WATCH: New Order Reveal How BLUE MONDAY was Made

March 7, 1983, New Order shocked the music world with the release of 12-inch single, "Blue Monday." The records arrived in a sleek die-cut sleeve designed by the famous Peter Saville to resemble a computer floppy disk. There are no words to be found on the sleeve, but a special color code that spells out the band and track information. The music inside was just a progressive, a stark amalgamation of electronic music influences crammed into one undulating instrumental tune. Back in 2020, members of New Order sat down to discuss what went into making that groundbreaking musical moment in time, collected into this neat and tidy eight-minute video.

"We wanted to hear our songs in a sort of disco, clubby environment, so we decided to go in that direction," keyboardist Gillian Gilbert laughs matter-of-factly in the clip. "Which is very upbeat, and I think it just completely changed our outlook."

"I remember there wasn't a great deal of bottom end on the bass drum, so how can we generate it?" Bernard Sumner recalls of creating that dance-floor beat in the video. "We generated it using a pulse from the bass synth, and created a subsonic pulse that went under the bass drum. And I wanted this sharp clap sound I'd heard on dance records, disco records from the '70s."

Even Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys drops in to add his own testimonial, describing how he and Chris Lowe were working on a track back in the early '80s when "this fabulously packaged New Order record came in" that took a similar thought into the stratosphere: "This is so much what Chris and I were trying to do."

Watch the very entertaining video below.