Billie Ray Martin, "Your Loving Arms (Peak Hour Twirler Mix)" (1995)

Readers, do you love me? Yes? Well, talk is fucking cheap. Why hasn't anyone ripped these posters off from London tube walls and sent them to me?



Images stolen from petshopboys-forum.com; click on 'em to make 'em bigger.

These ads for HMV -- yes, the Pets did advertisments, but let's overlook that for now -- appeared in print in The Independent a month ago, and have subsequently been plastered all over Tube stations.

I want them. I need them. I would frame them and hang them, and possibly let them take me behind the middle school and get me pregnant. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LET ME HAVE THEM.

It's not just that they feature Neil and Chris, and Billie Ray Martin, who I also adore. (Isn't it nice to see your idols love each other? In the October 2007 issue of FHM, Billie was asked about how it felt to be "name-checked" by Chris, and she said: "Yummy! It's wonderful! I knew 'Your Loving Arms' is his favourite song, but to soon see huge posters in tube stations and full pages in the biggest UK papers actually saying this is so exciting. Given the fact they are really my biggest inspiration, too, it's even more of an honour." Awwww.)

It's also that each of them has picked, as their "inspirations," songs and lyrics that really are amazing, not that we would expect anything less. Indeed, Billie's selection, "Paninaro," is actually my least favorite of the three songs picked. Neil's selection, "Goin' Back"? Only the most beautiful and poignant song about aging ever, and tears may or may not well up in my eyes each time Dusty sings, with hopeless resolve, the line, "And live my days instead of counting my years."

Even if it didn't remind me of a clubbier time in my life, "Your Loving Arms" is possibly my favorite song of the entire 90s. I don't need to tell you how desperate and melancholic it sounds: that first pulsating synth line (do-do-do-do), that second bleeping one (dee-dee-dee-dee-dee), that trancey beat. And while its lyric tends to be overlooked, Chris -- who has shown himself partial to seemingly simple lines that are emotionally devastating -- doesn't, and he picks exactly the right ones: "Sometimes the way that you act makes me wonder/What I am to you/And sometimes I can't stand the way that I'm acting/To be part of the things you do." Beautifully symmetrical -- the way you act, the way I act -- the lines perfectly conjure up all the sell-out occasions when we act like fools just to get in with someone we love.

You know and have, I hope, the original version of "Your Loving Arms." Here is my favorite of the numerous remixes: the awesomely-titled "Peak Hour Twirler Mix," courtesy of Junior Vasquez. He stays mostly faithful to the original -- the breakdown, during which we get a bunch of tribal beats that remind us that this was the era of The Goodmen's "Give It Up," may the only thing that strikes a casual listener as noticeably divergent -- but punches everything up just a wee bit. The beat is crisper, bigger, just a bit more urgent, and that bassline seems to quiver with even more heartbreak. The only problem with the song is that it ends.

Now get on scoring me those posters pronto.