Lewis Largent, former DJ and music director at Los Angeles’ alt-rock powerhouse KROQ and host of MTV’s “120 Minutes,” died Feb. 20 after a long illness.

In what will come as a surprise to absolutely no one, Morrissey has canceled his headlining appearance at KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Christmas in Los Angeles on Sunday, the radio station announced this evening, citing illness in the wake of his two previously scrubbed shows this week.

With this week marking the 25th anniversary of the release of Depeche Mode’s landmark album Violator, we once again dip into the Slicing Up Eyeballs cassette archives, this time for a recording of the KROQ broadcast during the band’s infamous in-store appearance at a Wherehouse record store on the album’s U.S. release date.

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.’

Depeche Mode will warm up for the opening of its Delta Machine world tour in Nice, France, early next month with a just-announced free concert in Los Angeles this Friday at The Troubadour, a 400-capacity club that radio station KROQ is calling “the smallest venue the band has played in L.A…. EVER!”

We’ve got some big news today on the radio front: Slicing Up Eyeballs — that is, yours truly, site founder/editor Matt Sebastian — has been asked to host “Dark Wave,” the Sunday night show that explores the “darker side of alternative” on satellite-radio network Sirius XM’s classic-alternative station 1st Wave.

Today marks the 22nd anniversary of the release of Depeche Mode’s classic, and still best-selling, ‘Violator,’ and to mark the occasion we thought we’d dredge up this vintage news footage about the band’s infamous near-riot outside a Wherehouse record store in Los Angeles.

We missed this when it was announced, but Spandau Ballet frontman Tony Hadley is in the midst of his first-ever run of solo shows in the U.S., a six-date tour that opened Saturday in New York and hit Chicago and Los Angeles earlier this week. Luckily for us, ex-KROQ/current 1st Wave DJ Richard Blade was on hand with his camera.

Some exciting news on the radio front: Slicing Up Eyeballs will guest-host Sunday night’s installment of ‘Dark Wave,’ the weekly show that explores the ‘darker side of alternative’ on satellite-radio network Sirius XM’s classic-alternative station 1st Wave.

For fans who’ll be in the Los Angeles area this weekend, this year’s installment of the Smiths/Morrissey Convention — set for Sunday at The Music Box in Hollywood — features an added attraction: an actual member of The Smiths.

Reunited synthpoppers Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark wrapped up their first U.S. tour in 20 years on Tuesday in Hollywood, and ex-KROQ/current 1st Wave DJ Richard Blade offers up this quick backstage tour at the Music Box.

As a prelude to tonight’s Los Angeles tour stop, synthpop vets Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark played a half-hour in-store set at Amoeba Music in Hollywood yesterday afternoon — and you can watch the whole thing right here, thanks to the indie record chain.

Twenty years ago tonight, Robert Smith and the rest of The Cure — aided by a pair of American DJs and shadowed by MTV and the music press — set up a pirate radio station at the headquarters of Fiction Records with plans to illicitly premiere their soon-to-released remix album ‘Mixed Up’ over the London airwaves.