When Liza Minnelli went to the studio to start recording her 1989 album Results with the Pet Shop Boys, she was nonplussed when informed that there’d be no orchestra. When recounting her experience working with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, Minnelli remembered asking, “When do the musicians get here? And they said, ‘Don’t be mad, there are no musicians. There’s just all these machines and us.” That quote encapsulates the relationship between Minnelli and the Pet Shop Boys and the trio’s approach to the project. Results is an incredible union of two seemingly disparate acts that shouldn’t make sense, but a deeper listen highlights that the musical marriage of Liza Minnelli and the Pet Shop Boys is brilliant.
By the time Minnelli and the Pet Shop Boys convened in the spring of 1989 to lay down the tracks, both acts were in very different places in their respective careers. Tennant and Low had recorded three studio albums and scored five top-ten Billboard hits (and ten top-ten in their native UK hits). One of their biggest hits, “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” had Pet Shop Boys duet with soul legend Dusty Springfield to the top of the pop charts for the first time in decades. Low and Tennant deeply appreciated camp, and Springfield – a gay icon – was the epitome of camp. She was an arresting figure with her mile-high beehive and panda eye makeup. With her renewed success, Springfield and the Pet Shop Boys released several other singles and a hit album.
On the other hand, Liza Minnelli was about to enter her third decade as a performer. She was an Oscar-winning actress with several Tonys underneath her belt, but a hit recording career had seemed to elude her. (Among her albums, she only scored two gold records, both soundtracks: Cabaret and Liza with a “Z”: A Concert for Television.) Though a popular touring artist and stage actress, Minnelli’s particular talents rarely translated in the recording studio. Her debut album, Liza! Liza! was released in the fall of 1964 and drew comparisons to Barbra Streisand‘s self-titled 1963 debut album. Like Streisand, Minnelli was a child of the counterculture but seemed far more at home singing songs of the Great American Songbook instead of joining the rock revolution with her peers. By the mid-1980s, she was the personification of old-fashioned showbiz razzle-dazzle, and her partnership with the Pet Shop Boys seemed like a way to bring her into the 1980s.
During some of the press for Results, Minnelli had suggested that the album was the first time she attempted contemporary pop, but that isn’t necessarily true. Though she seemed most comfortable singing songs of pre-rock pop, in the late 1960s, she did incorporate contemporary pop into her repertoire, recording songs by Burt Bacharach, Randy Newman, Sonny Bono, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney, John Denver, Harry Nilsson, Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor, and Carly Simon, among others. In 1977, she released Tropical Nights, a record that saw her join the disco world. So, the synthpop of Results, while surprising, wasn’t without some precedence.
Liza Minnelli’s interest in the Pet Shop Boys came from their 1987 single “Rent”. The song is a moody tale of a young, kept man. The record caught her attention; months later, she joined Tennant and Lowe, who started writing songs for their collaboration. “Rent” – a top ten hit for the Boys – found its way onto Results. Another Tennant/Lowe original, “Tonight Is Forever”, was also included, along with some originals as other covers, including Yvonne Elliman’s disco song “Love Pains” and a dramatic take on Tanita Tikaram’s “Twist in My Sobriety”. As a nod to Minnelli’s stage roots, Results also has a HI-NRG rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind” from Follies.
The music on Results sounds like a Pet Shop Boys record, except Liza Minnelli takes care of the lead vocals. The boys match Minnelli’s theatricality with a collection of songs that speak to the inherent camp in her persona and musical style. Much of Results can be considered slick, but it’s a work of arch camp, right down to the stylish album art courtesy of David LaChappelle. There’s a tension, though, in how Minnelli revels in the delirious kitsch created by Tennant and Lowe but also is seeking that elusive hit record. Minnelli would look to artists like Madonna and her close friend Michael Jackson and court the MTV crowd by starring in several music videos. She also unveiled a new look for Results, including trendy clothes like leather jackets and chunky boots. She also sported an asymmetrical haircut with highlights. It wasn’t a seamless transition for Minnelli, but it showed a dogged attempt to remain trendy and set aside her tears-through-smiles image. (Tennant once reportedly chastised her good-humouredly at a TV performance, telling her not to smile so much because they were doing “rock and roll.”)
