S1E8: Blue Monday

Nothing would have stopped us. Nothing did stop us did it. For over four decades, if only ever move forward. There's nothing to go back to, there was no plan, babe. Through tragedy after tragedy and a complete reinvention. I think I brought calmness. It was like it was the compensate of the band that used to be Joey Division. Nobody. They've never really stopped to take a breath. Until now. You were happy not being a normal group. This is Transmissions, the definitive story of New Order and Joy Division. March 1983, New Order released this song. A record which changed everything. It was just an idea waiting to hang really. We got there first. Created by pushing the technology to its limits. It was a bit of a science project really, as well as songwriting. And that's why it sounded so good. It drew on a huge range of disparate influences. This was really gay dance music. And we thought, how can these? Mank Union heterosexuals know about this. And set the clubs a light. And if we're honest, still does. We probably became a hit because of DJs. Club DJs playing it. It's just caught fire. And we were thinking, how can I be dance to this? We choose like an empty dance record really. Blue Monday, the song that never grows old. We forget that what we love as humans, what we react to in our souls, is actually imperfection. And I think it's perfect because it's imperfect. Just being a teenager on the dance floor, high. Just being in a dark, sweaty club in Chicago, dancing my ass off to a new sounding dance record. But let's lift the needle for a moment. We need to go back before Blue Monday became the best-selling 12-inch single of all time. Where did it come from? That song, that beat. For Jillian Gilbert, 1981. Not long after she joined the band. We were used to go out to a lot of clubs in New York. And we sort of just picked up on the music and how wonderful it sounded. And we liked them sort of records that were happening in America. So when we came back, we thought, well, why can't we do a track like that? And I think that's the germ of Blue Monday. We wanted to hear our song in a sort of disco clubby environment. So we decided to go in that direction. New order were enthralled by the power that a hypnotic repetitive, your fabric groove got have on a dance floor. But there was another motivation for creating a tune that would last seven minutes and 29 seconds. The band's hatred of on-course. Peter Huck. The idea was to get a song that we could play on the sequences so people would stop fucking my dream is to do an encore. Which seems really weird and throw away now that it's become as big and as legendary as it has. I didn't know what it was, but we knew how we wanted it to sound. We knew that we had this gig to do it. And it just sort of worked, that's it. But New York in the early 1980s didn't have a lot in common with Manchester at the time. Factories side, there wasn't an emerging subculture of underground clubs. But there was the local disc attack, and then you never to be dismissed. Burned some, no. I remember going to Legends in Manchester on sort of a funk night or something. And they had a fantastic sound system in there with a lot of sub-bay, serious sub-bay. So I started hearing frequencies that I'd never heard before. And there were plays such like Sharon Red and those Kiss Master mixes, Volume 1 and 2. And I could hear all the sub-in frequencies that I'd never heard before. So when we recorded Bloom and I decided that we just got to recreate some of that sub-base on the bass drum. Because it was done using a DMX drum machine, probably the second digital drum machine after a Lindrum. And there wasn't a great deal of bottom end on the bass drum. So I thought, how can we generate it? And we generated it using a pulse from the bass synth and created a subsonic pulse that went under the bass drum. We recorded a botany where I was studio in Islington, which was a studio that belonged to Pink Floyd. And it was actually a very good studio. And they had really good acoustics, and they had rooms off to the left, rooms off to the right where you could pipe stuff through. And my John Snark engineer had the idea of making some of the sounds harder by pumping them through down to the room where they kept the reverb plates. So we did a lot of work on it, a lot of production work to make it sound excellent. In a digit-lage that we have now, it would actually seem almost barbaric. Britannia Roe was quite an old studio, to be honest. The studio was very well maintained, and it had a lot of outboard equipment, but it was all from the 70s. You know, early 70s, if that. So it wasn't the modernist of studios. Mike Johnson was wonderful at running tape loops right around the studio on 10 mic stands and shit like that. He was up for anything, Mike, especially the pumping of sounds to get great ambience, which we used in the Tiled Room at Britannia Roe, which was like the old disused toilet, but a wonderful slapback that really gave it an edge. I think without him we definitely would not have created the record that we did. Other artists at the time were recording a state of the art digital equipment, but few chores or had access to classic old-school recording studio techniques. Creating Blue Monday, the band found themselves achieving