Welcome to the Week in Rock. This week featured news about Echo & The Bunnymen, XTC, Soundgarden, James, Steve Kibley, Simple Minds, Joe Strummer and more — plus we debuted the latest in our series of Auto Reverse mixtapes for your downloading/streaming pleasure.

Been a while since we’ve done a “120 Minutes” Rewind — the pickings were getting awfully slim on YouTube — but it’s time to revive the feature, and there’s no better way to do it than with this “120 X-Ray” spotlight on the mighty Joe Strummer.

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video we return to that treasure trove of quality early ’80s concert footage, the West German TV show “Rockpalast,” for this New Gold Dream-era performance by Simple Minds. Here, you can watch the full 90-minute performance by Jim Kerr and Co. filmed on June 6, 1982.

With just a couple days left in February, we’ve just managed to squeeze in this month’s (belated) installment in the Auto Reverse series: two fresh 45-minute sides that you can stream via Mixcloud, or download, at least for a limited time, courtesy of the link included right here.

The Church’s Steve Kilbey will perform with former bandmate Richard Ploog for the first time in nearly 25 years next month when the drummer — who left after 1990’s Gold Afternoon Fix — joins Kilbey and Mark Gable of The Choirboys for a “one-off special tour” called “Discover Australia: A Stumble Through Australian Pop History.”

Tonight’s Slicing Up Eyeballs Music Hour featured tracks by Simple Minds, Ramones, Miracle Legion, Hoodoo Gurus, Mojo Nixon, The Jam, Echo & The Bunnymen, Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians, Devo, Joe Jackson, The Toy Dolls, Squeeze, Dinosaur Jr, James, The Afghan Whigs and more.

Echo & The Bunnymen this morning revealed the first details of their 2014 touring plans in support of forthcoming album Meteorites, announcing a 12-date tour this May that mostly will play the U.K. but also will include a trio of concerts in major cities in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Manchester-bred rockers James today announced they’ll release their next album — La Petite Mort, the first taste of which, “Frozen Britain,” you can stream below — this June, a record that bassist Jim Glennie says “stretched us and the songs and pushed us to new heights in craftsmanship and intensity.”

Soundgarden will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its blockbuster album Superunknown this year with an ambitious reissue project that begins on Record Store Day with a collection of five limited-edition 10-inch singles, this is followed in June by 2CD and 2LP reissues, plus a monster 5CD “super deluxe edition.”

Back in 2010, Andy Partridge announced that XTC’s 1986 album Skylarking was being reissued “as it was intended to sound, but never has due to human error” — a new double-vinyl pressing that corrected the sound polarity that had been reversed on all prior releases of the album.

This week’s new releases include expanded reissues, on both CD and vinyl, of Bob Mould’s solo debut ‘Workbook’ and Morrissey’s ‘Your Arsenal,’ plus brand-new studio albums from Neneh Cherry and The Woodentops, and vinyl reissues from Peter Gabriel and The Afghan Whigs.

Full details aren’t promised until Wednesday, but Echo & The Bunnymen today “dropp(ed) the veil slightly” on the band’s forthcoming 12th studio album, revealing the title — Meteorites — and artwork for the project via the group’s Facebook page. A full tracklist and release dates presumably will follow later this week.

Welcome to the Week in Rock, where we round up all of the headlines posted on this site over the past week. This week featured news about the passing of Devo’s Bob Casale, plus The Afghan Whigs, The Sisters of Mercy, The Smiths, Belly and more — plus we celebrated our fifth birthday.