Timing is as crucial to the release of a retrospective as it is to comedy. That’s why this celebration of a career feels more like a wake. Underworld’s marriage of Karl Hyde’s poetic vocals to Darren Emerson and Rick Smith’s gliding electronica tugged the British dance boom of the 1990s towards a left-field-conclusion. But with the genre withering, it’s perverse to release a Best Of now. One day, a new generation will plunder their back catalogue, but not now. As with The Chemical Brothers’ recent compilation, the crash is too recent to celebrate the journey.

Stevie “Guitar” Miller gets downplayed when talk turns to great West Coast acts who got out of the ’60s, but this Wisconsin-via-Texas stylist is better than his biggest hits?”Abracadabra”, “Fly Like An Eagle”?might suggest. This package heads for all the usual sources, from the Children Of The Future album onward, and predictably ignores 1972’s remarkable Recall The Beginning?the psych-pop blues and spatial-effects electronica of that album still sound ahead of the game. Commercial or cute, light or heavy, Miller is more influential and durable than his detractors believe.

This record’s peacefulness went much against the general grain in 1983. Daughter of TV theme composer Edwin Astley and former member of chamber-pop ensemble The Ravishing Beauties, Virginia paints what seems to be a simple portrait of a summer’s day, with piano, woodwind, voices, field recordings and electronics. Yet titles like “With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming” suggest an unreality; and as the day wears on, the backward rhythm tracks and dissonance increase in intensity (“When The Fields Were On Fire”). Quietly influential on everyone from the KLF of Chill Out to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Astley seemed to be as back-to-basics as Billy Bragg (albeit in a different way), but in reality was as futuristic as the Art Of Noise.

Lawrence Hayward’s plan to release 10 albums in 10 years began timorously: the first two Felt albums?Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty and The Splendour Of Fear ?are dominated by Maurice Deebank’s guitar jangle; pretty, but aimless. The Strange Idols Pattern And Other Short Stories and the Cocteau-assisted Ignite The Seven Cannons are more focused, revealing Lawrence had a pop sensibility as well as an aesthetic one. After Deebank left in 1986, a short instrumental set-Let The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads To Death ?was followed by their best, Forever Breathes The Lonely Word Lawrence’s opulent melancholy finding fruition. Poem Of The River continues in the same vein, with organist Martin Duffy (later of Primal Scream) increasingly prominent. The Pictorial Jackson Review is dominated by a long piano instrumental by him, while Train Above The City is an entire album of tinkling cocktail jazz to which Lawrence only contributed the titles. The final masterpiece from 1989, Me And A Monkey On The Moon , is more conventional?in places it even rocks?though the Brum-centric “Mobile Shack” hints at the confessional novelty rock that would occupy Lawrence through the ’90s with Denim.

Either you can see this three-CD package as a potted history of black American music from doo wop to electro-funk via Motown, Philly and disco?because that’s the ground The Spinners cover here?or simply as a showcase for their sublime recordings with Thom Bell, plus a bunch of filler. There’s no denying the jejune appeal of 1961’s “That’s What Girls Are Made Of”, nor the infectiousness of the much-sampled “It’s A Shame” from 1970, and even later team-ups with the juicy, fruity Mtume are not the dads-go-trendy embarrassments that they might have been.

But the crucial stuff remains The Spinners’ summit encounters with Burt Blackarach himself, the aforementioned Mr Bell who, after inventing symphonic angst for The Delfonics and The Stylistics, evolved a more mature style for these doyens of Detroit vocal harmony. From 1972’s “Could It Be I’m Falling In Love” to 1979’s “Are You Ready For Love” (that recent No 1 for Elton John), Bell used flugelhorns, oboes and French horns to enhance Philippe Wynne’s gentle tenor voice, providing a rich avant-lush backdrop for these soft paradigms of adult male heartache.

I know what you’re thinking. Oh Lord, what’s McCartney doing now? What desperate revisionism is he foisting on a Lennon-free world? Now calm down. Far from a repositioning of the historical spotlight that Macca bashers will be so keen to detect, the Let It Be remix is not only a noble, entirely worthwhile exercise which only enhances the reputation of all concerned, it also goes quite a way to putting right an episode which was, in Beatles terms, an historical wrong.

Let It Be was The Beatles’ penultimate project but the last-released Beatles album; recorded mostly in January 1969, it eventually appeared in May 1970, nine months after their true swan song, Abbey Road. Considered at the time a rather second-rate send-off, the manner of its release?by far the most cobbled-together and compromised of all Beatle albums?has left its reputation well behind most other Fab output.