something new, harnessing the best aspects of both of those worlds. But for Steve and Maris, working with machines was as much a mathematical endeavour as it was an artistic one. You had to be structured because you were telling machines to play something you were conducting. You had to know a little bit about music, you had to learn a little bit about music, and the way that music got constructed you couldn't just rely on this bit. It feels right to change. Yeah, you know, I need to normally just nods and everybody knew it was the right place, but my machines are like that. These new machines were now at the heart of creating the new old sound. But in Bernard Sumner's mind, they were almost the same thing. I still play Monday more of a machine and the different rhythms within it are different gear cogs. So you've got some 8s high-outs that are going to, then you've got triplets that are going to, and then you've got the beat. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. That's the engine. And it's like a load of gears. That's the way I see it. A load of gears are churning perfectly in sync with each other. And when I was writing it, that's what I thought of. And the bass line's got, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. So there are like pulses that fit in with each other. That's how I see it. Less of a song, more of the beat generator. Salted to turn this beat generator into what fans might recognise as a song, Peter Huck had an idea. During some downtime in the studio, Peter caught a film on the tele, the classics were getting Western for a few dollars more. What captivated him most was any Omoraconis soundtrack to the film, particularly the distinctive bass line. It gave it a melodic content that once you put the vocal on it, it became a song. Now we weren't expecting that. It doesn't feel too treat me like you do. When you flange your hands on me, when I told me you are. So hard, hard, was my stanker. I thought I'd regret your words. Tell me how do I feel? Tell me now how do I feel? Suppose with how good the results were, the band began to push technological boundaries once more, this time when it came to mixing blue Monday. Mike used a stanker. It might have been made by a telephone concolleur transdynamic, which was a three band compressor that would put on a whole mix. We could tweak the whole mix, you know. You probably did it on the plugin very easily now, but in those days it was pretty revolutionary to use things like that. So we really went into it about a lot of time and swelled over it and it worked. Nowadays it would take you about five minutes on a laptop to knock up blue Monday. It's hard to explain how difficult it was to put all the bits together. Yeah, because you don't think of the technical issues when you do in it then, do you? No, it was just, I wonder how are you going to do this? It might be a simple matter to knock out a blue Monday today. theory at least. But for New Order in 1982 it involved renting out expensive studios and the pressure of finishing it before the next tour. We ran out of time in the studio so we had the track ready to go. We wanted to play in Australia so me and Stephen had to stay up all night in the studio and write every little note down to put it all in our sequencer because it was all done on tape so we just counted all the parts and fitted it all on the drum machine and the sequences at the time. It was a great achievement to finish it and I remember that we didn't even have time to celebrate finishing because literally we drove back up the motorway, packed and went to Australia. Next day after we'd finished it. Blue Mundi recorded along with all the other tracks for power corruption and lies a discussion was had about what to do with this strange new creation. Gillian Gilbert again. I don't think it fitted on the album because when you do an album it's sort of a collection of songs that you write at the time because you record in them producing them you do sort of get an atmosphere. So I think Blue Mundi was one of them songs which didn't really fit because it was more experimental and it was a totally mad idea to start with but I remember when we was writing it Rob our manager Rob Gray and said this is going to be a hit and we were like I don't think so. New order manager Rob Gray and love their end product so much. He would tear off all his claws and dance in the studio. He didn't know what he wanted in true A&R man style but he did when he heard it. With Rob Gray and gunning for his new favourite song it was decided back at factory HQ that Blue Mundi would go out as a single two months before the release of power corruption and lies. Factory records Tony Wilson. I'm not great at recognising singles I mean Rob Greten the moment they finished recording Blue Mundi he knew this was the greatest record in history. Me I had no idea at all it just sounds quite good to me. In the days of physical releases the artwork for a single or 12 inch could be as important as the artwork for an album. And for the Blue Mundi sleeve once again Peter Savile found inspiration from an unlikely yet perfect source a data storage device. I went to visit them at their rehearsal studio outside Manchester to discuss power corruption lies in fact to show them the postcard of the flowers and