Listen to the isolated bass and synth for ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order
In the wake of Ian Curtis’ passing in 1980, the remaining members of Joy Division found new hope and a lucrative grieving process in music. The group decided that Joy Division was no more without Curtis and aptly renamed themselves New Order. Back in 1979, Joy Division had welcomed Gillian Gilbert to play with them at one of their live performances in Liverpool as a second guitarist to support Bernard Sumner.
Impressed with her style, the band’s manager Rob Gretton came forth with a great idea: “Rob just rang up one day and went, ‘I’ve got an idea – we should get Gillian in to play guitar,’” drummer Stephen Morris recalled in New Order’s podcast series Transmissions. He continued: “He was dead right because we all found singing and playing impossible at the same time when New Order started. Looking back now, it seems obvious that we needed to get someone else in – sort of, ‘Blimey, why didn’t we think of that?’”
After recruiting Gilbert, New Order became whole. The band moved gradually from Joy Division’s dark, industrial post-punk towards an increasingly synth-induced sound throughout the 1980s. Their most pivotal moment came in 1983 with the release of the club classic, ‘Blue Monday’, which became the best-selling 12” single of all time.
In 1983, computers weren’t particularly commonplace, and programming in music was even rarer. As a group of curious creatives, New Order were particularly interested in the idea of making a song entirely through electronics and computer programming.
In the early 1980s, Bernard Sumner spent his spare time building sequencers; Gilbert later joined him to help develop new ideas using the devices, eventually earning her the title of ‘Synth Queen’. Influenced by their time in New York dance clubs, the group decided to make their new electronic single in a way that married their post-punk sound with a danceable beat – the magnificent result was ‘Blue Monday’.
As Gilbert once wrote of her involvement in ‘Blue Monday’: “The synthesiser melody is slightly out of sync with the rhythm. This was an accident. It was my job to programme 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”.
Gilbert added: “But I accidentally left a note out, which skewed the melody. We’d bought ourselves an Emulator 1, an early sampler, and used it to add snatches of choir-like voices from Kraftwerk’s album Radioactivity, as well as recordings of thunder. Bernard and Stephen [Morris] had worked out how to use it by spending hours recording farts”.
Listen to the groundbreaking single as never before through its isolated synth tracks and Peter Hook’s rolling bass lines below.
