Quick Takes: Vinyl has loyal ‘Fwends’

Flaming Lips fans will need to fire up their turntables if they want to hear the group’s new album when it surfaces exclusively on vinyl next month in conjunction with Record Store Day.

“The Flaming Lips and Heavy Fwends” is a double-LP set with experimental collaborations between the band and high-profile pals including Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Yoko Ono, Nick Cave, Bon Iver, Kesha and others.

It will be released only in a vinyl edition created for Record Store Day, the annual promotion of brick-and-mortar independent music retailers, an event that takes place April 21 this year.

—Randy Lewis

Dame Edna plans last tour

Dame Edna Everage, the Tony Award-winning drag act known for her purple hair and oversized rhinestone eyeglasses, will soon open her final stage show tour in Australia. It comes 57 years after her debut.

Barry Humphries, the actor and satirist who created Australia’s self-proclaimed housewife-superstar, wants to take the farewell show “Eat Pray Laugh!” to Britain and New York over the next two years following the two-month Australian tour that begins in Canberra on June 22, his publicist said Tuesday.

At 78, Humphries said the time had come to retire all his various alter egos from the stage.

—Associated Press

Didion cancels her UCLA visit

Joan Didion, who was scheduled to appear April 14 at UCLA Live, has canceled her visit after fracturing her kneecap.

The 77-year-old New York-based writer, author of such works as “The Year of Magical Thinking,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “Play It As It Lays,” was at lunch and “banged her leg,” said Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity and marketing for Knopf, her publisher.

Didion is wearing a brace and was advised by her doctor to take it easy, he said.

—Carolyn Kellogg

Young, Crazy Horse reunite

Neil Young has reunited with Crazy Horse for their first album together in nearly nine years, “Americana,” in which the band offers its take on 11 songs drawn from the American folk music tradition.

The new collection, slated for release June 5, includes Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” Stephen Foster’s “Oh Susannah,” the British national anthem “God Save the Queen” and folk songs from the 19th century and earlier including “Tom Dooley,” “Clementine” and “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain.”

In his notes with the album, Young says he and longtime collaborators Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot and Poncho Sampedro have tapped the notion of “the folk process” in which traditional songs were sometimes modified to make them more digestible by rock music fans in the early days of what came to be known as folk-rock.

—Randy Lewis

OK, so it really is a Van Gogh

It was, it wasn’t, it is: A still life once thought to be by Vincent van Gogh but later downgraded to being the work of an anonymous artist is indeed by the tormented Dutch Impressionist himself, researchers announced Tuesday.

The process leading to the confirmation of the painting’s authenticity reads like a cold case detective story. A new X-ray technique helped experts re-examine what they already knew about “Still life with meadow flowers and roses” and draw on a growing pool of scholarly Van Gogh research.

A detailed X-ray of an underlying painting of two wrestlers and knowledge of the painter’s period at a Belgian art academy led a team of researchers to conclude that the painting really is by Van Gogh.

The painting is owned by the Kröller-Müller Museum in the central Netherlands and was hung there Tuesday among its other Van Gogh works.

—Associated Press