PET SHOP BOYS – “It’s A Sin”
Neil Tennant does not have a weak voice but it is a thin one, with a limited range, and a lot of the Pet Shop Boys’ effectiveness comes from how they work with and around that. It means, for example, they can’t often surrender to euphoria like the hi-NRG and house music they’ve drawn from. The voice seems to work best at a distance from the sound, which meant they were regularly labelled ironists. But often the distance isn’t the knowing detachment of the commentator, it’s a felt, painful gap born of self-knowledge. No other pop star I can think of has had so many hit singles about self-reflection: looking back, considering ones life and its successes and failures: “Being Boring”, “Left To My Own Devices”, “Can You Forgive Her”, “Always On My Mind” even. Tennant is like some sort of Marcus Aurelius of pop.
And “It’s A Sin” is his first great exploration of the theme, though for me it’s the least of them. I’ve never quite loved it, though it’s marvellous fun, a brilliant tribute to the more grandiose end of italo disco. Its apocalyptic busy-ness works in the song’s defiant context, and all the samples, thunderclaps, Latin mumbling, synthetic gothickry and so on are great at establishing Tennant’s boyhood as a kind of moral Gormenghast he is still struggling to escape. But at the same time I can feel bludgeoned by it – the narrative flourishes (“They didn’t quite succeed!”) make me gasp and chuckle but they don’t get under my skin the way “Rent” or “Devices” do. Maybe I should just put it down to not being raised Catholic.
This is still a very fine record, though, and one of Tennant’s best performances. The force in his voice comes through fully as he hovers and swoops above the maelstrom of effects: a cold, wrathful tone he usually only shows in flashes. Perhaps you need to know what damnation is to sound quite so damning.
8
This must be the place I waited years to leave from the Behaviour album is surely a prequel to It’s A Sin. I mention it not least because much as I love Actually and Very I think every PSB fan has a special place in their hearts for Behaviour.
The review makes some smart points. I’ve never understood why Neil Tennant is seen as being an ironist first and foremost either when so much of his writing is confessional and sincere, not least when it comes to matters of the heart.
As we’re on the theme of Catholicism I might as well mention I am RC and if anything about It’s A Sin resonates it’s the lack of resolution at the end of it. Tennant starts out sounding sorry and despondent then shows some defiance in the middle eight answering back the Priests who’ve made his life a misery, but after this brief bid for self-determination he’s back to where he started as the song heads to it’s conclusion. That doubt and fear lingers.
There’s no such thing as an ex-Catholic only lapsed ones as somebody once said.
It’s a tribute to something-or-other that “It’s a Sin,” as TomLane points out, was a top ten hit in the States. I know MTV played the hell out of the video, and Actually was a succes d’estime, but it’s unfathomable how this, “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” and “Always On My Mind” became huge American hits around some of the ugliest chart fare of the eighties.
During the Nu-metal boom of the early noughties, there was a fashion for 80s cover versions. I’m not entirely sure why no-one ever tried to heavy-up this.
Oh well! This is my favourite PSB track, it’s big, it’s imposing, it’s bonkers. A ten, definitely.
swanstep @ 17 / Billy Smart @ 22
There are church organs and church organs, of course, but the big gothic sound is surely the sound of an organ being played without either imagination or subtlety, with all the stops pulled out willy-nilly. (Top-notch free gigs of my youth, by the way: listening to Peter Hurford practicing in St Albans Abbey). Isn’t that the equivalent of using synths on presets?
I can’t help thinking that there are reasons why George and Cole might have admired the Pet Shop Boys. Maybe they would have collaborated had they been around at the same time, who knows?
Meanwhile, through Popular I’ve been catching with the PSB back catalogue because I thought West End Girls was fabulous and was sorry I missed it first time around. I don’t like this as much though – it goes on and on and I really do feel bludgeoned by it.
@ rosie, 29. I dunno whether PSBs are musically supple enough to be of interest to the Gershwin/Porter generation. Staying within the genre, Everything but the Girl would seem to have much more to offer. And setting genre aside, Bjork first made heads explode in 1987 (now *that’s* a 10). I reckon she’d be near the front of the queue for some (impossible) genius collaboration.
swanstep @ 30: I wasn’t thinking musically, more of a common us-against-the-machine fellow feeling in the political climate that prevailed.
Was it about this time that the big march against Clause 28 happened? The most fun I ever had on a demonstration. I recall being behind a very accomplished and inventive oompah band. We’re certainly approaching a time when I began to ask some very serious questions about my own sexuality, but more of that anon.
