“Walk on. Press a button. Leave the gear to play a song all on its own. While we piss off back to the booze in the dressing room and chortle to ourselves”: The mistakes and judicious choices that made New Order’s Blue Monday

New Order's Bernard Sumner in 1985.

There is plenty that is remarkable about New Order’s Blue Monday. It’s the biggest-selling 12-inch single in history. Its notorious Peter Saville-designed floppy disc-shaped sleeve. Its length: at over seven minutes long it was habitually cut down when it was played on daytime radio.

Its chart run was extraordinary too. Released in March 1983, it originally peaked at Number 12 in the UK charts the following month. Hanging around the lower ends of the chart all summer, it then started rising once again, reaching Number 9 in mid-October.