"Why'd ya let her suck your cock.."

  It's a line from our favourite Marianne Faithful song Why'd Ya Do It written by the great poet Heathcote Williams. Why Williams never wrote another song for Faithful is a mystery.

 Hopefully she will sing it plus a batch of songs from that brilliant album Broken English when she performs at the Sydney Opera House on the 3rd February. Faithful's tour begins in Queensland on the 30th January.

The shows, with her full touring band, will showcase her critically acclaimed new album Easy Come, Easy Go  as well as drawing from the wealth of material from her expansive career.

  Reputedly Marianne dictated many of the words of Why'd Ya Do It to Williams when she found out her then boyfriend Ben Brierly, of the punk band The Vibrators was having an affair with a neighbour in Chelsea.

     And little did tSS know when we called in for Christmas lunch at that neighbour's house one year, that the owner would soon feature in a song that outraged the BBC which refused to give it airplay. They settled for the much more acceptable Ballad of Lucy Jordon.

       The house, a 4 storey mansion, was being rented at the time by the late brilliant Australian make-up artist Richard Sharah who created Zandra Rhode's amazing look.  During lunch Marianne called in for a few drinks and carried a bucket-to collect some coal from the cellar. She was down on 'er uppers at the time.     

           She transported at least 6 bucket loads of coal backwards and forwards from memory, saying "fuck the cow-she'll never miss it !". So Dickensian.

                 And she didn't even know at that stage that Ben was knocking off Sharah's landlady !

We aren't too sure about Marianne's heavily air-brushed publicity snap above-we prefer our own pic (at top)taken with Richard Sharah that Christmas day when she was on the coal shuttle.
               There is also a heavy rumour running about town the Environment Minister Peter Garrett-currently avoiding the media over the Whale War between Japan and Greenpeace and the ramming of the Ady Gil yesterday- is going to join Marianne on stage. Perhaps he'll do a duet on Why'd ya do it and dedicate to Japan. Or maybe the Ady Gil.

Here's Faithful's live version of Why'd ya do it but it has a habit of disappearing from youtube and below is our glorious Federal Minister of the Environment, the Hon Peter Garrett MP in one of his Midnight Oil Moments

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