Liza Minnelli worked with them so I think that’s a “yes.” Don’t quite know what you mean by “musically supple enough.” Can’t see what EBTG or Bjork (whatever their respective merits) would have had to offer either of them; the original Betty Hutton “It’s Oh So Quiet” is much more askew than Bjork’s.
Haven’t listened to “Birthday” in about twenty years. It was quite something at the time but now I suspect I’d see the joins.
#26 Oddly enough when I first bought Behaviour I was quite disappointed in it, though I’ve since grown to love it. I just wasn’t ready for its grown-up-ness, but also I thought it was a step back from the way Introspective had married complex, adult emotional moods with longer, clubbier tracks and still worked as a compilation of pop smashes. Behaviour was more about the songwriting rather than the track construction and having only just started to appreciate the latter I was hungry for more of it.
I remember when they played “Birthday” on Breakfast TV, it sounded wrong, joinheavy and somehow “like someone put the radio on while the news was on TV”
Needless to say, the TV hosts were all “lol this is awful”
@31: i recall going on an anti clause 28 march in summerish 88, but there could have been earlier stuff. odd thing is i don’t recall the trip to london or back – not for any great reason, just not that memorable a day.
behaviour came at EXACTLY the moment i was ready for a ‘grown up’ PSBs album and it was my clear favourite for a very long time as a consequence.
#31 – Rosie, we’re still around six months away from the first big march against Clause 28, which I think took place in London in December 1987. It was unquestionably the LEAST fun I’ve ever had on a demonstration. Ugly, violent and upsetting scenes, both at the Downing Street gates and at the rally at Jubilee Gardens. I lost my friends in a ruckus and ended up alone in the park: lonely, scared, angry, feeling very much under attack. That said, the larger London demo in the spring of 1988 felt more a good deal more positive and empowering, and the later Manchester demo even more so.
This all ties in with the ambivalence which many of us felt against the ambivalence of the PSBs, the barely coded messages of “It’s A Sin” notwithstanding. It was a time where it felt important to drop the coy closetry, and to stand up and be counted. (Although to give Neil Tennant his due, he did place his anger at Clause 28 firmly on the record.)
Hence we felt a closer kinship to the outspoken militancy of the Communards, and to a lesser extent Erasure (who might have had an out-gay singer, but whose lyrical content was almost entirely apolitical). Hell, even Boy George released a single called “No Clause 28″. In terms of more durable artistic resonance, the PSBs stance was of course ultimately vindicated – but in 1987 and 1988, we had other more pressing concerns.
On POTP the other week – a rare, superb episode featuring the charts of March 1988 – I was reminded of a similar coded message of a pop song: “Ship Of Fools” by Erasure.
Re 32: Having just discovered Betty Hutton’s version of It’s Oh So Quiet, I read up on the lady and discovered that late in her life she became close friends with Kristin Hersh. 1987 was also the year Throwing Muses broke cover on 4AD. Pixies, too. Quite a year for askew pop. I didn’t really get either at the time, hard as I tried, but I was glad they were around.
Interesting that punctum calls this song “the real ‘My Way’” since “My Way” lyricist Paul Anka sings a cover of “It’s a Sin” on his CD of (relatively) contemporary material released a few years ago. It’s actually one of the more convincing renditions on that collection.
The Wild World charge is not best made on the basis of “you can make a patchy mashup of the two”; otherwise the composers of the Howard’s Way theme, say, would be giving Rakim a case to answer.
What puzzles me is why I can identify with Madonna’s Italian/American catholicism, yet I struggle to find common ground with Neil Tennant’s English catholicism from an Anglican perspective? I’m more agnostic if truth be told these days, but I feel Madonna’s turmoil more through her music and find myself investigating the religious aspect of Madonna, the performer much more. I have no catholic background to align myself, nor do I find the catholic church any more or less attractive than the Church of England. So do I put this down to some kind of blindspot? Or do I (as I suspect) find Tennant’s catholic guilt less convincing within IAS’s lyrical framework. That’s not saying Tennant’s being dishonest or exaggerating his experience of his catholic upbringing, I’m sure he’s laying it all out there, but it feels like a barrier to understanding, rather than an open gate. There’s something arch about it all, that I don’t detect in Madonna’s work. I’m genuinely interested to hear from other commenters here, especially those with a catholic background, to see how they feel about it. I have a fear I may be opening an enormous can of worms, but like I said, I want to understand why some will rave about IAS, and I’m not feeling it. After all, I felt the PSB’s were brilliant at the time and still are.
