West End Girls

Tennant wrote the opening lines in 1983 at his cousin's house in Nottingham, after watching a gangster film, and completed the rap back in London. He has said it was written to be a rap record, inspired by Grandmaster Flash's The Message, and that it is about sex and escape and is paranoid. Of its class angle he said it was about rough boys getting a bit of posh. The lyric draws partly on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, in its mix of narrative voices and arcane references, and it includes the line From Lake Geneva to the Finland Station.

The first recording was made with the producer Bobby Orlando in New York. The duo played the instrumental live to tape, and Tennant sang the whole vocal for the first time. It was released in April 1984 and was a club hit in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but in Britain it could only be bought as an import. For the new version Stephen Hague spent a week at Advision Studios in London. Hague played the trumpet solo on an Emulator, deliberately playing wrong notes to make it sound more jazz, and recorded the traffic that opens the song on Gosfield Street outside the studio. Helena Springs sang background vocals. Hague had suggested slowing the song down and making it moodier.

Release

The new version came out in October 1985, entered the British chart at 80 and was number one within eight weeks, staying there for two. It reached number one in the United States on 10 May 1986. In 1987 it won the Brit Award for Best Single and the Ivor Novello Award for Best International Hit. In 2020 a Guardian critics' poll named it the greatest British number one single, although Tennant told the paper he would have chosen Good Vibrations. Alexis Petridis, ranking it second among their songs in 2023, called it their breakthrough single and a statement of intent. Andy Morahan and Eric Watson directed the video, which follows the duo around London and was nominated at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards.

Live

With It's a Sin it is one of only two songs played on every Pet Shop Boys tour. Tennant and Lowe performed it at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, riding around the stadium in cycle-driven chariots. In 2022 Tennant changed a line to From Mariupol to Kyiv Station in solidarity with Ukraine.