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.

The career-spanning box set from James — ‘The Gathering Sound,’ featuring three CDs, a DVD, a 12-inch record and 8GB of digital music — finally is set for release this fall, and will come with all of the band’s albums plus 32 previously unreleased recordings, 12 of which are completely unreleased songs.

Eagle Rock Entertainment this fall will release a DVD compiling Talking Heads live performances from across the band’s touring career, an 18-track set called ‘Chronology’ that spans the years 1975 to 1983 — and includes the quartet performing “Life During Wartime” during its brief reunion at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Twenty years ago today, first-time director Samuel Bayer gathered several dozen fans and three young musicians on a Culver City, Calif., soundstage to film the video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ a soon-to-be iconic clip — the infamous high school pep rally from hell — that ultimately would be as era-defining as the song itself.

Just eight months after a-ha’s farewell concert in Oslo, the Norwegian pop trio — saying they were ‘shaken to the soul’ — have announced they will reunite later this month to perform at the national memorial service honoring the victims of last month’s mass killings in that country.

In December 1988, when Dinosaur Jr entered Boston’s famed Fort Apache Studios, to record a track for ‘The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young,’ they cut not one but two songs: ‘Lotta Love,’ which would be included on the disc alongside covers by the Pixies, The Flaming Lips and Sonic Youth, and ‘I’ve Been Waiting For You.’

Much has been made about the loss of album art in the download age, but pop-culture maven Matthew Chojnacki argues that even more endangered are the 7- and 12-inch single sleeves of the 1980s — ephemeral splashes of music history that he’s compiled in the new book ‘Put the Needle on the Record: The 1980s at 45 Revolutions Per Minute.’