33. New Order - Blue Monday (Factory)

 

9 weeks at number one from w/e 26th March 1983

Is there a danger that I may be adding nothing here? If you head over to your favourite search engine now and try to find videos, blog posts and think pieces about “Blue Monday”, you’ll be spoiled for choice. Aside from a few smart Alecs on Internet forums playing devil’s advocate, you will find a set of almost unified voices gushing very genuinely about the song; its sound, the sleeve design, and the way it transformed Factory Records and therefore (arguably) Manchester.

What you tend to hear less about is how it was received when it was released in March 1983. Some journalists loved it unreservedly, as expected – New Order were, after all, press darlings even at this point – but there wasn’t the unified response you might expect. Right at the bottom of the Smash Hits singles review pages, almost as an afterthought, you can read David Hepworth’s uncharitable verdict:

“It had to happen. New Order have dumped moody, repetitive guitars in favour of moody, repetitive synths and a drum kit with a pronounced stutter. After the first twenty minutes or so, it starts to cause a tense, nervous headache”.

His Single Of The Fortnight was Bobby “O” with “She Has A Way”, which doubtless caused nods of approval from Neil Tennant on a nearby Carnaby Street office desk. Bobby “O” has certainly been influential on his career, but the verdict that “She Has A Way” is not only better than “Blue Monday”, but better by notable lengths and margins is surprising. It's playing on a field that's closer to New Order than you might expect, but is like a slap on the back from a mate on a crowded dancefloor in comparison to their record - bouncy, jovial and uncomplicated. 

Over at the NME, Julie Burchill was so frustrated by Factory’s reluctance to label the A and B sides properly that she reviewed the version on the flipside “The Beach” instead, fleetingly and half-heartedly, before moving on.

Record Mirror went one better and ignored “Blue Monday” in their review pages altogether.

Even New Order themselves have since seemed perplexed by the single’s dominance of dancefloors and the public imagination. Their original aim was to produce something they could leave a machine to play as an encore while they remained offstage, and Bernard Sumner once stated “It’s not really a song, it’s more of a machine that sounds good on club systems”. He then added, without further elaboration, “There was a lot of trickery going on that you don't realise. It's not just the bass, there's quite a lot of subsonic”, sounding slightly like Bill Drummond by way of Derren Brown as he did so. Maybe he was just genuinely dumbfounded by the single’s success and reached for the only explanation that made sense, that some kind of irregular sonic hypnotism was at play in making the track a success,

Whatever certain segments of the press or the group themselves thought, it was a given that the New Order single that followed “Temptation” was probably going to be a minor hit. The goodwill and the fanbase left hanging over from their Joy Division days would see to that, and “Blue Monday” confidently (but not breathtakingly) pushed its way into the national charts at number 37 on the week ending 19th March.

The expected run for singles by cult bands at this point was for the single to nudge another few places up the charts, perhaps resulting in a triumphant Top of the Pops appearance by the group, only for the single to fail to cross over to the general public and disappear. What “Blue Monday” did instead was far odder, hanging around the Top 100 for 38 straight weeks, often nudging up a few places or falling a few notches as if it had no bigger plans other than to hang around. By June it had fallen out of the Top 40, only to return again with a fresh wave of goodwill in September, eventually climbing to the top ten for the first time.

Early in its run on 31st March 1983, the group appeared on “Top Of The Pops” and put in a live appearance so nervous, chaotic and devoid of charisma that I found myself red-faced, desperately defending the record to my family - “But it usually sounds brilliant!” I yelled (to which my Dad’s admittedly sensible response was “Well, if you want to appear live on television you’d better make sure you can actually manage it first”).

The dominant myth is that the single dipped down the charts the following week as a result of disgusted would-be purchasers voting with their feet. This is actually not true – it climbed the chart defiantly. Had New Order decided to show up and put on a glove puppet show live on air, it wouldn't have killed the record’s momentum, if “momentum” is an adequate word to describe its mid-table stamina. Neither music critics, radio DJs refusing to play all seven-and-a-half minutes of it, its unavailability on seven inch single or Factory Records themselves could kill “Blue Monday” off – it knew it needed to reach everyone, and if it managed it slowly and stealthily rather than in a typical eighties rush, then so be it.

22. New Order - Temptation (Factory)

Six weeks at number one from 29th May 1982

Nearly twenty years ago now, I subscribed to Last.fm, an application which measures the music you stream or listen to on devices, and produces facts and stats about your habits. It aims to stun and surprise you by revealing who your favourite artists are and who else you might enjoy, but can display the bottish habit of shooting bogies such as “If you enjoy listening to Paul McCartney, you may also like the work of John Lennon”.

Once every so often, though, it pulls up an unexpected theme you hadn’t noticed before; that could be that you have an overwhelming proclivity to listen to Joni Mitchell during Springtime, or that your nineteenth most listened to song of all time is an easy listening cover by an artist you otherwise don’t care about, or – in my case - that New Order are among your top twenty most listened to artists (currently resting at the number 12 spot).

The stats don’t lie. Year in, year out I dip into New Order’s catalogue and devour some of their tracks almost obsessively, but I do all this without feeling as if I can call myself “a fan”. Looking at the rest of my personal chart, I can see a stream of artists who at some point of my life I have felt a strong and possibly ill-advised connection to, particularly in my teens and twenties. They’ve all produced music I’ve loved, but have probably also had a combination of other factors which captured my imagination - strong lyrical themes, wit, intelligence or irony, a gripping visual aesthetic which stirred my excitement for their music, or a sense of something I could relate to or a version of somebody I wanted to be.

