4 July 1987
‘West End Girls’, one of the best singles of the 1980s, didn’t get to number one in Ireland, so this is our first Pet Shop Boys chart-topper. By this stage they were well established as an essential pop act; I remember radio DJs and music writers of the time speaking of Tennant and Lowe in the same romanticised tone we always use for songwriting duos. I won’t go so far as to compare them to Lennon and McCartney or the blessed Bacharach and David, but they were certainly one of the most celebrated creative partnerships of the decade, along with Johnny Marr and that singer who turned out to be a right-wing sympathiser of racists.
I like ‘It’s A Sin’ – it’s a likeable track – and I get that it’s bombastic and dramatic by design, but maybe it’s that bombast that stops me loving it. Attending an all-boys Catholic school, as Neil Tennant did, I probably should have felt this frustrated, but maybe I was still too young or apathetic in 1987; by my teenage years in the 1990s the Irish Catholic establishment’s social influence was crashing down through floor after floor, so they were no longer a worthy foe. Tennant’s wonderfully sly and rebellious “They didn’t quite succeed” in ‘It’s A Sin’ would for my generation have been just a shrug: they didn’t quite exist. There’s also the sense that, long after we lapse or escape, those of us marinaded in Catholicism as kids always retain a residual fondness for its paraphernalia: the hymns, the language, the iconography. Certainly Tennant does in ‘It’s A Sin’, since he borrows catechism phraseology and even recites the Latin Confiteor from pre-vernacular mass.
As I said, this all makes for a likeable song, and a smart and relatable one. There are just other Pet Shop Boys songs I prefer, such as their very next single and Irish number one, where they really secure their position as a pop songwriting duo for the ages.
