The Week in Rock: Oct. 30-Nov. 5, 2011
Here’s this week’s Slicing Up Eyeballs news round-up, including posts about New Order, The Cure, Morrissey, Big Country, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Ministry — plus our interview with Peter Murphy
Here’s this week’s Slicing Up Eyeballs news round-up, including posts about New Order, The Cure, Morrissey, Big Country, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Ministry — plus our interview with Peter Murphy
EMI this week released the first in a new series of Peel Sessions compilations, a 2CD set called ‘Movement: BBC Radio 1 Peel Sessions 1977–1979’ that compiles recordings by 41 different punk, post-punk, reggae and 2 Tone acts including Joy Division, XTC, The Jam, Simple Minds, The Specials, Public Image Ltd. and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
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.
Thirty-five years ago today, a nascent Siouxsie and the Banshees — with co-founders Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin joined by Sid Vicious on drums — played their first concert at the famed 100 Club Punk Special, opening for The Clash and the Sex Pistols. Hear it here.
Although he’s become an in-demand guest vocalist, Robert Smith says in a new interview that he’s refocusing on The Cure and vows he won’t do another collaboration until he completes the long-promised second half of 2008′s ‘4.13 Dream’ — the so-called ‘Dark Album’ that he once suggested could land in spring 2009.
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.’
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.