Minnelli’s brief change for Results differs from the evolution seen in artists like David Bowie, Madonna, and Janet Jackson. While a talented and vibrant performer, Minnelli doesn’t have the kind of overarching vision or thesis. Though it would be a mistake to suggest she’s a cipher, her career wasn’t defined by the calculated evolutions accompanying her projects. Minnelli still had her acting on stage and screen, which also meant that her image shifted depending on the role. It’s worth noting that even if Minnelli is a resourceful actress, she has a limited range, and her roles all were variants of her screen persona.
The trendy outfits and hairstyles are a concerted effort to be contemporary, but it feels superficial. Regarding the growth of Minnelli’s sound, dismissing her input as performative and passive would be easy: simply being a singer handed a bunch of songs to record. Because Minnelli isn’t a songwriter or producer and lacks the artistic vision of Bowie or Madonna, it’s easy to underestimate her contribution. Yes, Tennant and Lowe are the primary architects of the record. Still, Minnelli is clearly a dominant muse, inspiring her collaborators to engage with her talents and persona to create a custom-made sound. Similarly to their work with Dusty Springfield, Tennant and Lowe’s collaboration with Minnelli explores the oversized persona and legend of an instantly recognizable and ubiquitous personality.
By 1989, Liza Minnelli had been recording music for 25 years, but Results was only her ninth studio album, her previous release being over a decade before. Between 1977 and 1989, Minnelli released four records: cast albums, soundtracks to her films, and souvenirs from her concerts. The live albums are the best representation of her talents. She’s a fine vocalist but an electric live performer who is generous with her audience to a fault. (Her ease in front of an audience was so potent it inspired the famously stage-shy Barbra Streisand to return to touring after an absence of decades.) Liza Minnelli is invigorated and energized by her audiences, who appreciate her singing, emoting, comedic mugging, and garrulous patter between the songs.
But putting Liza Minnelli in a recording studio robs her of her brightest strength as a performer. So, the material is essential, which is why her studio albums have rarely been significant up to this point in her career. Though she was a strong interpreter of the Great American Songbook, she wasn’t as masterful as a song stylist as her family friends Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald or her mother, Judy Garland, who came to define pop music of the pre-rock era. Her charisma carried her only so far on her studio releases, which means they were well-performed albums, if not all that interesting or unique.
However, with Results, Minnelli does something intriguing: she allows Tennant and Lowe to reference much of her image and stardom. In the 1980s, Tennant and Lowe were prime chroniclers of the gay culture of the decade under Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan’s America. Their songs – swoony, sullen dance songs and synth ballads – spoke to the anxiety of AIDS-era England under the odious Section 28 law, which saw a community tense and wary. During this time, Liza Minnelli was an established gay icon; her flamboyant look and inimitable demeanor inspired many drag queens. The boys responded to Minnelli’s gay camp legend status by assembling a project celebrating that legend.
Accordingly, a brief listen to Results shows sounds very different from Minnelli’s other work: lush, pulsing synthesizers and drum machines with late 1980s dance-pop flourishes like rap cameos, pounding house-inspired piano, and acid-jazz-influenced record scratches. Results can sound jarring for someone whose discography is primarily defined by orchestras or jazz combos. But Tennant and Lowe’s arch, knowing lyrics and unabashed embrace of dance culture spoke to Minnelli’s gay legend, so unsurprisingly, Results is a collage of stylish, affected dance music.
So, Results is a pretty gay album – probably more so than any of her other records. Tennant and Lowe spare nothing when indulging in every impulse, letting the songs be gaudy and overproduced, like one of Minnelli’s sequined Bob Mackie outfits. Liza Minnelli’s innate humor and absurdity are all over the LP.
