Love Comes Quickly
Writers - Hague/Lowe/Tennant
First released - 1986
Original album - Please
Producer - Stephen Hague
Subsequent albums - Disco, Discography, PopArt, Inner Sanctum, Smash
Other releases - single (UK #19, US #62, US Dance #10)
"Sooner or later, this happens to everyone." A surprisingly direct song, "Love Comes Quickly" describes how love can come suddenly and unexpectedly—no matter who you are, no matter what you try to do to avoid it—throwing you for the proverbial loop. "You can't stop falling." It happens to the rich, the powerful, the well-educated, the well-traveled, the sophisticated. Even a "taste [for] forbidden pleasures" doesn't render you immune. Neil and Chris suggest, in fact, that it is in the very nature of love to strike "when you least expect it."
Of course, it's just like the Pet Shop Boys to take something that, in hands more prone to cliché, would be simply wonderful and cast it in such ominous terms. It is this strange sense of foreboding—love as a scary, disturbing thing—that makes this song exceptional, if not unique.
Producer Stephen Hague suggested to the Boys that the song, as they originally wrote it, needed a middle eight. They agreed, so he then contributed to its composition ("I know it sounds ridiculous…"), coming up with its basic chord progression. That's how he earned his co-writing credit.
Many years later, the Boys would write another song, "You Choose," that seems completely contradictory to "Love Comes Quickly." But, as I explain when writing about that song, those contradictions can easily be explained by the psychology of romantic experience.
Mixes/Versions
Officially released
- Mixer: Stephen Hague
- Album/single version (4:19)
- Available on Please
- Album/single version, early fade (4:10)
- Available on the second "corrected" edition of the Brazilian release Party
- Album/single version (4:19)
- Mixer: Stephen Hague and Pet Shop Boys
- Dance Mix (6:50)
- Available on the Further Listening bonus disc with the Please reissue and on Essential
- Dance Mix (6:50)
- Mixer: Shep Pettibone
- Shep Pettibone Mastermix (7:38)
- Available on Disco
- Shep Pettibone Mastermix - Early Fade (6:08)
- Shep Pettibone Mastermix - Early Fade 2 (5:30)
- On the second cassette single edition of "Suburbia"
- Dub Mix (7:03)
- Shep Pettibone Mastermix (7:38)
- Mixer: Piet Blank and Jaspa Jones
- Blank and Jones Mix (5:00)
- Available on the bonus third disc ("Mix") with the "Special Edition" of PopArt
- Blank and Jones Ambient Mix (5:06)
- On the 2003 German Blank and Jones compilation Relax
- This, apparently, is essentially the same as the 5:00 Blank and Jones Mix on PopArtMix, different only in that its fade-out is extended by several seconds.
- Blank and Jones Mix (5:00)
- Mixer: unknown
- Live version (5:04)
- A bonus track on the "I Get Along" single
- Live version (5:04)
- Mixer: Stuart Price
- Inner Sanctum CD live version (5:38)
List cross-references
- Peak positions of PSB singles on the Cash Box charts
- The 10 biggest PSB hits on the U.S. Billboard "Hot 100" singles chart
- PSB titles and lyrics that are (or may be) sly innuendos
- Tracks by other artists that sample the Pet Shop Boys
- The key signatures of selected PSB songs
- My favorite PSB single sleeves
- My favorite PSB mashups
- My all-time favorite Chris Lowe sartorial statements
- The Pet Shop Boys' appearances on Top of the Pops
- The Pet Shop Boys' greatest acts of deconstruction
- The early tracks that the Pet Shop Boys recorded with Ray Roberts and Bobby 'O'
- How PSB singles differ (if at all) from the album versions
- PSB songs that have been used in films and "non-musical" TV shows
- Films that have featured PSB songs
- Songs performed live most often by PSB
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