TOUCH ME
This is the night!
TOUCH ME
I wanna feel your body…
Back when I was on the cusp of becoming a teenager, this cheeky song by Samantha Fox battled Madonna’s ‘Crazy For You’ on the Top Ten at Ten on our local radio station. I’m not sure how that happened, as they were released at such different times, but things worked differently in the 80’s. I was very much an 80’s child, for better and mostly worse, and I was just coming into my own, waking to the world around me and my place and presence in it. On the radio every other song was about sex, and while I had no idea what sex was, what a virgin might be, and how love did and didn’t always fit into the equation, I was fascinated by the forbidden aspect of it, the way it made the adults squirm whenever I would bring it up.
Full moon in the city and the night was youngI was hungry for love, I was hungry for funI was hunting you down, and I was the baitWhen I saw you there, I didn’t need to hesitate
The rainy month of March when this song first came out was filled with the usual paradoxes of this time of the year. Easter and Lent collided with the coming of spring, and all the birds and bees and dirty deeds that the less-spiritual part of the world got up into whenever spring arrived. On the windows of my bedroom, or the windows of the backseat of the car, I watched water droplets shape and warp the world. This song spoke to me with its over-the-top cheesiness, appealing to my love of the dramatic and histrionic, with more than a touch of sleaze. If Madonna’s ‘Crazy For You’ was the sweet little sister, innocently opining about a kiss and no more, ‘Touch Me’ was the sexier, raunchier cousin leading me into the night. Just a tween, I had no idea what any of it meant, nor any desire to learn. Instead, I felt the pangs of longing and yearning, the ache of a first crush on a boy who lived several streets away, and I had no idea why.
This is the night, this is the nightThis is the time, we’ve got to get it right…
Touch me, touch me, I want to feel your bodyYour heartbeat next to mine(this is the night)Touch me, touch me now…Touch me, touch me now…
When Samantha Fox sang this song, and whispers of her topless poses in certain scandalous magazines reached the boys, they felt something I simply didn’t. Immune to the charms of her ample cleavage, I had no desire to get into her ripped jeans either, but I watched other boys as they watched her, and I envied her transfixing hold on them. How could I cast such a spell? How to craft and conjure such rapt enchantment?
Hot and cold emotion, confusing my brainI could not decide between pleasure and painLike a tramp in the night, I was begging for youTo treat my body like you wanted to
This is the night, this is the nightThis is the time, we’ve got to get it right…
Touch me, touch me, I want to feel your bodyYour heartbeat next to mine(this is the night)Touch me, touch me now…Touch me, touch me now…
Later, years later, I would re-listen to this song and be horrified at the thought of me blaring it in the car while my parents gamely alternated between this and ‘Crazy For You’. It was just music and melody to me – the words meant nothing – but there was something primal and raw in it that appealed to my barely-burgeoning nature. As a tween, it wasn’t in any way sexual to me, just a bop on the radio that elicited thrills because I could see the reaction to it, not because I felt anything myself.
As a young gay man, that certainly changed over the years, but that’s another story for another song and blog post. This is just a quaint memory of S-S-S-S-Samantha Fox… because naughty girls need love (DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH) too.
Touch me, touch me now…Touch me, touch me now, yeah…
Touch me, touch me, I want to feel your bodyYour heartbeat next to mine(this is the night)‘Cause I want your body, all the time…
