Tony Christie – I Did What I Did For Maria

12th June 1971 · 1970s, 1971, Music

Tony Christie joined the trend for revenge songs, hunting down his wife’s murderer with I Did What I Did For Maria.

Who knew there was a pop sub-genre of songs about men murdering women? Certainly not me at the age of 13.

Mere weeks after R. Dean Taylor was hunted down in Indiana for killing the man who insulted his woman, along came Tony Christie – a poor man’s Tom Jones without the looks or voice – with this uplifting tale of a man hellbent on murderous revenge for the death of his wife.

As with Indiana Wants Me, I have only just realised that it’s about a revenge murder, although, with hindsight, the lyrics make it pretty bleedin’ obvious from the moment he rides into town “with my hand on my gun and revenge in my heart for Maria”.

It’s astonishing how, as a child, you can be entirely capable of singing along to a chorus that goes “Take an eye for an eye / And a life for a life / And somebody must die / For the death of my wife” without it once crossing your mind that this is a teeny bit transgressive. And wildly inappropriate for a pop song.

Perhaps it was down to the cheery demeanour with which Christie, a Yorkshireman (real name Anthony Fitzgerald) with bouffant hair, too-tight trousers and shirt slashed to the chest to reveal some gold pendants, sang the tune in the video – bafflingly against a background of Brighton (or is it Blackpool?) Pier.

To be fair, blandly cheery was his signature style on previous hit Las Vegas (“Oh Las Vegas – you’ll be the death of me”). And the theme song from The Protectors (Avenues And Alleyways). And his biggest hit (Is This The Way To) Amarillo, which reached No.1 on its 2005 re-release for Comic Relief, with a helping hand from Peter Kay (who used it as the theme for Phoenix Nights).

After topping the chart with a re-released Amarillo for Comic Relief in 2005, Christie was invited at the age of nearly 70 to record a Northern Soul album for the Acid Jazz label, featuring collabs with Jarvis Cocker and Roisin Murphy. Here’s one track, Nobody In The World

And here’s a video for Born To Cry, directed by Don Letts, featuring Richard Hawley and Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys. 

More recently, he has appeared in panto in Cambridge in a version of Jack & The Beanstalk set in a fictional town called… you guessed… Amarillo.