For the curious
Blue January + New Order musings
We’re dubbing the first two weeks 2024 Blue January, and we’re giving folks up to 50% off our sodas.
Why? Well, the 15th of January is Blue Monday, and it’s meant to be the saddest day of the year. More on New Order/our spin on this below.
Plus, we’re keen to support folks who want to start the year off sober (or sober-ish).
This huge never to be repeated 50% off sodas will unlock when you subscribe using code BLUEJANUARY. Or if you’re not up for subscribing, you’ll still get a very decent 40% off. We’ll be running this blueness until Blue Monday, 15th of Jan.
Now’s the time to stock up big time + turn your pantry into a pleasing wall of S&N cans.
Go forth, be blue (but in the best way).
New Order created Blue Monday to avoid having to do encores. Or so the story goes.
It’s 1983, drummer Steve Morris is messing around with an Apple II computer and programming bits of music to run through their growing synth collection. The band hated doing encores, so the plan was to create a track that they could play by simply pressing a button, the music would start and they could go to the bar or get in a car and clear off.
The track turned out to be fairly good, so they added bass and other instrumentation and finally lyrics. The fairly good track was transformed into a really very good track. It was released as a single and became the fastest selling 12” record of all time.
Blue Monday is the perfect balance of hypnotic dance music with killer bass and angular guitars. It’s languid, yet vital. Kinetic but doesn’t overdo it. Something for the house heads and the indie kids. It’s possibly the closest thing that exists to being a perfect record. There is not a dance floor in the world that doesn’t unite and take off whenever blue Monday is played - even 40 years on.
But there was a problem back in 1983 for the record label. Factory Records was born out of the legendary club, the hacienda and the wildly ambitious and creative minds of Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus. They had a visionary in-house designer, Peter Saville, a design genius, who elevated the identity of the label and the bands by creating some of the most iconic record sleeves of all time. However he was not so great with deadlines or costs.
The fastest selling 12” of all time, actually ended up costing the record label 5p for every copy sold. This was due to the complexity of the design and the die cut required to create the sleeve. The design which was based on a floppy computer disk, at the time a wildly futuristic idea, almost put the label out of business.
This is not of course why the 15th of January is called Blue Monday, it’s called this because it’s supposedly the saddest day of the year. but for us 2024 is all about abundance and creativity, not negativity and moping. So we are repurposing Blue Monday to be a celebration of this seminal and iconic record. Possibly the best ever made.