I was once Catholic but I’ve never “identified” with musicians, Catholic and non-Catholic. I do, however, love the PSB for the reasons Tom mentioned in his blurb: the shrewdness with which they’ve traversed the distance between Tennant’s persona and the thick, hammy overlaying of emotion in the music of a track like “It’s A Sin.”
@Rosie, 31. Ah, sorry for missing your point about politics! I suspect that some of Tennant/PSB’s political project might have been congenial to Porter et al.. I should add that my sense of what the PSBs mean or have been up to poitically has been shaped to a large degree by reading (gay,catholic,thatcherite tory) uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan bang on about them over the years. E.g., I definitely think of Being Boring and Sullivan’s original, 1989?, Here Comes the Groom essay – which orthodox lefties at the time heaped scorn on (Angels in America author, Tony Kushner, IIRC, nicknamed Sullivan ‘little Roy Cohn’: charming) – as two sides of the same coin. Many people here, e.g., Mike@36 above, probably have a clearer, more independent view of the PSBs than I do (maybe even than Sullivan does).
Re 41: i think perhaps Madonnas music and image is more defined by the Catholic aspects. I mean there’s her name for a start. It was never going to be totally over-looked. It strikes me her output has referred to religion less frequently than I thought. It’s just the Catholicism gives another spin to the matter of ” keeping my baby ” while there is also an implicit double meaning in certain song titles – Like a Virgin, Ray of Light even Open your Heart perhaps?
Neil Tennants account of the subject is not so different from that of Terence Davies in the narration to Of Time and the City. He summons the courage to ask why ascribe to a religion which interprets his hearts desire as a sin.
My own interpretation is that Madonna gets through to the part of us that despises the sexism, homophobia and hypocricy of the church, but is all too aware that it’s paegentry and rhetoric have a strange charisma (I first heard the Latin Mass 3 years ago and it is a work of art). With PSB I think it’s more a case of recognising that those who would seek to judge us are no better themselves.
Forgive me if this is all a bit heavy or if it’s not making sense.
Makes perfect sense, Anto. Great post and I totally agree.
You might have touched on something I hadn’t realised before, Anto. When I first heard The Orb’s Adventures In The Underworld, there were samples of Allegri’s Miserere Mei on there, which required further investigation. Then I found all this “sacred music” which was undeniably beautiful, which in turn paved the way for my appreciation of Mozart and more classical music. I can indeed totally immerse myself in the “pageantry” without having to be burdened by all the dogma.
Responding to swanstep re Sullivan’s doting on PSB: I read silly Sully quite a lot (for “bellwether” reasons; people in the nervewracking process of switching sides are always interesting to watch, if endlessly maddening), and I too (who love PSB as much as anyone here) find his enthusiasm for them can dampen mine
Re: the PSBs being criticised for their “ambivalence” as referred to @36 – I can’t remember when I first read this, but I remember being completely amazed that PSBs could have been considered overly coy at all, let alone after “It’s A Sin”! What did their critics think this was about?! From the vantage point of someone who wasn’t there, this seems like a hugely improbable (but very cheering) No 1. Not, ultimately, my favourite PSB track – I prefer “Rent” and “Being Boring” – but one of the first I loved by them. 9 from me.
@41 – had never thought about comparing the two but I probably agree; off the top of my head I can’t think of any other PSB track that actually frames things in a religious context, and here it seems…theatrical, a performance; taking these very real feelings of shame and guilt and setting them in something so obvious and ostentatious (choirs! organ-mimicking synths! thunderbolts!) that it seems like a parody of the religious experience. It works really well: treating religion as a charade, a mere dressing-up game, exposes it for what it is.
Whereas with Madonna, her actual religious experience is interwoven throughout all her material, whether or not she’s explicitly referencing it; it’s why she danced with the door closed in the first place and hence why busting out of those doors to sing about lust and ambition over club beats feels even more liberating. And the way it’s always there, riven through everything she does, is a pretty accurate reflection of just how deeply a religious upbringing sinks its hooks into you, of how hard – maybe impossible – it is to escape it. And yes, that includes its charisma – agree totally with @44, great post.
@22 – I often wonder how much currency sin has as a concept with most people – ditto. In my experience those people I know who had a religious upbringing – I mean a serious one, not just secular parents sending their kids to Sunday school or going to church a couple of times a year – and are trying to liberate themselves from it in some sense have a common bond that I’m never quite sure whether those lucky enough to have had a secular upbringing really understand. That isn’t quite the right way to put it but blah.
