The Jesus and Mary Chain’s brief run through Texas last month appears to be the beginning of an active 2012: In addition to today’s announcement of the band’s first-ever concert in China, the brothers Reid also will come back to the U.S. for a string of new dates in both June and September.

This week’s Slicing Up Eyeballs show on Strangeways Radio featured brand-new music from Billy Bragg, Devo, Translator and the late Joey Ramone, plus favorites new and old from David Byrne, The Beautiful South, Easterhouse, Heaven 17, Pulp, Buzzcoks, James, Echo & The Bunnymen and more.

There’s a flurry of activity coming from The English Beat — or as they’re more properly known, The Beat — as Shout! Factory this week announced plans to release both a new single-disc best-of and a 5CD box set featuring the band’s three albums and two discs of bonus material.

Over this past weekend, BBC’s Radio 2 marked the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic with ‘Minute By Minute,’ which recounted the disaster in real time — complete with a contribution from Billy Bragg, who wrote and performed a song from the oft-misunderstood iceberg’s point of view.

The Jesus and Mary Chain will follow up last month’s short run of Texas concerts with the group’s first-ever trip to China next month to perform at the China Music Valley International Music Festival in Beijing, where the noise-pop legends will share the bill with White Lies, Joss Stone, Xu Wei and Wang Feng.

The ’80s-era lineup of Ultravox — Midge Ure, Billy Currie, Chris Cross and Warren Cann — last month announced plans to release ‘Brilliant,’ their first new studio album together in 28 years, and today debuted the first music from that project, lead single and title track ‘Brilliant,’ on British radio.

With their new ‘concept covers album’ Echoes and Rhymes out in two weeks, The Primitives today released a video for the record’s first single: ‘Turn Off the Moon,’ a song that originally appeared as the B-side to the single ‘Lolita Ya Ya’ from the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Lolita.’