whilst I was there two things happened they played Blue Mundi to me which was just amazing and I liked it so much that they gave me a cassette of Blue Mundi but before I left I saw this fascinating little object sitting on the side and I picked it up and I said what's this and Stephen Morris said it's a floppy disc I'm like oh so that's a floppy disc I'd heard of a floppy disc but you know my life had never given me an encounter with one it was a fascinating object and I said can I have it Stephen said no not at all Stephen gave me a blank floppy disc from a packet I left and I drove back to London I drove back to London this thing to Blue Mundi with this floppy disc on the passenger seat next to me and but a time I got to the M1 the track and the floppy disc had become one in the same and I decided that the cover for this track had to be the floppy disc. Peter and his team created a metal die cut sleeve for the single this was a perfect replica of a floppy disc blown up to accommodate a 12 inch single and running down the right hand side of the sleeve was Peter's no signature strip of multicolor code. In the studio all of them kicking off with new order playing live singing live with Blue Mundi. On the 7th of March 1983 factory released FAC 73 with Blue Mundi on one side and an instrumental version the beach on the other. To promote the record new order were booked on the UK's most popular music show at the time top of the pops on the BBC. Beamed into the homes of millions of viewers this was the mainstream but there was one stipulation from the band. Blue Mundi must be played live. They resisted valiantly so we said we're not playing it then and I remember when we did play it live we all forced ourselves to stay up all night so we'd look rough at top of the pops because we thought that would be funny. New world might have been feeling rough on the night before but the performance of their new creation so reliant on machines rather than instruments was also causing the directors of this live TV show headaches of their own. The cameras was all set up to roll and the producers and directors upstairs and all the audience was in position because they had a live audience and lots of dancing and the camera was on me and the fingers and the keyboards and it was like right it's like the drum machine it was obviously I wasn't doing any singing and it was like no no the group would you do anything really and the camera went at his little microphone said they don't move I think we've got a problem we played it awfully and it went down ten places and we were delighted you know it was like the antithesis of every other group on top of we were laughing at those groups. Blue Mundi was a feat of engineering in the studio but playing it live was a challenge in itself. We started off with huge sections of sequences and then we didn't have the technology at the time to sequence them all together so we used Mike Johnson to edit all the tape together in sections and it was like oh let's have everything change at the same time because that's sort of weird people don't do that and you could only do that with the sequences at the time we used to record a bank of music and the sequencer and then while that was going along we had another sequencer where we used to have to change the dials ready for that one to finish and that one to take over that's what it's a bit mad on stage because we just twiddling waiting for you know these sections to come in and out so it sounded like one continuous stream of a sequence there. Despite the shake of performance on top of the pops Blue Mundi was unstoppable it scored new order top ten hitting the UK and across Europe and the more earplate received the more popular it became. Soon fans of music journalists alike were looking for the origins of this new sound. Hi my name is Neil Tennant and in 1983 I was working as a music journalist at Smash Hits magazine but in my spare time I was also writing songs with Chris Lowe and as the pet shop boys he would shortly make our first record. While I was sitting in the Smash its office one day when the magnificent 12 inch of Blue Mundi came in I put it on the office record player and the bump bump bump bump bump octave baseline starts. Well Chris and I had this little studio we used to go to in Camden and we'd written something so similar I always remember it was called Keeping My Fingers crossed and keeping my fingers crossed and I thought they've just done it they've done it because this was really gay dance music and I thought how can these mancunion heterosexuals know about this they've beaten us to it it was quite a big moment but of course it's a brilliant record. Years later when we were working with Burnett Summoner on Electronic of course we discovered that we all had very similar record collections and had been taking inspiration from them. What Neil Tennant had perhaps forgotten was that these heterosexual mancunions had recently opened a club in Manchester called the Hasse Ender. I would then ask the ender playing on a Saturday night. Its first DJ Hugh and Clark had recently fallen in love with an Italian disco record by a group called Klein and MBR. But on a Wednesday night we had a soul club over on the other side of town a place called Legend Night Club the DJs at the time with