Might one important diff. between PSBs and Madonna in their relations to religious themes be just that England (like Australia and NZ) is *much more secular* than the US? The Enlightenment in the US privatizes religion, it doesn’t eliminate it, whereas in the UK et al. the Enlightenment has a strong, default atheist character. [Intriguingly religion isn't strictly privatized in the UK, but its lingering on in various public institutions just dooms it to twist in the atheist breeze: to be an object of on-going, withering, broadly atheistic derision.]
The upshot (which I think agrees with Lex, 48): Tennant gets to approach Christianity and religion generally as something that’s been revealed to be utter nonsense, so all that’s left for him to deal with is his own personal shadows and hang-ups, etc.. Madonna, by way of contrast, takes all the religious stuff very seriously. She has her doubts about particular religious doctrines and organizations and features of her up-bringing, but like most Americans, remains deeply religious, spiritually questing, and all the rest of it.
This will always be the record that my eldest brother would put on when arguing with my Dad (Catholic): i was 4, Niall was 16, there’d be shouting, a door slam, and then it would start. The 12″ has gone down in the annals of family history.
8 is a fair score
Some really good stuff on Madonna v PSB here – obviously we’ll have the mother of all opportunities to talk about Madge and religion but don’t let that stop this interesting conversation.
I think Swanstep @49 is right – what’s at stake in “It’s A Sin” isn’t religion or childhood hang-ups or even sin, all of which the music casts in such a theatrical light it’s hard to take them seriously: it’s Tennant’s right to live as he pleases now, the coding Punctum talks about. So I guess my stuff about self-reflection is sort of wrong – or at least I don’t BELIEVE NT when he sings “when I look back upon my life, it’s always with a sense of shame”, certainly not the way I believe him in “Being Boring”, say.
Lex (#48), your amazement is completely understandable. The PSBs were hardly hiding in the closet, and there was an unmistakeable gay subtext running through all their work, from roping in Bobby O for “West End Girls” onwards. The defiantly out-gay Derek Jarman produced the “It’s A Sin” video, and Ian Levine – the out-gay leading light of UK Hi-NRG (and Saturday night DJ at Heaven) – supplied one of the lead remixes.
And yet, and yet… in the context of the times, where the British gay community (such as it was) felt under attack like never before (AIDS hysteria; overtly homophobic stories constantly running in the tabloid press, such as The Sun’s front page headline NOW THE POOFS CAN STAY IN THE PULPIT; a mounting brouhaha over “loony left” council spending priorities (including the “Jenny Lives With Eric And Martin” business) that led directly to Clause 28, “pretty police” agent provocateurs stalking cruising grounds and even chatting up gay men at gay venues and then arresting them for importuning, random police raids on gay pubs such as the Vauxhall Tavern, where the arresting officers wore protective rubber gloves), these barely coded signifiers STILL didn’t feel enough!
These were ideologically entrenched times, and there was a mounting feeling that it was time to pick your side, stand up and be counted. (Hence for example the coming out of Ian McKellen, as a direct response to Clause 28. And of course he soon appeared in a PSBs video, but more of that another time.) So it didn’t wash that the PSBs were striving for universality, or maintaining their mystique, or that by coming out they would risk being bracketed as a strictly gay act, with the attendant restrictions that would then be placed upon the interpretation of their work.
Which is not to say that there was any outright anger about this – just a sort of low-level muttering, in the young “activist” circles in which I was mixing, and who were turning up to my club nights.
With hindsight, I do have more sympathy with their position. After Neil Tennant came out in Attitude magazine circa 1994 (and incidentally, Chris Lowe has never to this day declared his sexuality), the PSBs seemed to dabble for a while with some more explictly gay-identified output, and perhaps this *did* somewhat weaken them.
Some of what make those times so baffling to look back on, I suspect, is that the activist community itself was so bitterly divided. I’ve talked a little on popular about the ugly wars — personal and political, cultural and ethical — within the NME’s editorial team (codename the “hiphop wars”); but these basically reflected broader, deeper turmoil within the (what to even call it?) “progressive community” as a whole at that time (if it was a community, it was a furiously internecine one). Anyway, it’s all too easy I think to look back and identify one strand as typical (and in retrospect bizarre); to overlook, because the battlesites have over 25 years moved elsewhere, that any given signifier of any given politics was back then bitterly contested, within the given movement agitating for that politics.
