GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
Album reviews
Latest releases from Roger Fakhr, Ryley Walker and Le SuperHomard & Maxwell Farrington
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
Roger Fakhr
Fine Anyway
(Habibi Funk Records)
★★★★
GROWING up in the cultural melting pot of 1960s and 1970s Beirut, Roger Fakhr recorded an album’s worth of English-language songs amid the increasing violence in Lebanon, releasing just 200 copies in 1977.
That album, along with some other tracks recorded in Paris, has now been rereleased as Fine Anyway. Fascinatingly, it is the sun-dappled influence of California, not the “Paris of the Middle East” that runs through the music, specifically the hippie singer-songwriters of Laurel Canyon: check out the strong Crosby, Stills & Nash vibes of opener The Wizard.
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