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Watch: ‘Bob’s Burgers’ Covered the Joy Division Classic ‘Transmission’ in a Way That No One Will Ever Top

I’m gonna need this to be a regular thing now…

By Stephen Andrew Galiher

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The people behind Bob’s Burgers have been doing magnificent work for more than a decade and continue to turn out impressively creative content. The latest example of this is a video of Bob’s Burgers characters Bob (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) and Gene (voiced by Eugene Mirman) performing a cover of Joy Division’s 1979 single “Transmission” in a way that no one should bother trying to top.

The clip begins with the father and son setting up in Gene’s bedroom. It then goes into some spacey visuals that are as fun as they are trippy. Musically, the track is very much a Bob’s Burgers cover. It has this middle-school-classroom-instruments sound. The vibe perfectly matches the idea of an 11-year-old kid performing a cover song with his dad.

Joy Division’s “Transmission” was technically the band’s first single. However, it was not included on their first album, Unknown Pleasures (1979), as noted by Far Out. Instead, it was meant for the Mancunian band’s abandoned self-titled debut, when they performed as Warsaw.

In 2019, bassist Peter Hook sat down with Radio X to discuss “Transmission”. During the conversation, he said that he knew they had something special from the moment they first performed the song. “The first time I noticed anything different was when we’d written a song that weekend,” Hook recalled. “And we had a gig on the Thursday, so we thought we’d play that song at the gig.”

“We played the new song, which was ‘Transmission’ – and everyone in the whole place stopped literally what they were doing to listen and to turn round and watch us,” he continued. “It was an absolutely bizarre moment. It really made the hair on your arms stand up and shivers down your spine.”

‘Transmission’ was released as a single after Joy Division’s debut album was already out

Hook went on to share that the song sparked comparisons to a very famous U.S. band, but he had no idea who they were and had to ask the late Joy Division frontman, Ian Curtis. “Everybody said we sounded like The Doors, and I remember saying to Ian Curtis one day, ‘Who ARE The Doors?’ I didn’t even know who they were talking about at all.”

Already familiar with the iconic rock band, Curtis made sure to fill in Hook.”He said, ‘Ohhhh, I’ll lend you an LP.’ He lent me The Doors’ first LP, which, as soon as I put it on, I nearly fell over because we DID sound like The Doors! So we thought, Bernard [Sumner, guitarist] and I, that it’d be funny to play a Doors song as a joke, as Joy Division, because of what everybody said. And we learned ‘Riders On The Storm’.”

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(Photo Credit: FOX / 20th Television Animation / YouTube) Watch: ‘Bob’s Burgers’ Covered the Joy Division Classic ‘Transmission’ in a Way That No One Will Ever Top 56 seconds ago By Stephen Andrew Galiher

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