“Blue Monday” by New Order turned 40 the other day, and I am just old enough to remember it being new, and if there’s anything I really need it’s something to make me feel old… Anyway, the Graun has a piece by Alexis Petridis looking at some of the tunes that inspired it and that it in turn inspired, and I was intrigued by a reference to something called Gerry and the Holograms, which I dimly recalled having heard of somewhere but I couldn’t place where; I now gather it is widely considered by those who’ve heard it to have been a primary source for “Blue Monday”. Anyway, I duly went in search of them and found this:
Now, Bernard Sumner has denied having heard this and claimed “Mighty Real” by Sylvester was actually what New Order really ripped off, but GODDAMN. If Sumner’s telling the truth, then we have a truly odd case of parallelism at work here… I know there’s not exactly an infinite number of ways in which you can combine notes so you’re perfectly likely to innocently come up with a note sequence someone else has already come up with, but even so. But Petridis reckons the band have been otherwise honest about where they nicked bits of “Blue Monday” from, and Sumner said he would’ve admitted it if he had borrowed from “Gerry”. So.
Anyway, Gerry and the Holograms were a duo of fellow Mancs who had variously played with the Albertos and John Cooper Clarke and released two singles in 1979, one of which was designed to be unplayable cos the record was sealed inside the sleeve with glue, rendering it impossible to play the disc even if you could get it out of the sleeve. Much more of an absurdist art project than a band (their label was in fact called Absurd Records), hilariously the “music” on the unplayable record was actually two minutes of silence. Frank Zappa was a fan. Found their complete works on Bandcamp, too.