Given yesterday’s news, it seemed to appropriate to dust off and post this episode of my Slicing Up Eyeballs show on Strangeways Radio from March 8, a show devoted entirely to R.E.M. to mark the release of the band’s 15th — and now, it turns out, final — album ‘Collapse Into Now.’

Three days after R.E.M.’s 2008 tour wrapped in Mexico City, the band posted this six-song, 39-minute encore set from that final concert — an appearance Michael Stipe told fans would be ‘our last show for a long time,’ but now stands as the group’s final performance.

R.E.M. — the iconic college-rock band that soared to major-label uperstardom in the late ’80s and early ’90s before suffering the loss of a key original member — announced today that it has ‘decided to call it a day as a band’ after 31 years together.

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.’

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we bring you this pristine, 95-minute R.E.M. concert filmed on the ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’ tour on Oct. 2, 1985, for the German TV show ‘Rockpalast.’

The members of R.E.M. have made no secret about how influenced they were by The Feelies’ 1980 debut ‘Crazy Rhythms,’ and in this May clip, we see the reunited band salute their admirers with a high-energy run through ‘Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)’ off 1982′s ‘Chronic Town’ EP.

Today marks the release of the 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M.’s ‘Lifes Rich Pageant,’ and to help celebrate, the fine folks at EMI Music have provided us with a copy of the set — featuring a whopping 19 previously unreleased studio demos — to award to one lucky Slicing Up Eyeballs reader.