Joining Tennant and Low is their collaborator Julian Mendelsohn, who worked with the Pet Shop Boys on their albums Disco (1986) and Actually(1987). The UK-based Australian native also provided background vocals and played keyboards on several tracks. Other in-demand guests on Results include Art of Noise alumna Anne Dudley, popular jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine, accomplished DJ and remixer C.J. Mackintosh, Jethro Tull veteran Peter-John Vettese, and prolific background singer Tessa Niles (whose ghostly, soulful vocals would become an integral part of the Pet Shop Boys’ sound).
The expansive sound of Results also has a very cosmopolitan, urbane, sophisticated quality. Liza Minnelli is very much a personality linked with New York City. She is an artist associated with New York, not just because of her signature song, “New York, New York”, but also because of her glittery Broadway Baby guise. Though her film career became spotty and strained after her triumphant 1970s, she remained a superstar on the Great White Way. Her exploits at Studio 54 and her aesthetic – primarily developed by Bob Mackie, Kay Thompson, and Halston – made her seem very New York (of a kind, of course). At the same time, the Pet Shop Boys are very English, but specifically very London. Their beautiful, melancholic dance ballads told stories of world-weary Londoners roaming the streets of Soho or King’s Cross, looking for romantic fulfillment. In their work for Minnelli, they wedded her stylish New York style with their own London affinity but expanded on that sound by incorporating diverse Western European dance and club pop sounds.
Minneli’s New York roots are most evident in the dance version of “Losing My Mind”. The Pet Shop Boys originally recorded a version of this Sondheim chestnut and repurposed the churning dance track for Minnelli’s record. It’s the seemingly perfect marriage of their shared gay sensibility. The arrangement has dramatic spoken-word passages before Minnelli gets to do some of her patented leather-lunged belting. Sondheim’s song is squarely and paranoid about a lover who grows increasingly obsessed and unhinged by her object of affection. It’s just the kind of song that allows Minnelli to overemote and be melodramatic.
Sondheim’s musical, “Losing My Mind”, is sung near the end of the show by Sally, a middle-aged woman who cannot let go of the past. A former showgirl, Sally is confronted by her object of obsession at a reunion, and she must confront not only her past feelings for the guy but her unhealthy fixation on him in the present. Sally was written to be presented as manic and untethered, and the song’s fevered pitch plays that nicely. The song is transformed into a disco Grand Guignol in the hands of a histrionic, over-the-top performer like Liza Minnelli.
She brings some of that intensity to her cover of “Rent”. Liza Minnelli’s version slows the song down from its mid-tempo original to a cinematic dirge. Composer Angelo Badalamenti arranges the piece as a film noir piece, accompanying her vocals with a theatrical orchestra, including lush strings that make the song a wrenching story of a kept woman. Minnelli’s voice slides from a pensive high register that plunges into her deep, lower voice, which she uses to belt out the chorus. One of the things Tennant and Lowe were happy about when working with their famous, Oscar-winning client as she was a skilled actress.
And she approaches “Rent” like it’s a brilliant script. The character she embodies in the song has some shades of Sally Bowles, particularly that character’s weary worldliness. When she throws off a sarcastic passage like “You phone me in the evening on hearsay / And bought me caviar / You took me to a restaurant off Broadway / To tell me who you are,” her delivery is ripe with contempt for her rich lover as well as a resigned self-loathing.
Tennant and Lowe also engage with Minnelli’s legend on her cover of Tanita Tikaram’s “Twist in My Sobriety”. The title has an ironic edge, given Minnelli’s public struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction (she spent part of the early 1980s at the Betty Ford Clinic). The song’s cryptic and odd lyrics are a coming-of-age tale of sorts, though Minnelli’s arch reading seems too alien to them – her voice essentially glides on the glistening production. Introducing the song is a rap version of her signature tune, “Lisa with a Z”, composed by her longtime collaborators John Kander and Fred Ebb (who penned her biggest Broadway hits Cabaret, The Act, The Rink), performed as an aggressive chant instead of the buoyant, bouncy way it’s usually sung.