Mike Shafton calling Kurti. On one of the track that they used to play in there with the Client and MBR Dirty Talk and this is one of those two-door house tracks we played it. It entered the dance floor we kept on playing it and over a course of time a couple of months people got into it people started dancing to it it became a really really big track and so I thought I'd played in the Hasse Ender. I tried it over a couple of weeks it worked it got bigger and bigger and it became like the number one tune in the Hasse Ender. I got low to request for it. Eventually at some point I remember hooky coming into the DJ box and asking if they could borrow my copy of Klein and MBR. I lent it to them and they had it for a couple of weeks and then when they returned it, they gave me a white oval carpet of it. Blue Monday. So I played Clan in MBO and then played Blue Monday after it. The reaction was instantaneous. It was one of the first tracks that got played in the half the end of the kind of like unified everybody in the club, you know. It was obvious that it would become a big hit. The power of repetitive electronic beats was not something discovered by discolored producers. The SARS can be traced back a little further. Some thought a certain German electronic band might have been an influence on Blue Monday too. I always said this house in his field, Roach's Dean McElsfield down the phone goes and he says, "Hi, there's somebody from Kaffirc." Anyway, it wasn't Ralph, it wasn't ever. The band was like to know how you achieved the bass drum sound on Blue Monday and I said, "Do it." It was really exciting. Understandably, the title of the track hasn't escaped scrutiny. The words Blue Monday don't appear anywhere in the lyrics. So where did they come from? Steve and Maurice was reading a book at the time, Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, A.K.A. goodbye to Blue Monday. And Peter Huck, as always, loved a 1953 song that shows the title. That's Dominic, you had a song called Blue Monday, although Steve, I know it's got a completely different story about that. Something to do with Kurt Vonnegut, that's not my memory of it. Wherever the name came from, the release of Blue Monday was a pivotal moment not just for the band, but for music itself. It was originally released as a 12-inch single. We mentioned it became the biggest selling 12-inch single of all time. But if you're under 30, you would be forgiven for thinking, "What's a 12-inch single?" And what's it significance to this story? My E.C.A. Sarikas, A.K.A. stereo mic, is a musicologist at the London College of Music. A 12-inch single, it was effectively a vinyl format that allowed you to do a longer piece, around 7 minutes, 7.30. It was something that was used very much in the dance/club worlds, so it was a format that DJs would use to take an existing track and prolong it. This would all be done by cutting analogue tape, you know, repeating sections, sometimes even when manipulating sections a little bit. And that would give you a version of the track that was longer, and very functionally useful for the dance floor. Because it would mean that DJs could have a longer intro to match the tempo to the previous records and gradually mix that in and, you know, keep the dance floor audience dancing for longer. The advent of the 12-inch record helped DJs to create a continuous beat throughout the night. And arguably, Lou Munder is the link between the dance halls of 60s Jamaica and the super clubs of a beat that today. The acetates and the dabs that were used in regular music, which became dark, was very much a day-to-day experiment of changing the multitracks of regga sounds into a new format, into a new version, effectively creating a new style of music, that they would test every night in the dance floor and check what works with the audience, and then go back to the studio and change it again. So those pioneering practices come from Jamaica. And this was something that the Jamaican immigrants who were populating places like New York were starting to do both in hip-hop, like in the hands of Cool Herk, but also in the hands of disco DJs who were starting to extend those instrumentals and eventually start putting drum machines and synthesizers under those disco sections that have been copied and repeated to make them sounding better for the dance floor, but also to prolong them and then to create change. Heavy, how to transport final records might not be the preferred format for more DJs performing today. But nearly all agree that the 12 inch is the real deal. But perhaps surprisingly, for Bernard Sommner, the gramophone record is not all it's cracked up to be. I know people love vinyl, but believe you me, it isn't actually better. You've got to fight against it, particularly if you want a lot of subsonic bass, you've got to print it on 12 inch, keep the amount of time that it plays for down shots possible. If you want the bass because the bass kicks wider grooves and the record can't handle them. With the single proving to be such a big hit for the band and after all the years of financial struggle, now was the time for the rock and roll lifestyle of private jets and country mansions. Well not quite. With a hasy-end-a-hemaging cash, Bluemond didn't prove to be the cash-cone you ordered