This has been online for a couple years now, but it didn’t come to our attention until this week: It’s a clip of future Oscar winner Trent Reznor in one of his mid-’80s, pre-Nine Inch Nails bands performing a fairly faithful cover of the Billy Idol hit ‘Eyes Without a Face.’
Twenty years ago today, the Perry Farrell-spawned Lollapalooza festival — which, in retrospect, joins Nevermind as perhaps the best historical encapsulation of ‘the year punk broke’ — made its debut in the sun-baked Arizona desert with performances by Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Jane’s Addiction.
It’s Trent Reznor’s birthday today — he’s turning 46 — and to mark the occasion, we offer up this 11-song performance by Nine Inch Nails captured on grainy VHS during the young band’s December 1989 tour in support of ‘Pretty Hate Machine.’
Three weeks ago, we launched the inaugural Slicing Up Eyeballs Readers Poll in an effort to gauge what this site’s frequenters think are the year’s best new albums and reissues. Now, with hundreds of ballots cast, the results are in.
The Cure dominates this year’s list of most-viewed stories, claiming five of the top 10 spots — including the No. 1 position, occupied for the second year in a row by our initial 2009 report on this year’s 3CD deluxe reissue of ‘Disintegration.’
British industrial/experimental music pioneer Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson — who co-founded the hugely influential acts Throbbing Gristle and Coil, was a member of Psychic TV and worked as an artist with famed album-cover design team Hipgnosis — died in his sleep on Wednesday at age 55.
This week’s new CDs include a huge new box set from Orange Juice, plus reissues from XTC, Nine Inch Nails, Heaven 17, Robyn Hitchcock and The Fall, as well as the U.S. release of Killing Joke’s new album and a special U2 EP tied to Record Store Day.
Back in August, we posted four high-quality video clips that had just surfaced from the 1995 co-headlining tour by David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails — and today we’ve learned that the filmmaker who put those fantastic clips together has uploaded a 40-minute rough cut of additional footage.
Double dose of Nine Inch Nails news today: Trent Reznor this afternoon announced the band’s 1989 debut ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ will be reissued next month on CD, vinyl and digital formats, newly remastered ‘for a greatly improved sonic experience.’
After some delay, the 33⅓ book series — pocket-sized titles that dissect one classic album at a time — will publish its much-anticipated title on Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 debut ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ in March.
This week’s new releases include Trent Reznor’s score for ‘The Social Network,’ a super-limited 12-inch from The Cult, the U.S. editions of Duran Duran’s ‘Notorious’ and ‘Big Thing’ reissues, a disc of Suzanne Vega acoustic re-recordings, and a CD/DVD of film soundtrack work from John Foxx.
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