A machine built instead of an encore
The kick does not ask permission. It lands, dry and enormous, and a sequencer answers a fraction late, as if the song had decided to limp on purpose. Then the choir stab, bright and slightly unreal, and Peter Hook’s bass, which refuses to behave like a rhythm instrument. Blue Monday is seven and a half minutes of club physics. Released by Factory in March 1983, it does not fade in. It starts already at work, a record designed to sound louder than whatever the DJ played before it.
Bernard Sumner, Hook, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert wrote it fast, around an Oberheim DMX they had barely learned. The practical brief was almost comic. They were tired of being shouted at for skipping encores, so they imagined a piece the machines could play while the band left the stage. It did not stay that simple. At Britannia Row in London, with engineer Michael Johnson, they chased the science of the twelve-inch: more level, more low end, a punch that a club system would reward. Hook wrote the climbing bass in the room. The sequences were long because the gear, for once, allowed length. They mixed it around the start of 1983 and let it out as FAC 73.
Peter Saville’s sleeve, a die-cut floppy disc, cost so much that the story goes they lost money on every early copy. Factory’s idea of promotion was close to none. None of that stopped the record. DJs heard the sub-bass and the refusal to resolve, and the twelve-inch became the best-selling of its kind. It was not on the first pressings of Power, Corruption & Lies. It did not need an album to live in. On stage it grew teeth, the machines and the humans arguing about who was in charge.
It’s not really our best song, but it was designed like a machine to make people dance.
(Bernard Sumner, Mad World)
Listeners who wanted another Joy Division were told, politely and then not, to look elsewhere. Sumner has been clear that the point was the discomfort. He did not want to spend his singing life as a sketch of Ian Curtis. Blue Monday is the argument made in rhythm. The lyric is small beside the architecture. The feeling is not. A blue Monday, in the old phrase, is the day that will not start. Here the day starts whether you are ready or not, and it does not stop for a chorus.
What remains is the limp that became the groove. That late sequencer, the kick that seems to hit the chest before the room, the bass that finally climbs like a decision. Dance music would spend decades refining this lesson. New Order stated it once, on a sleeve that looked like office equipment, and then had to play the thing for the rest of their lives. The button they hoped to press still requires four people. The machine, it turned out, had a band inside it.
