Weird Music History: How Farting Created New Order’s “Blue Monday”

Start with this excerpt from this piece in The Guardian.  You’ll never heard the world’s best-selling 12-inch single the same way again.

Gillian Gilbert, Synthesizer:  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. I had the sequence all written down on loads of A4 paper Sellotaped together the length of the recording studio, like a huge knitting pattern.

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. Bernard and Stephen [Morris, drummer] had worked out how to use it by spending hours recording farts.

Eww.