Capitol/EMI today announced it will release ‘The Very Very Best of Crowded House,’ a new greatest-hits package, on Oct. 26 as both a 19-track CD and download and as an expanded 32-track digital-only collection.

The defunct Ministry next month will release ‘Every Day is Halloween: The Anthology,’ a 12-track compilation that appears to mix some of the band’s best-known singles with new covers of classic songs by AC/DC, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones — and Amy Winehouse?

For our latest installment of Vintage Video, we flash back to March 1984 to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers — long before they became sensitive alt-rock balladeers — make their television debut on the ‘Thicke of the Night’ talk show’s one and only season.

As Crowded House nears the end of its U.S. tour, the band this week released an official music video for ‘Either Side of the World,’ the second single off this summer’s ‘Intriguer.’

Thanks to the folks at Canada’s HushMusic, we’ve got copies of the forthcoming ‘Retro:Active 7 — Rare & Remixed’ compilation CD to give away to three lucky Slicing Up Eyeballs readers. The new installment features mixes of songs by Echo & The Bunnymen, Tears For Fears, OMD and a-ha.

The first two albums by Robyn Hitchcock’s late-’70s/early-’80s neo-psychedelic band The Soft Boys — 1979’s ‘A Can of Bees’ and 1980’s classic ‘Underwater Moonlight’ — will be reissued in stripped-down CD and audiophile vinyl editions that come with new download-only bonus tracks.

The Pogues today announced a ‘Farewell Christmas’ tour of the U.K. and Ireland this December, which band co-founder Peter ‘Spider’ Stacy declares will be ‘the last Christmas tour for the foreseeable future’ — although there’s disagreement even amongst the band about that.

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.

The A.V. Club wraps up its summer-long web series ‘Undercover: 25 Bands, 25 Cover Songs, 1 Small Room’ with this final installment: Shambling indie rockers The Walkman take on R.E.M.’s 1985 single ‘Driver 8,’ from the just-reissued ‘Fables of the Reconstruction.’

Former Bauhaus vocalist Peter Murphy today announced that he’s reuniting later this year with ailing ex-Japan bassist Mick Karn to record a second Dali’s Car album — the short-lived group’s first new record since 1984’s ‘The Waking Hour.’

This week’s new releases include ‘Live Voodoo,’ a concert DVD/Blu-ray from Jane’s Addiction; ‘Collection,’ a new 16-track compilation from The Stone Roses; a 2CD reissue of ‘Love: And a Million Other Things,’ the only solo album by Propaganda’s Claudia Brücken; and ‘Neon Mirage,’ a new CD from Wall of Voodoo’s Stan Ridgway.

Bookended by a pair of great Depeche Mode tracks, tonight’s ‘Dark Wave’ show on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave was a strong one, featuring some very early Cure (‘Another Day’), a rare appearance by Oingo Boingo (‘Pain’) and a blast of Skinny Puppy (‘Smothered Hope’).

Elizabeth Fraser — the incomparable voice of the Cocteau Twins — turns 47 today, and to mark the occasion, we present what has to be one of the odder moments in the dreampop group’s history: a pair of TV news reports from WBNS in Columbus, Ohio, about the so-called ‘Cocteau Fever’ surrounding the band’s Sept. 19, 1985, concert in that city.