But the intentions were good. After the elaborate 1967 psychedelia of Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour and the individual musical personalities fighting for space on 1968’s White Album, McCartney’s initial idea was to get the Beatles back to being a band again, singing and playing as a four-piece. The filmed rehearsals?originally intended for a TV documentary that eventually became the Let It Be movie?would climax with an exotically located concert. However, with no one except McCartney really wanting to be there (the cavernous, cold Twickenham film studios), what actually occurred was directionless jamming and increasingly ill-tempered exchanges leading to Harrison temporarily walking out. Lennon later described the period as “the most miserable sessions on earth”.

Relocating to the studio in the Apple building basement, George invited keyboardist Billy Preston along for the remainder of the project (remembering the Fabs’ improved behaviour when Clapton guested on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on The White Album) and the band ground out an album’s worth of material. The climactic concert was downsized to half an hour on the rooftop of the Apple building.

With the group barely interested in the music they’d left behind, engineer Glyn Johns had a couple of (widely bootlegged) shots at compiling the so-called Get Back album from the hours of tape left behind but failed to get the band’s approval for his efforts, and the project was shelved. (Johns has since been famously reluctant to talk about his experiences with The Beatles.) By early 1970, Lennon?inspired by his erstwhile business manager Allen Klein?was taking care of Beatle business without referring to an estranged McCartney and appointed Phil Spector to prepare the Get Back tapes into a releasable state as an album companion to the imminent movie. For a week or so, Spector hit Abbey Road studios running, abandoned the back-to-basics remit, got Ringo to overdub his drums, smeared lush stuff all over McCartney’s ballads, performed some neat edits and produced a respectable record from what Lennon memorably called the “shittiest load of badly recorded shit”. Of the significantly retitled Let It Be album, McCartney says now that “I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it, you know.” At the time, however, he was so furious to have Beatles product put out without his approval, he cited it as one of the reasons why he wanted to legally dissolve The Beatles’ partnership.

Fast forward 30-odd years and Apple (mainly McCartney, but approved by Harrison and Starr) commission the Abbey Road team who remixed The Beatles for Yellow Submarine and Anthology for DVD to look once more at the session tapes and make the Let It Be album again, as they saw fit. Ironically, in attempting to better create the spirit of unadorned Beatles, the engineers have used whatever modern editing and processing they needed to achieve the best album they could.

The result, however, is worth it. Anyone who knows the sloppy jamming of the film and bootleg albums or who sat through the dreary outtakes that made it to Anthology 3 will be relieved to learn that only tidy.performances of the core material comprise this 35-minute, 11-track album. It’s not exactly transformed into a classic?apart from a couple of McCartney’s big-hitters, it’s the slightest selection of Beatle compositions since 1965’s Help!?but the new Let It Be is punchy, full of presence and powerfully involving. What was previously an uneasy mix of medium-grade Beatles treated to glossy overstatement and irreverent editing is now a great little record.

Of the main differences, “Don’t Let Me Down” is at last on the album it should have been on all along (here, the passionate rooftop version), “The Long And Winding Road” is a later take with slightly different lyrics (“anyway, you’ve always known…”) and there are no rolling toms in the final verse of “Let It Be”. The highlight of the record, however, may be the new (corrected speed) mix of “Across The Universe”, just Lennon with guitar plus hauntingly processed tamboura and a gorgeous new fade.

Of the tiny differences only Beatleheads who know the original like the face of their mother will spot, more of the improvised vocal yelps of Lennon and (especially) McCartney are retained throughout, Preston’s keyboard licks are more prominent on “I’ve Got A Feeling”, and Lennon’s rhythm guitar and the vocals are more defined generally. In fact, there’s an immediacy and muscle to the sound, particularly the rockers (“One After 909”, always a good performance, now sounds huge), that gives the impression of everything being louder than everything else. Now that’s a good mix.

Spector’s edits on “Dig A Pony” and “I Me Mine” remain, though some may miss the raucous, always incomplete “Maggie Mae”, the saggy improvised jam “Dig It” and Lennon’s “Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf-aids” intros. As compensation, there’s a 20-minute bonus disc?a mouth-watering taster for the extra footage of the Let It Be DVD, due in 2004?with around 25 items of other informal but fascinating studio flotsam, including Lennon singing McCartney’s first ever song, “I Lost My Little Girl”, and a snippet of a long lost Ringo song, “A Trip To Carolina”.

