Blue Monday
by New Order
- 128
- BPM
- D minor
- Key
- 7A
- Camelot
- 80
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Gillian Gilbert made a mistake that stayed in "Blue Monday". The band had no MIDI. Engineer Martin Usher designed a circuit to synchronize their synthesizers and drum machine, and the sequence was programmed in binary code. Gilbert wrote it out by hand on a long roll of paper. She accidentally added an extra rest. It threw the sequence slightly out of time. The band liked the effect and kept it.
New Order wrote the song in their rehearsal room in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. The bassline was played on a Moog Source and sequenced on a sequencer built by Bernard Sumner, and an Oberheim DMX supplied the rhythm. They had bought an early sampler, the Emulator 1, and sampled choir sounds from Kraftwerk's "Uranium". To learn the machine they recorded their flatulence and sneezes.
Factory Records released it as a 12-inch on March 7, 1983. Peter Saville and Brett Wickens designed a die-cut sleeve that looked like a floppy disk and carried no readable words, only coded colored blocks. It cost so much to make that Factory lost money on every copy. The single reached number nine in the UK and spent 186 weeks on the UK Independent Singles Chart. It is the best-selling 12-inch single in history.
Blue Monday runs at 128 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.88 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 469 ms. It is in D minor, Camelot 7A, which shares its notes with F major and mixes cleanly with G minor and A minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.