Morrissey’s intimate concert at Hollywood High School last March — arguably the highlight of Moz’s illness-plagued and cancellation-prone U.S. tour — is not only due for a DVD release this year, it appears the film also may be screened in movie theaters in the U.S. — in giant-screened IMAX 3D no less.
Legendary independent record label 4AD — home in the ’80s and ’90s to the Pixies, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Throwing Muses and so many more — will be the subject an exhaustive history this fall with the publication of Martin Aston’s new 800-page book “Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD.”
The Dead Milkmen return this week with the fourth in their new series of limited-edition 7-inch singles — this one’s called “Welcome to Undertown” — and you can now stream both songs off the vinyl single (the title track and “Streetlamps”) as well as the digital-only bonus track, “The Sun Turns Our Patio Into a Lifeless Hell.”
Tonight’s Slicing Up Eyeballs Music Hour on Strangeways Radio featured music off albums that made the Top 100 Albums of 1982 list, including tracks by Ramones, Bauhaus, The Chameleons, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, R.E.M., Pylon, New Order, Ministry, The The, Echo & The Bunnymen and more.
In 1984, David Byrne helped put together a TV special on the Talking Heads for U.K. TV’s Channel 4, a 68-minute mix of live material filmed at Wembley Arena, interviews, TV news clips, commercials and found footage and sound — sort of a visual version of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts set to live music.
Blondie will tour the U.S. this September and October with special guest X in tow, an 18-date trek dubbed the “No Principals Tour” that will include, with the purchase of each ticket, downloads of five exclusive new songs off Debbie Harry and Co.’s forthcoming 10th studio album.
The Pet Shop Boys today debuted the video for Electric single “Vocal,” and it’s a bit of a time warp: The Joost Vandeburg-directed clip — which you can see below — is comprised of “authentic amateur film footage shot at various raves in the late ’80s” as well as images from the Hacienda club in Manchester.
While we’ve already posted copious video from Siouxsie’s first concert in five years this past Saturday, it is worth sharing one key piece of footage from tonight’s reprise at the Yoko Ono-curated Meltdown festival, namely the one song on Saturday night’s setlist that got dropped from that show: “Spellbound.”
Tuesday marks the 25th anniversary of Depeche Mode’s iconic “Concert For the Masses,” a daylong show at the 100,000-seat Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., that also featured performances by Wire, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Thomas Dolby — and was, of course, filmed and recorded for ’101.’
When it came time for Echo & The Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant to put together a new band “outside of the restrictive confines of Bunnymen-world” last year, he actually ended up tapping some Bunnymen for the job: namely former bassist Les Pattinson and current drummer Nick Kilroe.
We interrupt our regular programming for a bit of housekeeping: Version 1.1 of the Slicing Up Eyeballs iPhone/iPad app is now available in Apple’s iTunes Store if you’d like to upgrade your existing version or purchase it — 99 cents — for the very first time and help support what we do here every day.
This week’s new releases include brand new studio albums from Miracle Legion’s Mark Mulcahy, Julian Cope, Steve Kilbey of The Church and Primal Scream, plus an expanded reissue and new rarities compilation from The Chameleons and a live vinyl release from The Fall.
Tonight’s edition of “Dark Wave” featured music from Pigface, Throwing Muses, Alien Sex Fiend, Killing Joke, Lowlife, Bauhaus, Fad Gadget, Depeche Mode, Ski Patrol, The Psychedelic Furs, Front Line Assembly, Tubeway Army, The Smiths, Tones on Tail, The Human League, Wire and much, much more.
Welcome to the Week in Rock, where we round up all of the headlines posted on this site over the past week. This week featured posts about The Replacements, Siouxsie, Pixies’ Kim Deal, My Bloody Valentine, The Cure, The Chameleons, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, The Ocean Blue, Gary Numan and more.
Siouxsie returned to the concert stage for the first time in five years tonight in London, performing the first of two nights at the Yoko Ono-curated Meltdown festival with a 20-song set that included a full reading of 1980′s Kaleidoscope plus Banshees favorites like “Cities in Dust” and “Israel” as well as tracks off MantaRay.
The Pixies this morning announced that bassist Kim Deal — who has spent much of this year touring with the reunited Last Splash-era lineup of The Breeders — has left the band , and, in a statement attributed to Black Francis, Joey Santiago and David Lovering, say “we will always consider her a member of the Pixies.”
With Peter Hook already have written one book on Joy Division and planning a follow-up on New Order, Bernard Sumner now will get his say, too, the announcement that he’ll publish an autobiography in fall 2014 that will offer his “personal perspective both on my own life story and the many bands I’ve been in.”
For this week’s “120 Minutes” Rewind, we offer up a 13-minute reel from the April 17, 1988, episode, which finds eternally glib host Kevin Seal broadcasting from the Scrap Bar in New York. There, he sings fake reggae songs with the patrons, then hangs out first with Joe Strummer and then chats with Zodiac Mindwarp.
In honor of last weekend’s passing of Ramones artistic director Arturo Vega, we’ll use this week’s Vintage Video to dig up a choice concert from the New York punk legends. This performance from Sept. 13, 1978, in Bremen, Germany, finds the band ripping through 25 songs in just about 50 minutes flat.
