A Ballad of Vengeance Sung in the Key of Love -A Song of a Man’s Unyielding Retribution for His Lost Beloved
In the spring of 1974, Paper Lace released their rendition of I Did What I Did for Maria, a track nestled within their album Paper Lace and Other Bits of Material, which didn’t storm the singles charts as a standalone release but rode the wave of the band’s peak popularity. That year, the Nottingham lads were basking in the glow of The Night Chicago Died, a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and Billy Don’t Be a Hero, which topped the UK Singles Chart for three weeks—though this particular song remained a quieter companion, cherished by fans who flipped their vinyl to find it. Originally a No. 2 UK hit for Tony Christie in 1971, written by the prolific duo Mitch Murray and Peter Callander, Paper Lace’s version emerged as the band seized the songwriting pair’s knack for storytelling after their Opportunity Knocks triumph in ’73. For those of us who lived through those days, it’s a tune that hums with the echo of a time when music spun tales as vivid as any paperback western, a relic of an era when AM radio ruled and every note carried a story.
The journey of I Did What I Did for Maria with Paper Lace is a chapter in their whirlwind rise. By ’74, the quintet—Phil Wright, Cliff Fish, Mick Vaughan, Chris Morris, and Carlo Paul Santanna—had shed their early covers-band skin as Music Box and stepped into the spotlight, thanks to Murray and Callander’s golden touch. The song itself was a hand-me-down, first cut by Christie as a dramatic croon about a widower’s revenge, but Paper Lace gave it their own spin, recorded in a rush of sessions at London’s Morgan Studios alongside their chart-toppers. Wright’s voice, less polished than Christie’s but brimming with raw earnestness, carries the tale of a man facing the gallows, unrepentant for the blood he shed to avenge his Maria. It’s a snapshot of a band at their creative cusp—before lineup shifts and the fading of the ’70s pop wave dimmed their star—crafted in a haze of cigarette smoke and studio lights, a testament to their fleeting reign as Nottingham’s pride.
At its core, I Did What I Did for Maria is a stark ballad of justice through a lover’s eyes—a man who’d trade his life for the one who took his wife, finding peace in the act. “Take an eye for an eye, and a life for a life,” Wright sings, his delivery steady as the sun rises on his final dawn, a courtyard waiting to claim him. It’s vengeance without apology, love twisted into a gun’s cold steel, a story that unfolds like a dusty saloon showdown where honor outweighs consequence. For us who heard it back then, it’s the sound of Saturday nights spent huddled by the radio, of flared jeans and faded dreams, when a song could make you feel the weight of a stranger’s heart—grieving, raging, resolute. There’s a simplicity here, a clarity in its moral gray, that hits harder as the years pile on, reminding us of when right and wrong felt less tangled.
Cast your mind back to ’74—platform heels clicking on pavements, the air thick with the promise of summer, and Paper Lace blaring from every corner shop transistor. This wasn’t their loudest shout, but it’s the one that lingers for those of us who wore out the grooves of Paper Lace and Other Bits of Material, flipping past the hits to find this quiet stormer. It’s the taste of warm lager at a pub gig, the flicker of a black-and-white telly showing the lads on Top of the Pops, the ache of a world where love could drive a man to the edge and beyond. I Did What I Did for Maria didn’t need a chart to claim us—it lived in the spaces between, a cowboy’s lament in a pop band’s hands, a memory of when music could break you open and leave you whole. Even now, it rides back on the wind, a ghostly strum from a time we can still feel in our bones.
Great Songs