Word: alison
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Alison" is the album's most interesting song. A ballad, it's unsettling in the same way as "I'm Not Angry"--what Costello says works at cross-purposes with how he says it. The music is quiet and lyrical, and another aspect of Costello's instrumental skill is revealed in the reflective, jazz-like guitar figures he plays under the vocal. The words, however, belie the tradition of rock and roll ballads to lost loves. Yes, there's sadness there for what used to be--but the norm in classic rock lyrics is the graceful acquiescence, and Costello will...
Anthony then draws in Giles Leggett, his wealthy friend from Oxbridge days, as a backer. Alison Murray, Keating's lover, is a beautiful ex-actress who retired in order to care for her brain-damaged daughter, but also to avoid competition with her less successful actor-husband. While doing fund raising for a cerebral-palsy fund, Alison learned how to read balance sheets and ask knowledgeable questions about interest rates, investments, and tax relief. Now she shares a common interest with Anthony Keating: money...
Meanwhile, Alison tries to resuce her ungrateful daughter from Wallacia, a Communist satellite in the Balkans, where Jane has encountered the misfortune of killing two Wallacians in a car accident, earning herself a potentially open-ended jail term...
...Anthony Keating's transformation is pecularly a product of his times, Alison Murray's dilemma has a more enduring nature. She has struggled in her adult life to be beyond reproach, to be called a "perfect woman," a "perfect mother." Now, mirroring the demise of England, her own value system collapses. She realizes that the sacrifice of her career done in order to care for her defective daughter Molly has only ended by causing other women to hate her. They had already hated her for her beauty; they now hate her because the example she sets makes too many demands...
...gave Rosemary cancer of the breast, said Alison to herself, aloud, to see how the words sounded. They did not sound very foolish...