John Prine: Sweet Revenge

A NEW ALBUM by John Prine is an event. Let it be said at once that Prine is immeasurably the best singer-songwriter to come out of America in the seventies; and what holds him back from mass popularity is that he is not bounded by the seventies: He's no epitomising hold-all of everybody's sense of Now. He's no Bowie or Alice Cooper of Bruce Springsteen. Rather, he comes out of a tradition established long before most of us got hooked on music at all.