How Kurt Vonnegut, Fats Domino and flatulence inspired New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’
It’s a regrettable phenomenon, but some bands do become synonymous with their most successful songs. Although they do indeed have several other excellent tunes in their catalogue, this maxim could certainly be applied to New Order and ‘Blue Monday’. The track was released as a single from the band’s second album, Power, Corruption and Lies, in 1983.
There are several inspirations behind ‘Blue Monday’, and they come from all over the place. Thematically, the song is said to be about an abusive relationship of some sort, although Peter Hook once admitted that Bernard Sumner – who wrote the song’s lyrics – had been on LSD when he penned the words.
As reported by Songfacts, Hook said: “I don’t think there is a great deal to tell behind the lyrics if I am going to be brutally honest! It was just one of those things where Barney just went for it, and the rest was history.” Regardless of their inspiration, the lyrics evidently came from somewhere beyond the band’s usual conceptual understanding.
The song’s title, though, appears to have two particular sources of inspiration. The first looks to be from a novel by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut and one of its particular illustrations. New Order drummer Stephen Morris had been reading Vonnegut’s seventh novel, Breakfast of Champions, which contains an illustration reading: “Goodbye Blue Monday” and refers to the notion that the invention of the washing machine would drastically improve the lives of housewives.
However, Peter Hook also once explained that they had nicked the song’s title from a Fat’s Domino tune: “I went in and jammed the bass; I stole a riff from Ennio Morricone. Bernard went in and jammed the vocals. They’re not about Ian Curtis; we wanted it to be vague. I was reading about Fats Domino. He had a song called Blue Monday, and it was a Monday, and we were all miserable, so I thought, ‘Oh, that’s quite apt.'”
Yet these were still not the only inspirations for ‘Blue Monday’. Another hilariously comes from the act of flatulence. Keyboardist Gillian Gilbert once noted that the iconic synthesiser piece of the song was something of an accident. She said: “The synthesiser 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,” Gilbert added. “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 had worked out how to use it by spending hours recording farts.”