McCartney and Starr are said to be delighted. That makes three of us.

Peter Gabriel’s career has always been a battle between the head and the heart. He is the egg-headed boffin, one of rock’s most intimidating intellectuals who likes to tinker endlessly in the studio and who cloaks his work in artiness. And he’s an emotional, impulsive man who knows the value of spontaneity and the importance of following his instincts. When the two are captured in perfectly balanced creative tension, he’s capable of breathtakingly taut and powerfully moving music.

Hit is not the first compilation of Gabriel’s solo material. Shaking The Tree appeared in 1990 and most of the big tracks from that collection are reprised here?”Solsbury Hill”, which allegorically described his exit from Genesis; “Biko”, which remains a model of how to combine pop and politics with dignity and passion; the glorious duet with Kate Bush, “Don’t Give Up”, and the mysterious “Red Rain” (both of which are enhanced by Daniel Lanois’ ethereal co-production); and the flowering of his world music interests on the duet with Youssou N’Dour which gave its title to that earlier compilation. Then, of course, there’s the MTV staple anthem “Sledgehammer”, which probably best captures the Gabriel dialectic?cultured and sophisticated but with a slamming beat, a white soul vocal and wonderfully libidinous lyric.

Yet 1990 was only halfway through Gabriel’s solo career. Although there have only been two regular studio albums since then, Us in 1992 and Up last year, he has hardly been idle, and exactly half of the tracks come from the period after 1990.

There are four apiece from those two studio albums. But then there are the tracks that only the collectors will have?”Lovetown” from the film Philadelphia, the heart-rending “Father Son” plus “The Town That Ate People” and “Downside Up” from the Millennium Dome show, the evocative “Cloudless” from his soundtrack to Phillip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence, and the brilliant “Burn You Up Burn You Down”, included on the earliest promo copies of Up but inexplicably omitted from the final version.

Head and heart taken together make for a collection that not only confirms him as a unique voice in British popular music, but should also convince you that he’s blessed with genius.

Mining the same classical chamberpop as contemporaries Procul Harum, Alex Spyropoulos’ and Patrick Campbell-Lyons’ charges cut… Simon Simopath in 1967, a science-fiction pantomime a-flutter with silken strings and baroque delicacy. Part Greek myth, part L Ron Hubbard. Even better was follow-up All Of Us, though?with the exception of “Rainbow Chaser”?it failed to ignite a public weaned on less fragile acid fare. Today, their 30-piece string orchestras?

The Soldier On The Wall takes its title from Hadrian’s Roman structure which divides Harvey’s native Scotland from the Sassenach hordes and the tone and timbre of the late maverick showman is very much concerned with war games. Containing most of the flamboyant elements of Alex’s Vertigo period, when raucous hits like “Delilah” brought him a modicum of notoriety, TSOTW is littered with narrative items like “Flowers Mr Florist” and “Snowshoes Thompson”. When archaeology becomes the new rock’n’roll, they’ll be playing this on the ramparts.

Recorded in July 1964, Callier’s debut finally reached a wider audience after his mid-’90s re-emergence from years in computer programming exile and the patronage of Beth Orton. Now bolstered by three extras (including a breathtaking reading of Judy Collins’ “The Golden Apples Of The Sun”), this is unsinkable stuff, Callier purring like a male Nina Simone over spartan arrangements of traditional ditties, spinning folk standards into soulful spirituals. Exploring his love of Coltrane, Callier fingerpicks over the twin basses of Terbour Attenborough and John Tweedle to create a skin-pricking intimacy, not least on “Spin Spin Spin” and the epic “I’m A Drifter”.

How better to escape the glum omnipotence of The Darkness than to curl up with five CDs of AC/DC? Bonfire is a tribute to the randy gifts of original singer Bon Scott. A couple of live CDs from 1979 capture the band’s power, the way they evoked abandon with such military precision. Another disc of rarities provides the requisite archaeological factor (“Whole Lotta Rosie” stemmed from a song called “Dirty Eyes”! Who knew?). Better still, an NYC radio session from 1977 is a match for any of the Scott-era studio LPs. A mark docked, though, for the cynical inclusion of the first post-Scott LP, Back In Black, as Disc Five. A rock landmark, for sure, but do the band’s devotees need another copy?