Blue Monday

“Blue Monday” was released on Factory Records on March 7, 1983, and is described as the best-selling 12-inch single in history, with more than 700,000 copies of the original release sold in the UK alone. It was built on an Oberheim DMX drum machine, a Moog Source synthesizer for the bass line and an Emulator I sampler, with the kick drum recorded playing through a studio monitor to capture the room’s natural reverb. Bassist Peter Hook has said the song was “stolen” from Donna Summer’s “Our Love.”

The famous story is about the sleeve. Designer Peter Saville created a die-cut cover meant to resemble a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk, and the lore says it was so expensive that Factory lost money on every copy sold. The claim has a paper trail: Factory’s Tony Wilson said the label lost 5p per sleeve “due to our strange accounting system.” But Saville himself has pushed back, saying “nobody expected ‘Blue Monday’ to be a commercially successful record,” and has also said, “I am so bored with this story. We didn’t even know how many of these expensive covers were ever made anyway,” adding that printers later “banged out a cheaper version” with printed silver ink. The honest version is that the most repeated anecdote about the record is a story its own designer will not vouch for.

The chart history is less contested. The original peaked at No. 9 on the UK Singles Chart; a 1988 remix, produced by New Order and Quincy Jones, reached No. 3 in Britain and topped the US dance chart, and a 1995 version reached No. 17. The record charted three separate times across twelve years.

Greatest of All Time. The best-selling 12-inch in history, in a sleeve whose famous cost has a footnote.

Hero image: “Blue Monday” single sleeve artwork, Factory Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.