Blue Monday

Blue Monday was released as a 12-inch single by Factory Records on 7 March 1983, backed with The Beach, and appears only on certain cassette and CD editions of Power, Corruption & Lies. The band wrote it in their rehearsal room in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. The bassline was played on a Moog Source and sequenced on a sequencer Sumner had built, an Oberheim DMX supplied the drums, and an Emulator 1 sampler supplied choir sounds taken from Kraftwerk's Uranium. Sumner told NME he had built the sequencer from an electronics kit, and that the machines would not talk to each other until the engineer Martin Usher designed a circuit to connect them. Gilbert wrote the sequence out by hand and added an extra rest, which the band kept. Parts were reused from a 1982 piece called Video 5 8 6.

Hook said the song was stolen from Donna Summer's Our Love, and Sumner named Klein + MBO's Dirty Talk and Sylvester's You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) as sources. Sumner said it never got radio play and became a hit through clubs, because it was only available on 12-inch. It first reached number 12 in Britain, then re-entered and climbed to number nine, and it spent 186 weeks on the UK independent chart. It is described as the best-selling 12-inch single in history. A 1988 remix by Quincy Jones and John Potoker reached number three in Britain and topped the US dance chart, and a 1995 reissue with a Hardfloor mix reached the UK top 20.

The sleeve, designed by Peter Saville and Brett Wickens, is die-cut to resemble a 5 and a quarter inch floppy disk and carries the artist and title only as coloured blocks. It cost so much to make that the label lost money on each copy, which Hook confirmed to NME. The band played the song on Top of the Pops on 31 March 1983 and Morris recalled that the synthesisers went awry. BBC Radio 2's Sold on Song described it as a crucial link between 1970s disco and the dance and house boom. Rolling Stone placed it at number 235 on its 2021 list of the 500 greatest songs and number 18 on its 2022 list of the 200 greatest dance songs.