For his first live dates since a series of trouble-prone 2009 outings, Morrissey will return to the stage this summer with a nine-date U.K. tour leading up to a slot headlining the Hop Farm Music Festival alongside such icons as Lou Reed, Iggy & The Stooges and Patti Smith.

In honor of today’s release of ‘Collapse Into Now,” tonight’s Slicing Up Eyeballs show on Strangeways Radio took a look back at the career of R.E.M. Watch for a replay at 2 p.m. EST Friday.

Last week’s news that troubled pop star George Michael would be covering New Order’s late-’80s smash ‘True Faith’ as a charity single for Comic Relief was met with the appropriate derision — which turns out to be totally appropriate, now that we can hear the Auto-Tuned bastardization that the ex-Wham! singer has churned out.

The latest installment of indie behemoth Amoeba Music’s web series ‘What’s In My Bag?’ asks Johnny Marr the titular question during his recent visit to the chain’s Hollywood store.

In this latest round-up stuff, we’ve got an assessment of My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Loveless’ at 20, an audio documentary on Public Image Ltd.’s ‘Album,’ an interview with Joy Division’s Peter Hook and a studio multitrack of Black Francis’ vocals on the Pixies’ ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven.’

As promised, ‘Rattle My Cage’ — the lead-off track from The Primitives’ new EP ‘Never Kill a Secret,’ due out digitally this week — is ‘a bit noisier’ than our first taste of the four-song release.

This week’s new releases include brand-new albums from R.E.M. (‘Collapse Into Now’), Blancmange (‘Blanc Burn’) and Exene Cervenka (‘The Excitement of Maybe’), plus a new EP from The Primitives, two mid-period reissues from The Mission and a new KMFDM single.

Having spent much of last year touring ‘Unknown Pleasures,’ bassist Peter Hook will continue to relive his Joy Division days in 2011, performing the band’s second album — 1980’s ‘Closer’ — in May and releasing an EP of new recordings of four Joy Division songs — including one that’s never been released.

Reunited synthpop group Blancmange returns this week with ‘Blanc Burn’ — its fourth album, and first in more than a quarter century — as well as an eight-date U.K. tour, although ailing co-founder Stephen Luscombe has been advised by doctors to skip the trek.

Real or fake? Depeche Mode fans are debating a trio of 30- and 40-second samples — including one that may be a never-before-released track — that surfaced online yesterday and purportedly come from a 1980 demo tape. Hear those samples here.

As we reported last month, Morrissey is poised to release yet another compilation this spring — the 18-track ‘The Very Best of Morrissey,’ due out April 25 — and today we get a first glimpse at the cover art.

The long-in-the-works documentary about The Replacements and their rabid fans — a film dubbed, appropriately, ‘Color Me Obsessed’ — finally is finished and will make its world premiere later this month at the Gasparilla International Film Festival in Tampa, Fla.

To help promote ‘Riot Now!,’ the upcoming 10th studio album from Chicago’s Eleventh Dream Day, indie mainstay Thrill Jockey Records is offering up a free download of the track ‘Satellite.’