hot for initially at least. But in the nearly 40 years since its release, what's undisputed is how much the track remains a firm favour in clubs across the world. It's a guarantee, Dan's for filler I think. Bernard Sommner again. I've witnessed that myself was in a club in Berlin once, not so many years ago and they were playing a lot of techno and stuff and people were dancing and then they put Bluemond on the arm and everyone got up literally everyone. If I nearly broke my leg because of it, I did. It was so crowded, the dance floor that stumbled over a little table and nearly broke my leg so I've witnessed that. I started to hang around like a vampire with all these young DJs and every bloody DJ, no matter how young he is or how old he is from Karl Cox to bloody Skrillex or whatever, you know the first thing they say to you is Bluemond, that made me, that's inspired me like oh god, it's really weird thing to live with but what a compliment is. Puny Dijon is a DJ as well as a producer and musician. She can remember the track going down a storm in Chicago in the early days of house music. I grew up in a really crazy time. It was the beginning of house music culture. It's a very musical town. There was a lot of industrial clubs, a lot of video bars and new wave clubs so I think my first introduction to Bluemond was via the video at a bar called Berlin which was a queer bar. As a lot of people know, Chicago is very segregated and so house music culture was predominantly black and queer people that created music and a culture for themselves but there was a lot of like any movement sort of like what was happening in New York when you had hip-hop colliding with new wave so when Blondie was doing rapture and she had rab and then Jean-Michel Bosquette was in the video, that's pretty much how Chicago was and so we had clubs called like Neil and Berlin and you know some of these industrial clubs and so there was all this cross-pollination so my first introduction to New Order were in house music. Since the track was first played in those clubs in Chicago in the 1980s there have been countless remixes in 1988 factory released the single again. A remix of the original by none other than legendary producer Quincy Jones who was hoping to sign the band at the time. One of the greatest compliments we were ever paid was when we asked Quincy Jones if he'd do a remix of Bluemond and he was adamant that he couldn't do it, he couldn't better it and of course we laughed it off at the time you know in the folly of youth. Well he said that and think wow what a compliment you know when he did do a remix because we forced him to do it and it didn't sound that different and you know he said to us one of the reasons he signed us because he felt that we were great producers. But why exactly do producers love the track so much? What is it specifically about Bluemond? It leaves icons like Quincy Jones, Slapjord. Just being a teenager on the dance floor, high, just being in a dark swity club in Chicago, dancing my ass off to a new sounding dance record. For producer Jarls Martin it's the song simplicity that makes it such a gem. It is an amazing record. I tell you what make great producers and great records and I wouldn't include myself in this, a people that can be economical. If you think about Bluemond has very little going on in it, it's just brilliantly done. It's the same as you know listen to Billy Iage's record now, it's really well produced or listen to Dr. Dre and Eminem they're brilliantly produced because there's nothing it's very simplistic and Bluemond is like that. Bluemond just has a driving rhythm brilliantly programmed in the days where normal could program. Think about that I mean like none of us had an idea to do it and they did it and came out with something that hasn't been bettered. There's an era of clocking they call it clocking with machines where things are now too much in time and I wonder whether I'd never have been able to do it but one of the Bluemond is actually perfectly in time. As a rhythm track you know if that was done now it would be really precise and I think that we forget that what we love as humans what we react to in our souls is actually imperfection and I think it's perfect because it's imperfect. But with the vast array of apps at our disposal to create digital music surely it would be a doodle to make a Bluemond in just a few hours on the latest smartphone. The Steven suggested earlier are what day. Stereo Mike again. I would say that a lot of what we do today is we fight the sterile nature of perfection that we have been able to achieve. Everything has become quite clean and sterile and a lot of us are going back to vintage techniques to bring a little bit of flavor into the music making process and into the sound making process and I think tracks like that that's really captured the pulse of the moment, contain all of those accidents inside them. So I think Blue Monday and its magic is very much a product of its time. There's a lot of ghosts in the machine, there's a lot of incidents, accidents, happy accidents as we call them in the studio, which the visionary musicians that new order are were happy to grab, to capture and to incorporate. It's something I actually often struggle to teach my students and I take them out