On September 15th, 1979, Joy Division made their sole nationally broadcast television appearance on the BBC youth program Something Else, delivering a blistering performance of their single Transmission.
The episode, filmed in Manchester, featured a lineup of distinctly northern voices: The Jam, Joy Division, and punk poet John Cooper Clarke. Clarke is shown wandering the city’s streets, reciting verses before the camera segues into Joy Division’s stark studio set. The band—Ian Curtis (vocals), Bernard Sumner (guitar), Peter Hook (bass), and Stephen Morris (drums)—launched into Transmission with taut precision. This footage, starkly lit and utterly magnetic, was later adopted as the official music video for the single.
Alongside Transmission, Joy Division also performed She’s Lost Control, further cementing the program as a rare document of the band on national television. At the time, their debut album Unknown Pleasures had been out for only a few months, and this appearance marked their introduction to a broader audience.
The entire episode is available to watch below. It also includes an interview segment with drummer Stephen Morris and Factory Records co-founder Tony Wilson. In typically dry fashion, the pair lament the difficulty of getting the band airplay on mainstream radio, with the notable exception of John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 program, where Joy Division had already found an early champion. During the discussion, Wilson famously remarked, “Because [Joy Division’s music] itss unsettling, and slightly sinister and gothic, it won’t be played [on the radio].”
While Something Else was Joy Division’s only nationally broadcast TV appearance, they had previously performed Shadowplay on Granada TV’s So It Goes in 1978—also produced by Tony Wilson—which was their very first televised performance.
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