“Blue Monday” by New Order

"Blue Monday" came out on Factory Records in March 1983 as a 12-inch single, and New Order wrote and produced it themselves, all four of them: Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert. It never needed an album, though some cassette and CD editions of Power, Corruption & Lies, the band's second studio album, carry it.

Here was an English rock band walking straight onto the dance floor and refusing to leave: Eurodisco pulse, synth-pop chill and alternative-dance stamina, pieced together from ideas the band had soaked up from other people's records and turned into something cold, hypnotic and entirely their own. The flip, "The Beach", runs the track back as a mostly instrumental version. Then there was the sleeve. Peter Saville and Brett Wickens designed a die-cut jacket made to look like a floppy disk, with not one word on the front, just rows of colored blocks in a code Saville invented to spell out the band, the title and the label.

The original stayed on the UK indie chart for 186 weeks, a stretch bettered only by Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart", and it remains the biggest-selling 12-inch single ever, with the original 1983 pressing alone accounting for more than 700,000 copies in Britain. The band remixed it in 1988 and again in 1995, and the 1988 version went to the top of the American dance chart. In 2022 Rolling Stone ranked it 18th among the greatest dance songs of all time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.