With its year-long farewell tour underway, Norwegian pop trio a-ha this week announced it will release ’25’ — a new 2CD retrospective covering its output over the past quarter century — in its home country later this month.

British agit-rocker Billy Bragg will venture across the pond this September to play a short U.S. tour following his slot at Seattle’s Bumbershoot festival over Labor Day Weekend.

R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey joined Pearl Jam in Berlin last night to rip through the MC5’s classic ‘Kick Out the Jams’ at a concert that also featured the Seattle rockers debuting a new cover of Public Image Ltd.’s ‘Public Image.’

The Pixies continue to map out a busy 2010, with newly announced plans to follow up the band’s second round of U.S. ‘Doolittle’ concerts with a string of Latin American shows this October in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

Beck’s Record Club — this time featuring Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and post-rock combo Tortoise — tonight unveiled the next album it will cover song-by-song: Yanni’s ‘Live at the Acropolis.’

Fans who shelled out big cash for the just-issued mega-deluxe edition of U2’s new ‘U2 360° at the Rose Bowl’ concert DVD received a nice bonus: a red-vinyl 7-inch single featuring the previously unreleased song ‘Soon,’ a 2-minute track left over from the ‘No Line on the Horizon’ sessions.

XTC’s Andy Partridge today announced the band will reissue 1986’s ‘Skylarking’ on double vinyl ‘as it was intended to sound, but never has due to human error.’ No release date has been announced, nor plans for another CD reissue.