"Blue Monday" (AM10), Produced by New Order; Engineered by Michael Johnson assisted by Barry Sage and Mark Boyne. A Factory Record (FAC73); Released March 7, 1983.
The synthesiser melody is slightly out of sync
with the rhythm. This was an accident. It was my job to programme the entire
song from beginning to end, which had to be done manually, by inputting every
note. But
I accidentally left a note out, which skewed the melody. We'd bought ourselves
an Emulator 1, an early sampler, and used it to add snatches of choir-like
voices from Kraftwerk's album Radioactivity, as well as recordings of
thunder..."Blue Monday" was meant to be robotic, the idea being that
we could walk on stage and do it without playing the instruments ourselves. We
spent days trying to get a robot voice to sing "How does it feel?"
but somebody wiped the track. Bernard ended up singing it.
We couldn't believe it when it became the
biggest-selling 12-inch of all time. People have interpreted the title all
sorts of ways. It actually came from a book Stephen was reading, Kurt
Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. One of its illustrations reads:
"Goodbye Blue Monday." It's a reference to the invention of the
washing machine, which improved housewives' lives.

Peter Saville (Sleeve Design) on "Blue Monday:" I met New
Order in their Manchester studio to show them a postcard of the Henri
Fantin-Latour flower painting I was using for the cover of their
forthcoming album Power, Corruption and Lies. While I was there, they
played me "Blue Monday," and I instinctively understood what they were trying to
do. It sounded like something the equipment could play itself.
I picked up an interesting object and asked:
"Wow, what is this?" I'd never seen a floppy disk before. I thought
it was great. I said: "Can I have it?" And Stephen said: "Not
that one!" So I drove back to London listening to a tape of "Blue Monday" with another floppy disk lying on the passenger seat. By the time I got home, I
knew the sleeve would replicate a floppy disk, with three holes cut in it
through which you could see the metallic inner sleeve. The only information I
had to impart were the words New Order, the song titles (including B-side The
Beach) and the Factory Records catalogue number. I decided to do this
with a column of coded colours, to provide some mysterious data, so I sat down
with some pencils and used a different colour for each letter.