Mike at @52: You’ve got me puzzled now. If Neil Tennant only came out in 1994, how come I, who was only familiar with the name and not the music in 1997, knew for certain that the Pet Shop Boys were gay? Very shortly after this was number one I was involved in a lot of discussion about gay coding in popular culture and I knew it then, particularly with reference to a collaboration with Dusty Springfield. When I saw the video of this song the other day for the first time, it never occurred to me that the song was about the taboos around gay sexuality.
There were a lot of openly gay people in my circle in Notting Hill – perhaps I knew it through them. But it never occurred to me that there was any ambiguity about it.
There’s two meanings of “coming out” at issue here: coming out to friends, family, colleagues and so on; and making a public (quasi-political) statement. NT was early and unambiguous about the first (he operated in a very gay-friendly territory, the pop media); but interestingly dilatory about the second (at least in the eyes of some at the time). The first meant that it was a very open secret indeed from the mid-80s; but not one given official unambiguous sanction for almost a decade.
In @54 I mean to say : “it never occurred to me that the song wasn’t about the taboos around gay sexuality.”
Rosie at #54: I guess it depended on where you stood. If you were having discussions about gay coding in popular culture with gay friends in Notting Hill, such things might have been self-evident – and perhaps there were enough friend-of-a-friend corroborations to turn supposition into fact. But if you were buying the 7-inch of “It’s A Sin” in Doncaster Woolies because you liked the video on The Chart Show, perhaps the coding was a good deal less apparent!
Sükråt at #53 – quite agree with you re. the divisions within the activist community. Around the time of the Clause 28 protests, it was all getting very Judean Popular Front vs Popular Front Of Judea – God, the ROWS we used to have at campaign meetings! – although it was still kinda heartening to witness the SWP Trots and the RCP space cadets finding transitory common cause with the disco bunnies and flaming queens on the marches.
Although this did lead on one occasion to the Best Demo Chant Ever, formulated specifically to piss off the opportunistic Trots:
“Give us a G! Give us an A! Give us a Y! What does that spell? GAY! What is gay? GOOD! What else is gay? A BOURGEOIS DEVIATION THAT WILL DISAPPEAR COME THE REVOLUTION!”
@52 – I guess I do understand, completely, why there were those mutters; but equally, I’ve always found it an important point that one’s right to be who you are* goes way beyond crude gender/sexuality/ethnicity labels – at heart this is a fight for individual expression, and bullying people into following a political agenda goes against the spirit of the thing. It’s not just crucial for me to be allowed to be a gay man – it’s crucial to be allowed to be a gay man in the ways I choose to be and the ways that I naturally am. So I have a great deal of sympathy for Tennant, who I imagine would have wondered why he had to make such a big song and dance about coming out when everyone already knew; in the same position, I’d also shy away from making any Official Public Announcement. It’s not that interesting or that important and it’d just be awkward to act like it is.
Although I don’t think that was the freedom that we were explicitly fighting for at the time – the stated issues were more to do with emancipation and equality – it’s certainly the logical end-point of the struggle, and one that has, for many if not for all, largely been achieved. And Hallelujah for that!
By a significant distance, my least favourite PSB single up to the point in the mid-90s when I stopped being terribly interested in their singles. Too blousy and over emphasised, like a Sunday evening Victorian melodrama adaptation on BBC1. It seemed heavy handed, where the songs I liked were about lightness of touch, and since I came from a family where religion just didn’t matter in the slightest, the “father forgive me” section just had me rolling my eyes. The poster above who notes that it sounds simultaneously overdone and underdone reflects my feelings: it’s a song I always skip when I put on Discography or Pop/Art.
I don’t know much about NT in this instance, but how much do you think his refusal to be pinned-down by making a public statement was an act of promotion? Again, I know nothing about him so I’m not implying it was. The reason I ask is because it reminds me a bit of the position Michael Stipe of REM was put in (put himself in?) in the early ’90s. The meme put forward by the hetero rock press was “Why won’t Stipe just admit he’s gay?” and, for his part, MS definitely played along and used this ambiguity to his own ends in promoting his band. This probably peaked with the promotion of the “Monster” album in ’94, the album’s subject matter itself dealing with issues of sexuality and public persona. Every interview from this time seemed to focus on MS toying with journalists re his sexuality.
Sorry if that’s a bit off-topic, but what I’m wondering is: could NT be accused of having done the same at this time?
