The reunited Boomtown Rats have debuted the first track off the Bob Geldof-led band’s first new album in 36 years,  the very catchy “Trash Glam Baby,” which you can stream in full right here, and which serves as the first taste of the forthcoming Citizens of Boomtown LP. Full details here.

Seven years after Bob Geldof reunited with The Boomtown Rats for the first time since their 1986 split, the group is set to release a new album , marking 2020 — the Year of the Rat — with a new 10-song collection called Citizens of Boomtown, the band’s first LP since 1984. Details and tour dates right here.

The reunion of The Boomtown Rats finally crosses the pond with news that Bob Geldof and Co. will play a pair of U.S. shows late next month in New York City and Boston as part of “The Big Session,” a three-act package that also will feature Irish groups The Stunning and Mundy.

Bob Geldof will rejoin The Boomtown Rats for the first time since the band split in 1986 to play the U.K.’s Isle of Wight Festival this summer, saying in a statement on the fest’s website, “We were an amazing band and I just feel it’s the right time to re-Rat, to go back to Boomtown for a visit.”

‘We’re the Kids in America,’ the third chapter of BBC Four’s ‘How the Brits Rocked America: Go West,’ features interviews with John Lydon, Robert Smith, Elvis Costello, Jim Kerr, Ian McCulloch, New Order’s Stephen Morris and Peter Hook, Adam Ant, Bob Geldof, Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, and many more.

The first solo album in a decade from Boomtown Rats leader Bob Geldof — the cheekily titled How to ‘Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell’ — is now out in the U.S., and to help mark the occasion, Mercury/Vagrant Records slipped us three copies of the CD to award to lucky Slicing Up Eyeballs readers.

A couple days before making headlines at South By Southwest by declaring America and its music “exhausted,” former Boomtown Rats leader Bob Geldof dropped by ‘The Late Show with David Letterman’ to promote his new album ‘How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell.’

Now less than a month away, the schedule for the South By Southwest music festival is starting to solidify, with a host of ’80s college rock vets slated to make appearances in Austin, Texas, next month — including Duran Duran, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Edwyn Collins, World Party, J Mascis and more.

This week’s new releases include an expanded reissue of Ride’s debut ‘Nowhere’; a new Bob Geldof album called ‘How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell’; a new best-of from Propaganda’s Claudia Brücken (‘Combined’); a reissue of Howard Jones’ ‘The 12″ Album’; vinyl reissues of Bauhaus and Dead Can Dance; and a collection of ZTT 12-inch mixes.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of Live Aid, the Bob Geldof-organized African famine relief concert that remains one of the cultural signposts of the ’80s. For readers of this site, the event is perhaps best remembered as the tipping point in U2’s ascent from college-rock upstarts to global superstars.

Tweet Few things are more reminiscent of ’80s pop culture than the type of celebrity do-goodery that sprouted up in the aftermath of the earthquake […]

Midnight Oil’s classic 1987 hit “Beds are Burning” — originally about Aboriginal land rights in Australia — is being turned into an all-star, new-millennium anthem […]