You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

In May 1980, the band Joy Division was devastated by the death of lead singer Ian Curtis.

The three remaining band members, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris, decided they would keep making music together.

And a few months later, Jillian Gilbert joined them. They called the band New Order.

New Order is one of the most influential bands of the last four decades.

Their song, Blue Monday, came out in 1983, and it holds the record for being the best-selling 12-inch single of all time.

Rolling Stone put Blue Monday on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, and Pitchfork included it in its top five best songs of the 1980s.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Blue Monday, in this episode, New Order discusses how they created this song.

This episode was produced in collaboration with Transmissions, the official New Order and Joy Division podcast produced by Cup and Nuzzle.

We've put together this story out of the hours of interviews they've reported, along with a new interview I did with Peter Hook.

As you'll hear the band explain, nothing about Blue Monday's success, or really even its existence, was something that they planned for.

How does it feel to treat me like you do when you place your hands on me?

And tell me, do you?

How?

What does the band that used to be Joy Division do now that you no longer enjoy division?

That's drummer Stephen Morris.

Obviously you're a bit numb really emotionally.

Here's bassist Peter Hook.

Rather than deal with the grief around E and Death, we just threw ourselves into record it and writing.

We just gone with it. And it was a real struggle.

It wasn't anyone's particular fault.

This is guitarist and vocalist Bernard Sumner.

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