New Order - Blue Monday
In May 1980, the band Joy Division was devastated by the death of lead singer Ian Curtis. The three remaining band members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris, decided they would keep making music together, and a few months later, Gillian Gilbert joined them. They called the band New Order.
New Order is one of the most influential bands of the last four decades. Their song \u201cBlue Monday" came out in 1983, and it holds the record for being the best-selling 12-inch single of all time. Rolling Stone put \u201cBlue Monday\u201d on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and Pitchfork included it in its top 5 best songs of the 1980s.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of \u201cBlue Monday,\u201d in this episode, New Order discusses how they created the song. This episode was produced in collaboration with Transmissions, the official New Order and Joy Division podcast produced by Cup and Nuzzle. We\u2019ve put together this story out of the hours and hours of interviews they\u2019ve recorded, along with a new interview I did with Peter Hook. As you\u2019ll hear the four of them explain, nothing about Blue Monday\u2019s success, or really, even its existence, was something that they planned for.
For more, visit songexploder.net/new-order.