22. Blue Monday – New Order

It was always just the perfect song, this: I guess that’s why they kept putting it out, over and over again. Or maybe they were just trying to pay for the sleeve. I had the original, actually, but I love this version because it’s just funny.

I remember being into New Order for years, probably from about when Love Will Tear Us Apart tore them apart and they retreated, licking their wounds, to America and house music and Temptation (or The Up Down Turnaround Song as it became known to us when someone’s girlfriend asked us to play it again after we’d all danced like maniacs around the fire out at The Farm, a ramshackle place a friend of my friend’s brother used to live at that would draw us like moths back in the day) and Ceremony, drawn in by those stark covers.

But this. That drumbeat. That bassline. How does it feel? Hearing this, in some crappy club in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, it felt like a revelation. I saw them play live, at the Enmore Theatre supported by The Deadly Hume (the then-new band by the bloke who played The Wang for Hunters and Collectors before deciding he wanted to be the front man and leaving, writing Passenger Blues - "Got my eyes on your / Got the Death Seat Blues" - that was the spiritual song of that trip to Melbourne with Eyman). 

I was standing at the front before realising the crowd was jumping so much that the wooden floor in front of the stage was bowing up and down about a foot from the concrete floor on which all the seats rested: I had one leg on either part of the floor, and figured I needed to move. This was back when they only ever played 10 songs at a show, encores included, so I stayed put when everyone else was leaving on a countback. I was rewarded with a version of this.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMjH1nR0ds