Twenty years ago today, the Perry Farrell-spawned Lollapalooza festival — which, in retrospect, joins Nevermind as perhaps the best historical encapsulation of ‘the year punk broke’ — made its debut in the sun-baked Arizona desert with performances by Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Jane’s Addiction.

Since the announcement last month that MTV plans to revive its ‘120 Minutes’ franchise as both a new monthly TV show and a quick-hit web series, the music-averse network has begun populating its MTV Hive website with performances by the likes of The Cure, Pixies, The Jesus and Mary Chain and World Party.

MTV announced today that it will revive its hugely influential Sunday night alternative-music video outlet ‘120 Minutes’ as a weekly online series called ‘120 Seconds’ hosted by Matt Pinfield on web portal MTV Hive and a monthly show that will be televised on sister network MTV2.

Check out Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction in the full, unaired pilot for a proposed MTV reality show called ‘Grounded’ that apparently was going to follow different celebrities each week as they moved back home with their parents.

To commemorate XTC frontman Andy Partridge’s 57th birthday today, we present this three-song live session — recorded May 16, 1989, at MTV in New York — that finds the rarely touring trio playing two songs off the just-released ‘Oranges & Lemons,’ plus “Blue Beret,” a then-unreleased outtake.

Today marks the 47th birthday of one of the signature guitarists of his generation: Johnny Marr of The Smiths. In honor of this peerless player, here’s a full ‘Meat is Murder’-era Smiths show, filmed for Spanish television on May 18, 1985, in Madrid.

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.

Trevor Horn is resurrecting The Buggles, announcing today on his website that ‘The Buggles will return… 28.09.10,’ a headline that appears alongside a vintage photo of himself and former bandmate Geoff Downes.

Spin magazine recently dropped a goldmine into Google Books: scans of nearly every issue of the music mag, from its May 1985 debut up through October 2009. We’ve flipped through the ’85 to ’90 issues, creating links to stories about The Cure, R.E.M., The Replacements, Morrissey, New Order and many, many more.

This week’s new releases include the Gorillaz’s ‘Plastic Beach’ — featuring a reunion of The Clash’s Mick Jones and Paul Simonon — plus reissues of Spandau Ballet’s first two albums and a new early-’80s best-of from The Fleshtones.

This latest installment of Vintage Video again comes from our old stash of VHS tapes: It’s the entire Dec. 23, 1990, episode of MTV’s ‘120 Minutes,’ hosted by Robert Smith, who offers a retrospective of The Cure’s videos to promote the release of the band’s post-‘Disintegration’ remix disc ‘Mixed Up.’

The LA Weekly yesterday pointed out a trio of Depeche Mode home videos just uploaded to YouTube that capture the synthpop giants before, during and after their appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards on the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood on Sept. 9, 1988.

Loyal Slicing Up Eyeballs reader Chris Cummins — the guest blogger who wrote last month’s excellent “Remembering MTV’s ‘120 Minutes’” post for USA Today’s Pop […]