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Smiley Lewis, who for journalist Tony Rossell was “the unluckiest man in New Orleans” had some sad Mondays. It’s all Fats Domino’s fault who made him live in his shadow. It also happened with Blue Monday, the song written in 1953 by Dave Bartholomew and published the following year by Lewis. It took Domino’s version to reach the top ten on the Billboard charts and make it a classic. So much so that, thirty years later, another song with the same title would mark “the dawn of digital music and computer-generated music in Britain”, in the words of Manchester music guru Tony Wilson.
New Order
New Order survived. They are, in fact, the three members of Joy Division who were orphaned by singer Ian Curtis, who took his own life in May 1980. Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris are joined by the latter’s wife, Gillian Gilbert. They released their debut album Movement in 1981, followed by a handful of singles, including Temptation. In the autumn of 1983 they grappled with the new songs, one of these was born as an instrumental to save New Order the task of encores during concerts. It is a tangle of sounds whose core is the beat of Our Love by Donna Summer, produced by Giorgio Moroder, on which the bass of You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) by Sylvester intertwines with the spaghetti western atmospheres designed by Ennio Morricone in For a Few Dollars More.
Completing the song’s soundscapes are the Italo disco of Kleyn and Mbo’s Dirty Talk and a dark male choir that comes straight from Kraftwerk’s Uranium. To this first layer of fragments and references is added the band’s instrumentation, which also includes a sequencer built by Sumner himself. His aseptic singing extends over the instrumental and gives voice to a text open to many interpretations. Some find links to the Falklands War, others lean towards a rant against Margaret Thatcher or drug addiction. In 2013 Gilbert said that Sumner wrote that verse because he was tired of journalists’ questions, while a lesser-known theory has it that the New Order song talks about a series of student suicides that occurred in Sweden in the 1950s: six boys who the extreme gesture following emotional suffering culminated with listening to the song Blue Monday by Fats Domino, the very one that inspired the title for New Order.
The single, released in March 1983, went down in history as the best-selling twelve-inch of all time, a fact that is impossible to verify because it derives from the combination of multiple charts that have never been definitively resolved. It is more likely, however, that the graphic designer Peter Saville’s choice to reproduce a floppy disk as a cover, die-cutting it with a silver interior and difficult-to-print colours, caused him to lose, depending on the testimonies, between two and fifteen pence per copy sold. There is no doubt, however, that Blue Monday, which remained in the British charts for thirty-eight weeks, still sounds futuristic decades after its release.