Neil One day in 1982, when we were in Ray Roberts' studio in Camden, where we used to write songs in the early Eighties, Chris started playing those chords, and it sounded very religious to me, like a hymn, and I started singing 'it's a, it's a, it's a sin', and I wrote the words in about five minutes. Having thought of the phrase 'it's a sin', I thought 'what's a sin?' and having been brought up as a Catholic you thought everything was a sin. You're taken that thinking about it is as bad as doing it. The song was meant to be kind of big and funny and camp.

Chris Neil played cowbell. We were obsessed with cowbells in those days.

Neil The middle bit, which became the 'father forgive me' section, was from another song Chris had written and I said, 'let's put that in "It's a sin".' We spent ages working on it. It was originally very Euro and had a different tune, very French sounding. We demoted it in New York with Bobby '0'. We thought of recording it with Stock Aitkin Waterman for please because we like 'So You Think You're A Man', the Divine record they did, but Pete Waterman didn't like the song. We also submitted it to Divine's manager and were going to send it to Ian Levine for Miguel Brown to do but they'd just done 'He's A Saint, He's A Sinner' so when I phoned him, he said, 'Another song with sin in the title is no good, is it?' When we recorded it for Actually, we decided to make the whole record gargantuan ally Catholic and over-the-top. There was the famous naff where we went to Brampton Oratory with Julian Mendelsohn and recorded the ambience. You can hear it in the background of the 'father forgive me...' section.

Chris These days we'd have gone for a cup of tea and a cake and let him do it.

Neil There was a man cleaning candleholders and we recorded that too. Then we went to Westminster Cathedral and there was a priest who was preaching you can hear him at 0.39- and there was a choir who sang 'amen' which is at 4.44. '20 seconds and counting', at the beginning, was a sample on Andy Richards' Fairlight and I just said, 'let's use that'. It's from one of the Apollo missions. It has absolutely no relevance whatsoever. And then I brought in a Catholic prayer book with the Confiteor,; which is from the Latin mass, and recited that in Latin: 'I confess to sins I have committed in my past...' Julian produced it, but we then weren't totally happy with it. We made a seven-inch version of it, which we never released but I didn't think my vocal sounded good enough. So we gave it to Stephen Hague to work on it some more

Chris He took out half of the orchestra hits.

Neil  I did some of the vocal again and he put a vocoder or harmoniser with the vocals. Tom Watkins didn't like Stephen Hague's mix but we went with it. But this wasn't going to be the first single from the album. 'Heart' was agreed to bathes first single. It had 'You know where you went wrong' on the b-side and we'd done artwork for it with Chris and I smiling, because we were so sick of people saying 'please smile'. Then, one day, we were in Paris promoting 'Suburbia', the famous time we had to rehearse miming on the radio and we threw a major wobblers because it was so stupid. Anyway, Tom Watkins phoned up and said, 'Right, no one at EMI dares say this to you but everyone thinks you're mad not releasing "It's a sin" because it's easily the most commercial track on the album. I know you're not going to listen to anything I say but I think you should think about it.' So we did. We were going to use the same artwork, but Jill Carrington - who worked at EMI and later became our manager - said, 'No, it's stupid for "It's a sin".' So we did a new session with Eric Watson in a church in Spitalfields. We did the twelve-inch with Stephen Hague [CD2, track 5] - it was just an extended, exciting mix.