PETER HAMMILL: OVER (Charisma), SINGULARITY (Fie) BB BLUNDER: WORKER'S PLAYTIME (Long Hair) BRIAN GODDING: SLAUGHTER ON SHAFTESBURY AVENUE (The Wild Places), THE COLOUR OF SOUND (Happydays), KEBAB A LA TWANG (Happydays) MIRAGE: NOW YOU SEE IT... (Happydays) FULL MONTE: SPARK IN THE DARK (Slam) MIKE HARRISON: LATE STARTER (Halo) SOMETIMES, gratifyingly, a plan just comes together. Writing CD reviews week upon week when you're a grizzled old misanthrope with an ear trumpet and a Tenalady prescription often leads to frustration, despair and uncontrollable flatulence when much of what you have to listen to is tedious, formulaic and uninspired.

This week, however, the stars have miraculously and benevolently aligned themselves in such a way that I get to write about some of my all-time heroes, starting with the very very great Peter Hammill. Hammill was - and is - the frontman with the immortal Van Der Graaf Generator, by some distance the most challenging, uncompromising but ultimately rewarding British prog group of their era.

Right from the get-go, Hammill has simultaneously maintained a prolific and consistently worthwhile solo career - in fact, Van Der Graaf's first outing, Aerosol Grey Machine, started life as a solo project - and recent weeks have seen the release of Hammill's latest album, Singularity, and the expanded and remastered reissue of his lovelorn 1977 masterpiece, Over.

Fans should be delighted to learn that Singularity reveals Hammill to have lost none of his trademarks over the years - the dramatic, declamatory delivery ("like Withnail set to music", as my son says) and the passages of careful tenderness and scathing vitriol which routinely surface in his literate and genuinely poetic lyrics.

It's a fair bet that no one else in 2007 will be writing lines such as "And though her heart is hard as stone that's still the flame from which she'll spark...' and "I preferred her in anonymity, but now that cover's blown and, absurdly, she stars, eponymously cast: it's Salome's show" (Naked To The Flame).

A fresh listen to Over, meanwhile, reveals it to be the definitive break-up album of all time - more eloquently bruised, bereft yet redemptive than Sea Change by Beck, Blood On The Tracks by Bob Dylan and Blue Valentine by Tom Waits put together.

Hammill wryly notes on the sleeve that "I was not so lost in misery and self-pity that I lost all touch with self-awareness. Equally, I was not exactly a bundle of laughs at the time, either." Indeed, it is the unmistakable clout of passionate conviction that makes Over such a powerful document of (again in Hammill's words) "a bit of a turn on a bumpy stretch of road."

A figure similar in Herculean stature to Hammill in my personal pantheon of greats is Brian Godding, who on the quiet has been outplaying Britain's finest guitarists for more years than seems entirely fair.

A mainstay of criminally unsung UK psych godheads Blossom Toes, Godding went on to develop a fluent, dazzling, driven but intuitively tasteful guitar style with Mike Westbrook's Solid Gold Cadillac in the 1970s before undertaking further jazz-rock projects with toweringly substantial players such as saxophonist George Khan, bassist Steve Lamb and drummer Dave Sheen.

Fans of Allan Holdsworth, John Etheridge and John McLaughlin had best be sitting down with a fortifying cuppa when they hear, by way of example, Blue Sun from Godding's 1988 album Slaughter On Shaftesbury Avenue - a warm-toned, hugely imaginative and wholly involving sound picture on which Godding conjures forth such a powerfully hypnotic extended intro that I actually jumped out of my seat when the drums came in.

Godding now sells his unimpeachable back catalogue via his website www.lotsawatts.co.uk and the Happydays label imprint, and does so with a cheerfully irreverent, unpretentious and self-deprecating attitude. Both of the Blossom Toes albums, plus the massively sought-after Live In Sweden CD, are available from the website - as is the wonderful Workers' Playtime album from Toes offshoot BB Blunder - and Godding's further endeavours range from mesmerising guitar synth workouts (The Colour Of Sound and Kebab A La Twang) and cartwheeling fusion (Mirage's Now You See It...) to the startlingly avant garde tone poetry of Full Monte's Spark In The Dark.

All this, and he's a top bloke as well. Why not stop by his website and pay your respects to a national treasure who has deserved recognition since at least 1967?

Finally, it's immensely gratifying to see the re-emergence of Mike Harrison, formerly the vocalist with Art and Spooky Tooth and every bit the equal of terrific UK R&B vocalists like Gary Brooker, Chris Farlowe and Terry Reid.

Late Starter finds him performing stirring versions of chestnuts such as Night Time, Drown In My Own Tears and Let's Go Get Stoned, all of which are eminently well suited to his gruffly expressive vocals.

A glowing analogue production and the sterling efforts of a capable and committed band help to make this considerably more than just a reverential rehash of the former glories of others, but the garlands mostly go to Harrison himself, whose ability to sing the proverbial birds out of the proverbial trees remains completely undiminished. Now if only he'd tackle fresh versions of Rome Take Away Three and I Think I'm Going Weird... eee, I'd be right made up.