Rogér Fakhr ★★★★ Fine Anyway HABIBI FUNK. CD/DL/LP

After Sudanese jazz, Arabic funk and Tunisian disco, say Hi! to Lebanese yacht rock.

Unlucky to hit his mid-’70s recording peak while civil war raged in Lebanon, Rogér Fakhr’s solo works are known to just a few friends and owners of a privately pressed cassette. Culled from charmingly hissy reel-to-reels, Fine Anyway reveals the guitarist for singers Ziad Rahbani and Fairouz as a classy singer-songwriter in his own right, balancing Scott Walker’s gravitas with Tony Joe White’s naturalness on the cleverly ornamented analogue baroque of My Baby, She Is As Down As I Am, yearning yet groovy (Such) A Trip Thru Time and title track’s bittenlipped bravado. A brace of slicker studio offerings, recorded in exile in Paris, feel positively West Coast, with only the jolting chants and sirens of note-to-self Keep Going hinting at the turmoil surrounding him. Andy Cowan