“It’s A Sin” - the origin story of the smash hit

In June 1987, British pop duo the Pet Shop Boys, aka Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, released what would be their second number one hit, heralding their “imperial phase” of commercial stardom: “It’s A Sin”. This insistently grand synth-pop anthem merged disco drama with a lyrical lament that evoked Tennant’s Catholic schooldays (“When I look back upon my life/ It’s always with a sense of shame/ I’ve always been the one to blame…”)

“It’s A Sin” was true ‘80s pop provocation: a lavishly produced “sorry, not sorry” statement amidst undeniably conservative times. In 2021, its spirit was summoned again, when “It’s A Sin” became the title (and a soundtrack highlight) of Russell T Davies’s poignant drama series, portraying a group of young friends during the ‘80s AIDS crisis. The NME reported that the TV show also prompted a “huge streaming surge” for the PSBs’ classic track.

The original “It’s A Sin” was conceived in early 1983, when vocalist Tennant was still a music journalist at Smash Hits magazine, keyboardist Lowe was an Architecture student, and the pair were aspiring songwriters in a small Camden studio. By summer that year, Tennant had met and clicked with one of their musical heroes: New York hi-NRG pioneer Bobby Orlando. The PSBs would record an early mix of “It’s A Sin” with Bobby O in 1984.

“’It’s A Sin’ was meant to be very ‘Euro’,” Tennant tells The FT. “It even had a little Euro melody at the beginning, which we later dumped. We had a different song with dark piano chords, and we put that in the middle bit [forming the “Father forgive me..” section]. The song was written very quickly. I always remember we were told at school that sex was a sin unless it was in marriage, for the purpose of procreation. People often think that ‘It’s A Sin’ is about being gay, and I guess it sort of is, but actually, it’s really about how we were taught that sexuality was a sin.”

The Bobby O incarnation of “It’s A Sin” wasn’t a commercial success, though it still sounds like an excitingly raw blueprint for the eventual smash hit. Tennant dismisses the oft-repeated story that the PSBs offered the song to Hit Factory producers Stock/Aitken/Waterman (“It’s not true – well, neither of us can remember it, anyway”), though adds that it had been rejected by UK hi-NRG DJ Ian Levine (partly due to the title resembling another of his productions, “He’s A Saint, He’s A Sinner” by Miquel Brown – though Brown would actually release a hi-NRG cover of “It’s A Sin” in 1997).

“It’s A Sin” would ultimately resurface as the lead single from the PSBs’ second album, Actually (1987). By this point, the duo were star signings on UK label Parlophone, widely celebrated for their pop artistry, though they’d yet to repeat the international success of their breakthrough chart-topper “West End Girls” (1985). This time, “It’s A Sin” reunited the PSBs with two innovative producers, Stephen Hague and Julian Mendelsohn, as well as cutting-edge Fairlight synth programmer Andy Richards.

“We’d moved on from our initial Pet Shop Boys sound, which was quite ‘New York’ and hip hop-influenced,” explains Tennant. “We decided to go really big on ‘It’s A Sin’, and mega-Catholic. With the Fairlight, you had any sound you wanted.”

“It’s A Sin” involves exceptionally varied elements, including the “ambience” sampled at London’s Brompton Oratory (the sound of a man cleaning the church candle-holders is in the middle of the song), and a choral mass recorded at Westminster Cathedral (coincidentally, in the same key of C minor); you can hear a mournful “amen” as the song thunders towards its close, and Tennant recites a Latin prayer (the Confiteor). Meanwhile, Richards found a NASA countdown on the Fairlight:

“I said: ‘Put that at the top! It has no relevance whatsoever, but it sounds great,” exclaims Tennant. “At the end, you get the ‘zero’, of course; it sort of book-ended it.”

While the track was being mixed, Tennant noticed the studio TV set showing Derek Jarman’s Baroque arthouse film, Caravaggio; this inspired the PSBs to ask Jarman to direct the video for “It’s A Sin”. The richly vivid clip depicted Tennant facing a church inquisition, Lowe as his jailer, and all seven deadly sins (including British artist Duggie Fields playing a golden “Avarice”), and sparked the start of several PSB/Jarman collaborations.

“It’s A Sin” hit number one across Europe, and proved huge in America and across the globe (“We were sort of back! Back! BACK!, as they say in Smash Hits,” remarks Tennant). It also prompted censure and celebration, in unusual places. Tennant’s former Catholic school, St Cuthbert’s in Newcastle, gave a damning local paper interview about their old boy:

“It was really vile!” laughs Tennant. “We also met someone who’d been a St Cuthbert’s pupil, and apparently in assembly, they were taught that any boy found with a copy of ‘It’s A Sin’ would be suspended.”

Salvation Army publication The War Cry praised “It’s A Sin” for raising modern discussions of sin, while tabloid columnist and broadcaster Jonathan King fixatedly accused the PSBs of plagiarising the melody of Cat Stevens’s 1970 song “Wild World”. Stevens, by then known as Yusuf Islam, wrote to Tennant and Lowe in support, and the PSBs successfully sued King for defamation, donating the settlement to charity.

“It’s A Sin” has endured through an array of remixes and reinterpretations. In 2017, German artist Wolfgang Tillmans created an atmospheric Tate Tanks sound installation, The 30 Tracks That Make It’s A Sin By Pet Shop Boys, extending the song into two hours, 34 minutes and 39 seconds (“I was too embarrassed to go to the exhibition,” confesses Tennant. “But I’ve got a copy of the mix; it sounds amazing”). The Killers frontman, and lifelong PSBs fan, Brandon Flowers, sang “It’s A Sin” with the duo at the 2009 Brit Awards, when Tennant and Lowe collected their Outstanding Contribution to Music trophy. At the 2021 Brits, Years & Years vocalist and actor Olly Alexander (star of TV series It’s A Sin) restyled it as a torch song, in a flamboyant duet with Elton John.

“We’d got a letter from Russell T Davies, saying they were going to call the TV series It’s A Sin, and hoped we didn’t mind,” says Tennant. “And Olly sent me his beautiful version of the song, before they released it. Olly’s version really brings out that queer quality, and it’s more ‘painful’ than our version.”

Another 2021 cover of “It’s A Sin” came from Jonathon Davis of US alt-metallers Korn (on the soundtrack of TV drama Paradise City).

“’It’s A Sin’, at its heart, is a heavy metal record,” insists Tennant. “There is a huge link between hi-NRG music and heavy metal: the urgency, the chords, the slightly histrionic melody. You could do a medley of “It’s A Sin” with “The Final Countdown” by Europe; in fact, I don’t know why we haven’t done that.”

The PSBs have been known to blend “It’s A Sin” into Gloria Gaynor’s disco stormer “I Will Survive” at their concerts, but the track always proves a show-stopper in its purest form.

“’It’s A Sin’ has actually become our biggest song,” says Tennant. “It’s got a kind of mad ecstatic euphoria about it – and that’s what we always aim for in our music.” Amen.