A quarter century of Blue Mondays

As DJ Martian points out, today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of this song's first, losing-money-on-every-copy release:



Happy birthday, Blue Monday.

To put this into too much context, we're now as far away from the release of Blue Monday as the release of Blue Monday was from this:

Radio One More Time: Twenty-Five Years Of Rock

As we've seen, when Radio One's documentaries were good, they were very, very good.

When they were poor, though... well, they stank so bad you could hear your speakers hum. The bad ones were usually due to the
application of an well-meaning, but too expansive, idea, or one that the production team were too close to too notice they were producing something overlong, obsessive and trussed in an anorak.

We know, we know, the irony of writing that last sentence in the middle of a forty-part series on fragments of Radio One.

The Story of Music Radio was one of these, a lovingly-crafted hymn to the joys of Luxembourg, pirate radio and the first days of Radio One, crafted, mostly, by people who were there. What could have been a interesting hour-long romp stretched out for weeks and weeks, and it was like being played old tapes by your aunt, while your uncle explained them all to you. For weeks.

But Music Radio was whistle-stop compared to Twenty-Five Years Of Rock, a "celebration" of the first quarter century of the music of Elvis. Like a school tour of a poorly curated museum, an uninterested audience was marched past dusty artefact after dusty artefact, as a pantheon was knocked-together before your ears. Any sense of joy, excitement, of the original spontaneity which drove rock to rule the music world was carefully removed; a music which jumped your bones and stuck its hand up your skirts was made to wear its best suit and sit quietly in the parlour as its parents enthused over what a good boy it was.

I suspect there may only have been twenty-five episodes, but it seemed to run non-stop from 1977 until 1981 and - just when it was all over - it appeared in a revised format. Thirty Years Of Rock. There was much to be admired about rock's pioneers - the Richards, the Hollys, even the Presleys - but it couldn't be taught like multiplication tables or the development of steam power. They'd have been better off just playing the records.

[Part of Radio One More Time]