I don’t recall ever feeling this way about New Order. New Order have always just been there, pumping out wonderful records which have been, at different moments and sometimes all at the same time, moody, stylish, irresistibly danceable, boundary pushing and exquisite pop. Despite all this, though (and I accept there’s a chance I’m projecting here) who among us has really felt as if they know Bernard Sumner or Peter Hook, or even The Other Two? As teenagers, did we really read one of their interviews and want to follow them around the country until we more clearly understood the workings of their minds? Did their lyrics – in one or two cases, among the most atrocious ever written – make us think “Finally somebody has put a new spin on some of the events in my life”?

New Order never gave much away, but they also never gave the impression there was much going on behind the mystique either. All the beauty took place around them; those tastefully designed Factory Records sleeves and arthouse music videos created an image of sorts, but not one that stuck to a solid theme or was consistently, identifiably their own – if you asked Bernard Sumner to talk in depth about the meaning behind any of the artistic elements that accompanied them, you might get seven or eight words at best. If you really wanted the lowdown on that stuff, you had to ring the entryphone at Factory Records and philosophise with Tony Wilson.

“Temptation”, then, is fascinating for two reasons; firstly, it acts as the first solid, logical bridge between their old analogue past and their new experiments with electronics. If “Everything’s Gone Green” sounded shaky and tentative, “Temptation” seems more sure footed, in tune with the machinery rather than occasionally falling out-of-step with it. The original 1982 version (and not the 1987 remix which the group seem determined to make us believe is the definitive version) is too spindly for the dancefloor, but still sounds forward-thinking, like an early experiment in indie-dance.

Combined with that, though, is something that feels sharper and more honest, more knowable and believable, less arid than most of New Order’s work; Sumner’s voice strains and struggles, but the simplicity of the lyrics about the collapse of a relationship are close enough to Motown (The Temptations, even). “Up, down, turn around/ Please don't let me hit the ground/ Tonight I think I'll walk alone/ I'll find my soul as I go home” could actually be lines from a Northern Soul record, while the repeated begging of “Oh, it’s the last time/ I’ve never met anyone quite like you before” brings everything to the necessary climax.

8. New Order - Everything's Gone Green (Factory)

 

Number one for three weeks from 10^th October 1981

Note – this was technically a double A-side with “Procession”, but the NME chart only listed “Everything’s Gone Green”, so that’s what we’ll be focussing on.

So, there was this thing called punk rock, and that was very important… and also this band from Manchester who emerged from punk rock, but were financed by a newsreader, and overcame tragedy when… and you probably know this already… but... oh fuck it.

It’s unprofessional of me not to begin this entry with the backstory of New Order. The problem is it would feel either cliche-ridden or strange to bother. Who is reading this right now who doesn’t know their story, or about Ian Curtis’s suicide, or the legend of Factory records? Even the most poorly programmed AI bot in the world could spew that stuff back at you to perfection.

If I had something new to add to the thousands of pieces of work out there (not least a whole motion picture) I could try, but by this point my angle remains as typical and as factual as any Wikipedia entry. So you’ll hopefully forgive me for not starting right at the beginning, for not mentioning Warsaw, The Sex Pistols, Tony Wilson doing regional news on the television, or any of that hoopla. There are ways out of this jammy fix, admittedly; if I wanted this entry to be both original and clickbait friendly I could claim that it was all over-puffed and silly and everyone involved should be regarded as a footnote in any story about British independent music, especially while Toyah Willcox had records out at the same time and was higher up in the actual proper grown-up charts, but I’m not here to play those games.

Except… what can get overlooked in the aftermath of Joy Division is how confused New Order initially seemed. Their debut single “Ceremony” was a recording of an unreleased Joy Division song issued after Curtis’s death, and sounds exactly as you would expect – a continuation of the story rather than any kind of new project. If other groups had been faced with a similar situation, it could also have acted as a full stop, a short tribute before everyone agreed that nothing would ever be the same again and all went their separate ways. That would have provided a way out which would have denied New Order years of trauma at live shows as punters cried out for Joy Division songs which were too painful for the band to perform.

It was not to be, though. “Everything’s Gone Green” – named after a flippant, stoned remark in a recording studio – followed and sounds like the first true New Order single, the one where they’ve found a voice which isn’t purely an imitation of Ian Curtis’s, and yet it’s a strange, uncomfortable hybrid, at moments sounding like a rough 1977 Giorgio Moroder demo of a remix of an unfinished Joy Division song.

In the jokey IPC comics I was bought as a child, the future of all factories and technology was usually portrayed in slightly overblown and monstrous ways, often featuring giant metallic robotic crab shaped machines who tinned food, built cars or even operated on people. The people in these comic strips would generally be cowed by the shiny beast, quivering in corners, stammering or insisting that it was out of control and everyone concerned should step away from it. In “Everything’s Gone Green”, New Order are those visitors to an evil genius’s factory, backed into a corner, surrendering nervously to the electronics but not surfing their waves entirely successfully. The pulsing nature of this single seems like an unnatural fit at certain moments; they sound swamped in places, and in others just a fraction of a beat behind the mechanical precision. The ending is the most revealing aspect; the machines get the last word via some polite digital burbling, not the group.