Peter Murphy may be out on the road celebrating 35 years of Bauhaus with sets filled entirely by music performed by his old band, but he’s looking forward as well as he works on the follow-up to his 2011 album Ninth, a new record called Lion that’s being produced by Youth and is expected to arrive sometime in early 2014.

With demos already in hand, the Echo & The Bunnymen braintrust — frontman Ian McCulloch and guitarist Will Sergeant — will begin recording their 12th studio album within the next six weeks with Killing Joke bassist Youth likely sitting in as producer, the band announced today.

Ian McCulloch has made no secret over the years of the fact that he considers “The Killing Moon” to be “the greatest song ever written,” and, in this new video for the NME, he explains how the song was born, via a backwards David Bowie chord sequence and some divine lyrical intervention.

Ian McCulloch later this month will release a new live/studio 2CD set called Holy Ghosts, and the singer is letting fans download one of the studio tracks, album closer “Somewhere in My Dreams — but only until 5 p.m. BST, which is noon EDT for those of us here in the U.S.

After working on solo projects for the last couple years, Echo & The Bunnymen braintrust Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant will reconvene in the studio this summer to record the band’s 12th album, McCulloch tells The Quietus in a new interview, saying the record will be called The Garden of Meedin.'”

Today we unveil the results of Part 1 of our year-long Best of the ’80s feature, an ambitious, year-by-year poll of Slicing Up Eyeballs’ readers to determine just what were the best albums of each year of the 1980s — and then, when that’s all said and done at the end of 2013, we’ll run a monster best-of-the-decade poll.

Echo & The Bunnymen’s 1980 debut album ‘Crocodiles’ will be reissued for Record Store Day in a new 180-gram audiophile pressing on red vinyl by reissue specialist Vinyl 180, the label announced in an e-mail newsletter this week. It’s not yet known whether it will be a U.K.-only release or also put out in the U.S.

Echo & The Bunnymen spinoff Poltergeist — an instrumental trio that reunites guitarist Will Sergeant with former bassist and founding member Les Pattinson — today debuted one of the tracks off the band’s upcoming debut album Your Mind Is A Box (Let Us Fill It With Wonder). Check out “Cathedral” via the player here.

Echo & The Bunnymen spinoff Poltergeist — an instrumental trio that reunites guitarist Will Sergeant with former bassist and founding member Les Pattinson — today announced it will release a debut album titled ‘Your Mind Is A Box (Let Us Fill It With Wonder)’ in March then perform a series of U.K. dates later that month.

Long-running Manchester act James has enlisted Echo & The Bunnymen for a 10-date tour of the U.K. this spring in support of the band’s ‘The Gathering Sound’ box set, a career-spanning collection that originally was due out in fall 2011 and then this past spring — and is now finally due for release next month in the U.K.

Echo & The Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant this summer announced he’d enlisted former bandmate and current Wild Swans bassist Les Pattinson to take part in a new instrumental band called Poltergeist — and today they’ve debuted the first fruits of their labor, about two minutes’ worth of an untitled track.

Echo & The Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch today announced additional concerts on his fall acoustic tour of the U.K. in support of the upcoming expanded reissues of his first three solo albums, bringing the total number of dates to 13 so far in September, October and November.

Before revving up his new band Poltergeist with former bandmate Les Pattinson, guitarist Will Sergeant of Echo & The Bunnymen recorded a fan-funded, acoustic instrumental solo album called ‘Things Inside’, which is now available for purchase — and can be sampled via the three tracks that are streaming here.