of the computer onto older equipment and after you know a few sessions they are all quite inspired about the difficulty and the inspiration that difficulty brings. DJ Ampidusa Crystal Claire. I heard Blue Monday because I think everybody here is Blue Monday as they're growing up through some facet of the world, you know what I mean? My friends were quite heavily into Joy Division, I was more into Metal Music growing up but it was joining the dots of just reading the Bacchus CDs, reading magazines from anime and all this kind of stuff to learning that Joy Division went to become new order and then my fascination grew with learning about the Manchester sound predominantly and stuff that was coming out of the Hasse End and when I was 1617 that I guess what pushed me towards learning about early Chicago House and I loved listening to Boogie Records because Boogie Records had like different elements occurring every like 15 seconds and the sounds were fascinating. I think with new orders specifically they had that at the helm because they have acoustic elements and then you know Gilliam will be playing some crazy synth line on top of like what to me sort of sounded like maybe a Simmons or a Lindrum Beast or an Aito Ace and as I grew to Prokuma Music producer my fascination grew deeper and deeper and I think that's a huge reason also why I like Music of that era because it was that cross-pollination between studios becoming a lot more digitally refined but the guys that were writing the music were coming from a band perspective so it was this interesting clash of heads where it was extremely experimental. I think I play a new order song every set I don't play Blumund anymore because I played it to a point of no return and I just felt like I was overdoing but new order just made timeless music because they managed to make crossover dance music that just appeals to everyone but still has its core integrity and that punk element that Joy Division has. Fans love it, DJs love it, musicians love it, producers love it but what about Ian Curtis? What would he have made of Blumund? Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris. No, he needed me to beat you, did he? Do you think so? I bet he would. I bet he wouldn't have liked it. You got craftwork stringy types things. I like that bit. Yeah. Well, there's a bit of for everyone, isn't it? Yeah, all right. Maybe he didn't like some of it. No, seriously, I mean, we did like George O. Marauder stuff and I remember when we sat in a cafe, he knocked in girl and that's some sort of George O. Marauder record came on and they said it wouldn't be good to do something like this. So he probably wouldn't like it, really. Oh, Ian said that. Yeah. Oh, you would. Of course. You weren't there. If Ian could have had a hand in making Blumund day, would he have done anything different? Peter Huck. I think Ian would have put a fantastic vote on it and I think maybe it probably would have been a little bit darker but in my opinion, probably better for it. Blumund day went on to sell over a million copies. It's been remixed and re-release by the band twice. It's been sampled, it's been covered, it's been featured in countless films and TV shows. But despite how instantly recognisable it is, the track still manages to sell new. And for Peter Huck, you can hear not just the influence of Blumund day but everything New Order has achieved at this point as not one but two bands. Most music these days is in the New Order vein. If a band doesn't sound like joy division and they sound like New Order and even if you look at a record in the way that Rihanna does it, or all these 30 seconds from Mars and all these American bands do it, if it's the combination of rock and dance instruments and yeah, we'd play a major and I'm very proud of that. But the New Order story doesn't end here, if anything, it's just getting started. Blumund in May have been a high point but it's by no means the only time New Order created a milestone in music. And the Hasse Ender? Well, you might know that things got complicated. What's more, Ian's death and the pain they endured to get to this point wasn't to be the only loss they had to overcome. Ian's death didn't stop us getting all the equipment stolen, didn't stop us, Rob's death didn't stop us telling his death, didn't stop us and nothing stopped us because there was no day job you see. There was nothing to go back to, there was no planned date, no other option. So I think we would have carried on until we either starved or died of dehydration. That was Transmissions, the definitive story of Joy Division and New Order. Well, part of it. As we say, the story doesn't end here. But for now, I'm Maxine Peake and this has been a cup and nozzle production for Warner Music and New Order. This series producer was Craig Templeton Smith, additional production by Joe Foley, Frank Lockier Palmer, Sad Rabbis and Richard K. Thanks to Peter Savole, Becca Bolton and Andy Robinson from Prime Management for New Order, James Masters, Stuart Wheelie and Tom Gallagher at Warner Music and of course, Bernard Gilliam Peter and Steven. Archive courtesy of James Nice, channel 4, BBC, ITV Granada and Mary Harron, excerpt of Bernard Summers BBC 6 Music first time interview courtesy of the BBC. And remember kids, dreams never end.