Derek Jarman | It's a Sin / 1987 [official video] | It's a Sin / 1989 [Wembley Stadium concert video]

two sinful manifestations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pet Shop Boys [Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe] (composers and performers) Derek Jarman (director) It’s a Sin / 1987 [remastered, official video] / 1989 [Wembley Stadium live concert video]

 

Let me begin in my comments on one of the greatest hits of the synth group Pet Shop Boys by focusing on the official 1989 video relating to their album Actually.

    In this version of It’s a Sin, directed by queer filmmaker Derek Jarman, the original song extended its lyrical themes with far more action than the lead singer Neil Tennant usually performed. In this version Tennant is under arrest in an Inquisition-like setting, led to bonfires and other spots by his jailer performed by composer Chris Lowe who is attached to his fellow performer by a metal chain.

    Various elements of the montage include a group of bored and sinning monks and several women reenacting various personifications of the seven deadly sins, in particular gluttony, lust, sloth, and greed, with a figure with long green fingers representing greed, and the actions of the judge (actor Ron Moody) symbolizing both wrath and pride.

     Arguably, in this vision, the endless sins which Tennant recites that he has been told he is guilty throughout the St. Cuthbert’s Grammar School education, does not necessarily include homosexuality. At this point, Tennant had not yet openly admitted to his homosexuality (not wanting to be defined by his sexuality, Tennant actually came out in a 1994 interview in the UK gay lifestyle magazine Attitude), and the sins of the song seem to be of a general sort, unless it be represented by the frieze of closely gathered young monks:

 

it’s always with a sense of shame

I’ve always been the one to blame

For everything I long to do

no matter when or where or who

has one thing in common too

 

It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a sin

It’s a sin

Everything I’ve ever done

Everything I ever do

Every place I’ve ever been

Everywhere I’m going to

It’s a sin

 

At school they taught me how to be

so pure in thought and word and deed

They didn’t quite succeed

For everything I long to do

no matter when or where or who

has one thing in common too

 

    After an angry complaint about the song from his former grammar school St. Cuthbert’s, Tennant declaimed the comments of a school staffer as being cowardly in commenting anonymously about a former pupil, citing the embarrassment of his own parents, who still lived in Newcastle, the site of the school.

    In a 2009 interview, moreover, Tennant commented:

 

“People took it really seriously; the song was written in about 15 minutes, and was intended as a camp joke and it wasn't something I consciously took very seriously—sometimes I wonder if there was more to it than I thought at the time—but the local parish priest in Newcastle delivered a sermon on it, and reflected on how the Church changed from the promise of a ghastly hell to the message of love.”

*

 

   The far more interesting performance of this work, however, is the live Wembley Stadium performance in 1989, also directed by Jarman.

    Here Tennant appears in a campy exaggeration the holy red robes of an Episcopalian Bishop, almost literally in drag, altering his role in the original video as being simply a prisoner of sin to being a person of authority both describing and proclaiming Tennant's boyish sins.

 

   In this rendition, the seven deadly sins are much more comically realized as masked and papier-mâché-headed of a pig (gluttony), a green-skirted woman (envy), etc.

 

    While Tennant basically stands and occasionally strolls upon the stage, Lowe is kept busy performing at the synthesizer.

   

     Most importantly, the projected visuals do not just repeat the images on the stage, but flash obviously gay-boy figures upon the screen, and eventually through a wrap-around scrim surrounding the performers in the flames of hell. The sins here are being punished through the tortures of the church, but through the hell-fire of Satan himself.

   Here, it is clear, that homosexuality is most definitely one of the sins of which Tennant has been accused, as the partially nude gay boys dance along with the montage of images awash in flames.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).