Christmas week is a light one for new releases, with only two notable titles: the digital edition of Duran Duran’s long-awaited ‘All You Need Is Now,’ and a 180-gram vinyl reissue of Ride’s shoegaze classic ‘Nowhere.’

With Duran Duran’s long-awaited new album ‘All You Need Is Now’ due out digitally on Tuesday, the band’s been doing loads of press here in the U.S. and back in Europe — including this live debut of lead-off single ‘All You Need Is Now’ on the U.K. television show ‘Loose Women’ this past Friday.

Blaming a promoter who ‘defaulted on the contract,’ Duran Duran today canceled a planned five-date South African tour that was scheduled to begin next Monday — and serve both as a debut of parts of the band’s forthcoming album ‘All You Need Is Now’ and mark ‘the start of an enormous global campaign’ to promote the record.

With the release of the digital edition of Duran Duran’s new album ‘All You Need Is Now’ now less than a month away, the band on Monday night revealed the album’s cover art — which may, truthfully, be more important to those fans waiting for the expanded CD edition to come out in February.

The new album from Duran Duran — ‘All You Need is Now,’ which Nick Rhodes declares ‘the best record we’ve made in over two decades’ — will be released exclusively on iTunes on Dec. 21, but won’t come out on CD until February.

Producer/DJ Mark Ronson tonight gave Duran Duran fans their second taste of the band’s forthcoming album ‘All You Need Is Now,’ premiering the track ‘Being Followed’ — part of it, anyway — on his East Village Radio show.

Today is Duran Duran frontman Simon Le Bon’s 52nd birthday, and to mark the occasion — and with a tip of the hat to the current batch of reissues — we present this fabulous clip of DD playing its single ‘Notorious’ on an Italian television show in 1987. I