It’s worth remembering that there were very few top 40 type stars who were unequivocably “out” in a Jimmy Somerville way at this time. There were many who didn’t particularly try to cover it up but stopped short of publicly proclaiming their homosexuality. In 1987, George Michael was still in the closet, Freddie Mercury was coy about it, even Elton John had felt the need to marry a woman only a few years before. It was quite a different world in that respect.
mike @ 57: Actually the discussions about gay coding in popular culture were with Open University students in Preston but yes, you make a very fair point. Which can be extrapoltaed to comment in passing that the pop scene looks very different out in the sticks from what it does to the cool kids in the Kings Road or the offices of the NME!
1987 was a year when I learnt a great deal about things I hadn’t thought much about before. It was in the general election of that year – on the previous Madonna patch – that my partner and I decided after a heavy leafleting session to show solidarity by calling into The Champion on the Gate. I knew something about that kind of coding, of course, but there was still something startling about the massed ranks of men, all with near-identical shaved heads, moustaches, leather jackets, plaid shirts and belted jeans.
Before the year was out I’d know a great deal more about the infinite varieties of the West London ‘scene’!
What an amazing sleeve! (I’ve never seen it before) – the classic seedy bedsit kitchen unit etc – extremely evocative.
63: very true there was always an element of obfuscation around all gay pop stars – Boy George saying he preferred a cup of tea, George Michael pretending his PA was his girlfriend (incidentally re Rosie’s on “how did she know NT was gay before he came out” I knew George Michael was gay from about 1983/84 as there were insinuations in gossip columns all the time – I remember a particular one from around that time in the “Blues and Soul” clubbin’ gossip column of all places talking about George being a regular at the Coleherne which I believe was a gay pub).
The only unequivocally gay pop-star back then was Tom Robinson (famously always tagged buy the Sun “Britain’s Number One Gay” back then).
Fatgit@ 46: Allegri, Tallis (esp “In Spem Allium”), Rachmaninov Vespers etc surely the most beautiful music ever made – the ultimate chillout.
Mike @52: was the Vauxhall Tavern round the back off Strawberry Sundae (underneath the arches) in Vauxhall – as that may be the pub my very straight friends went in by mistake before I met them in Strawberry Sundae one night).
Swanstep @ 49: I don’t think this is the place to be slagging off religion in such a smug way.And re your idea that religion is in some way dying I would draw your attention to such books as “God Is Back – How The Global Rise of Faith Is Changing The World” by Micklethwait and Wooldridge (an atheist and a Catholic incidentally) to show how wrong you are.
Someone was bemoaning not having a secular upbringing, I was brought up a Methodist (and to be honest would have loved to have had a secular childhood when I was a kid)but I’m very grateful that I was part of that world now. Looking back most of the people who belonged to our church (as in Methodism generally )were decent working-class/lower middle class people who overall I’m very glad now to have known.
My attitude may have been a bit different if I’d been brought up an Anglican where it’s always been much more of a case of “the Tory party at prayer” and being a part of a club where being seen to attend trumps any actual belief 10 times over.Having said that the leaders were always a thorn in Thatcher’s side so they couldn’t have been all bad…
@AndyPandy,65. Sorry to have caused offence, but, in all seriousness, I *wasn’t* slagging off religion. I discussed (pontificated about!) religion strictly at a meta-level, e.g., ‘In the US religion goes like this. In the UK et al. it goes like this….’ and suggested that those differences explain at least some of the difference between PSB and Mad. that others had identified.
the gay/pop/religion intersection is covered in the latest issue of The Word magazine which features an interview with Richard Coles, formerly of the parish of The Communards and now a senior Curate in Knightsbridge – coincidently(?) he speaks highly of ‘spem in alium’
What a dirge. I just don’t get this PSB love-in at all I’m afraid. Tennant’s voice is a problem, and maybe the first reason why I always find them so unloveable. I don’t know – the synth sounds are too pompous as well. And this record sounds slow to me.
Like Classix Nouveau meets Yes.
Thought this would be a 10.Probably my favourite PSB track.was only a toddler at this time but still thought it was great when i first heard it and still holds up to this day.Indeed maybe my favourite number one of all time.Frantic speed, great intro,wonderful chorus and the slowed down reflections of tennant only to speed up again just after the second chorus.marvellous.
call it overblown if you like but i believe that it helps the song.of all the 80s songs ive heard on the list so far its by far and away one of the most attention grabbing, exciting ones you will come come across.
10.
As I was reading this, this very song came on the radio. It’s a great pop track and probably my fave PSB song.