This week’s headlines at Slicing Up Eyeballs — you know, in case you missed anything — included a lot of news about the now-defunct R.E.M., plus items on Public Image Ltd., The Jesus and Mary Chain, This Mortal Coil, Scruffy the Cat and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

John Lydon’s reconstituted Public Image Ltd. has completed recording a new album at Steve Winwood’s studio in Cotswolds, England — the band’s first since 1992′s ‘That What Is Not’ — and will release it next year, the band announced on its website this week.

The celebrated third album from dancefloor-ready post-punk act Shriekback — 1985’s ‘Oil and Gold,’ featuring signature song ‘Nemesis’ — will be reissued next week in the band’s native U.K. as a 2CD set featuring a remastered edition of the original album and a bonus disc with 10 B-sides and live tracks,

The Japanese division of EMI Music this week reissued Public Image Ltd.’s entire catalog in limited, digitally-remastered SHM-CD editions, with 10 titles packaged in vinyl-replica paper sleeves, as well as a tin-can encased, triple-disc ‘Metal Box’ and a standard jewel-case edition of ‘The Greatest Hits… So Far.’

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.’

Punk/post-punk icon John Lydon turns 55 today, and to commemorate, rather than choose between the equally groundbreaking Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd., here’s something equally important: Lydon’s collaboration with Afrika Bambaataa on Time Zone’s 1984 single ‘World Destruction.’

Although John Lydon has delayed work on a new Public Image Ltd. album over the death of stepdaughter Ari Up, the reunited band will continue performing in 2011, with two new summer festival dates announced this week in the U.K. and Slovakia.

German-born punk pioneer Ari Up — the frontwoman of The Slits who learned guitar from Joe Strummer and was John Lydon’s stepdaughter — died today at age 48 following ‘a serious illness,’ Lydon and her mother, Nora Foster, announced via Public Image Ltd.’s website.

Watch the Waterboys performing their 1988 classic ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ live in Irish radio station RTÉ 2fm’s mobile studio at the Electric Picnic Music & Arts Festival last weekend, where Mike Scott & Co. shared the bill with Roxy Music, Bad Lieutenant and Public Image Ltd., among other bands.

Short-lived British postpunk act The Pop Group — which somehow melded punk, dub, noise and funk — will reunite this September after nearly 30 years apart, with four concerts scheduled in the U.K. and Italy and a new album reportedly in the works.

The reconstituted Public Image Ltd. today canceled the entire mid-August German leg of its ongoing reunion tour over ‘production scheduling problems,’ and said it has no plans to rebook the six scrapped concerts.

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.’

Tonight’s ‘Dark Wave’ on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave opened with The Cure’s ‘Disintegration,’ and featured such highlights as a rare airing of TSOL (‘Flowers By the Door’); the return of Public Image Ltd.’s ‘Rise,’ which opened the show for weeks on end earlier this year; and both Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and the Swans’ cover.