Though Minnelli isn’t known as a great Shakespearean actress, the Bard also manages to make an appearance on Results. In a move that can only be described as more is more, Tennant and Lowe throw in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 into the bridge of the dance track “If There Was Love”. It’s an excellent fit for the bitter lyrics of the song, which has Liza Minnelli railing against modern society and its facile emptiness. The song’s opener, “Men of affairs, women with power,” speaks directly to Shakespeare’s lines, “They that have the power to hurt and will do none.” The sonnet questions the power of beauty, its hold on people, and its exploitative qualities. Tennant and Lowe’s lyrics also present a somewhat cynical world of transactional relationships. So when Minnelli wonders, “And if there was love, would that be enough?” she asks whether genuine love would solve the complex issues in a coldly modern society. The song’s scornful themes highlight the dark sides of Minnelli’s artistry that were often obscured by her maniacally ebullient stage persona.
The other important part of the Results project was the suite of music videos for the album’s singles. For the first single, “Losing My Mind”, Minnelli was directed by Brian Grant, who helmed such memorable music clips like Olivia Newton-John‘s cheekily gay “Physical” (1981), Donna Summer‘s pro-union anthem “She Works Hard for the Money” (1983), and Whitney Houston‘s sprightly “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)” (1987). Grant’s vision for Minnelli has diva portray a lovelorn stalker. The video is all stylish late 1980s smash cuts and gimmicky photography, with flattering closeups of Minnelli in her pop star guise. The director creates a mini-movie showcase for his leading lady, and she approaches her MTV music video debut with the over-the-top dedication of a histrionic movie queen. Grant makes some obvious allusions to Sondheim’s obsessive lyrics, framing Minnelli in shots with Polaroids of her stalker victim papered on the walls (and in one disturbing scene, Liza Minnelli sinks into a bathtub filled with photographs).
Grant creates another soap opera with her strident dance single “Don’t Drop Bombs”. In grainy black-and-white scenes, Minnelli and her co-star play out scenes of operatic domestic violence before Grant transports his audiences into an absurdly ridiculous sequence in bright, oversaturated colors, with Minnelli dancing in front of burning set pieces, recalling the MGM movie musicals of her parents. Bu Grant and Minnelli aren’t just interested in the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals. Still, they also acknowledge 1980s pop music videos with allusions to Michael Jackson and Madonna, complete with a moment when she grabs her crotch before launching into a dance break that’s smashed against flashes of strobe lights, scored by the funky record scratches.
The final music video for Results placed Liza Minnelli into an empty theatre, her home. More so than even a sound stage, a live theatre is Minnelli’s natural habitat. Directed by Terence Donovan, “So Sorry I Said” has a simple premise: Minnelli – austerely beautiful – is placed among the empty seats in a dark, cavernous theatre. The song’s aching melody reflects the melancholy of the video clip. Donovan’s prolific career as a photographer is reflected in how he captures Minnelli’s stunning androgynous looks (enhanced by the late genius makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin). The choice of having Minnelli lip sync from the seats to an empty stage is fascinating, given how much she’s identified with the stage, and some of the most indelible images of Minnelli are of her captured singing on stage.
After Results, Liza Minnelli and the Pet Shop Boys would go their separate ways. She’d return to a sporadic schedule of releasing studio albums of pop and jazz standards and entertaining audiences as a live performer for decades. In 2010, the icon made a rare film appearance in Michael Patrick King’sSex and the City 2, performing a comedic rendition of Beyoncé‘s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” in a tacky gay wedding scene. It was a return of sorts to dance-pop, but it was clearly a tongue-in-cheek joke and a one-off, as she seemed to have permanently closed the chapter of her dance diva phase. Still, 35 years later, Results is a thoroughly enjoyable album with cult classic status.