn and arguably helped invent a gloomy genre of music called goth. Joy Division was a band with a guitarist who could barely play, a drummer who couldn’t keep time, a singer who couldn’t sing, and a bass player who thought he was playing lead. And yet, somehow it all worked. Singer/lyricist Ian Curtis suffered from epilepsy and depression, and his tortured lyrics were an acquired taste, but once you acquired it, it was hard to get enough.
Joy Division only existed for three short years. In those three years they built up a following and recorded two official studio albums along with several non-album singles. Their unreleased debut album was widely available as a bootleg for years. Joy Division’s biggest song, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” became a hit posthumously. Tragically, Ian Curtis took his own life on May 18, 1980, just as Joy Division was about to embark on its first North American tour.
The members of Joy Division had an agreement that if anything ever happened to any of them, they would continue on as a band, but under a different name. After Ian Curtis died, the members of New Order all took turns singing and they recruited Gillian Gilbert as a keyboardist/guitarist to round out the band’s lineup. Joy Division guitarist/keyboardist Bernard Sumner emerged as New Order’s vocalist and lyricist.
After initially rejecting synthesizers, Joy Division relented and started using them in their later work. New Order took that to another level. Electronic instruments and samplers were expensive, but Joy Division’s back catalog sold well enough that New Order could afford them. That led to the transformation from a band who recorded sad three-chord punk songs into an electronica band who recorded dance music.
If you listen closely enough, you can perceive how Love Will Tear Us Apart led to songs like Blue Monday.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.