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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
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
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)
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.
Mixer: unknown
- Live version (5:04)
  - A bonus track on the "I Get Along" single
Mixer: Stuart Price
- Inner Sanctum CD live version (5:38)
Mixer: David Woolley and Mike Woolley

Live at the Royal Arena, Copenhagen (3:15)
- Available on an exclusive gold-vinyl disc available with Issue 113 of Electronic Sound magazine

List cross-references

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