Dick Clark, who died Wednesday at age 82, and ‘American Bandstand’ played an important role in the ’80s, too, helping bring the burgeoning New Wave and college rock scenes to mainstream America at a time when the still-nascent MTV wasn’t universally available on American cable networks.

Having just wrapped up a run of spring U.S. dates across the northeast and midwest, The Psychedelic Furs have announced a new batch of American concerts in late spring and early fall, including two dates supporting The Go-Gos in California in late September.

Paul Weller dropped by BBC’s ‘Later… with Jools Holland’ last night to perform two tracks — ‘The Attic’ and ‘Kling I Klang’ — off his just-released new solo album ‘Sonik Kicks,’ both of which you can see via the clips posted here. Weller is due on these shores later next month to play a pair of gigs in New York City and one in Toronto.

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.’

Tears For Fears will embark on a late-summer tour of the Far East — hitting Japan, the Philippines and South Korea — but not before playing a small string of warm-up shows in Las Vegas, the San Francisco Bay Area, Costa Mesa, Calif., and possibly San Diego, the band’s Curt Smith reveals on a recent music-industry podcast.

The original lineup of San Francisco’s Translator — the psychedelic-tinged New Wave rock act best remembered for its 1982 single ‘Everywhere That I’m Not’ — this week will release ‘Big Green Lawn,’ its fifth album and first in 26 years. The seven-track album’s out Tuesday, and you the song ‘Soul on Fire’ here.

Only the tail end of the Buzzcocks’ first set at the newly expanded two-weekend Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival was featured on the event’s webcast, so the video offerings aren’t as great for the legendary punk act, but we have been able to round up four songs from the band’s 15-song set on Saturday.