A camp joke that a priest took seriously
A cathedral of synths opens as if a mass had been remixed for a club, Latin already muttering underneath, and Neil Tennant’s voice comes in looking back, already ashamed, already pleased to say so.
It’s a Sin was written by Tennant and Chris Lowe for Actually, produced by Julian Mendelsohn, and released in June 1987. It went to No. 1 in Britain. The lyric is a schoolboy’s inventory of guilt, St Cuthbert’s in Newcastle, Catholic priests and nuns, the lesson that wanting was already the offence. At the end Tennant sings the Confiteor, the old confession, mea culpa, in the Latin he had learned as an altar boy. Derek Jarman directed the video, flames and judgement and a beautiful defendant. Jonathan King claimed the melody was stolen from Cat Stevens and lost the argument in court. The song did not need the lawsuit to be remembered. It needed the chorus, which is a gavel.
Tennant has insisted, with a straight face that may be the joke, that he wrote it in about fifteen minutes and meant it as camp. People took it seriously anyway. A parish priest in Newcastle preached on it. The seriousness is in the record whether or not the writer scheduled it. Lowe’s arrangement is enormous on purpose, fairground and chapel at once, and Tennant’s vocal stays almost conversational inside the storm, which is the Pet Shop Boys trick: a big room, a precise sentence. Thinking about it, the Church had told him, was as bad as doing it. He put that sentence in a song you could dance to, which is its own theology.
The song was written in about fifteen minutes, and was intended as a camp joke and it wasn’t something I consciously took very seriously.
(Neil Tennant, The Atlantic, 2009)
Live, the track is a procession. The crowd sings the title as absolution and as accusation, and the band, two men and a mountain of sequencers, let them. It has scored films, a television series that borrowed the name, Pride nights where the joke and the wound are the same dance. Tennant, older, has said he wonders if there was more in it than he thought at the time. The tape does not wonder. It is lavish, funny, and furious, a man thanking his teachers for a guilt they did not quite manage to install, and thanking them in a voice that still knows the plainsong.
What remains is the double edge of the laugh. Camp, in this song, is not an escape from the subject. It is the way the subject can be said in public in 1987 without asking permission. Everything I long to do, he sings, has one thing in common. The chorus answers before you can. The Latin at the end is not decoration. It is the school still in the mouth, recited correctly, and then handed back. A fifteen-minute joke, if that is all it was, has lasted longer than the lesson.
