Dreaming and Recklessly Scheming: When Liza Met the Pet Shop Boys

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Before there was “Padam Padam”, and before there was even Cher’s “Believe”, there was Liza Minnelli and “Losing My Mind”. With a staccato piano and the kind of woozy synthline they’d honed over three albums, the Pet Shop Boys turned Stephen Sondheim’s gutting tale of unrequited love into a glorious Italo-disco banger, starring Liza as the ultimate woman scorned. It reached #6 in the charts.

This was, of course, the 1980s, a period when the British public found itself in a love affair with mainstream musical theatre – it was the era of “I Know Him So Well”, of “Memory” and “The Music of the Night”, and there was undoubtedly some of that fondness mixed into the public’s willingness to welcome the Liza Minnelli to the top 40.

“Losing My Mind” was a single from Minelli’s 1989 album Results, produced by the Pet Shop Boys and Julian Mendelsohn. Yet, despite Minelli’s career up until that point, this was crucially not a musical theatre album – in Minnelli’s own words, Results, as it would ultimately be called, was “poetic, vaguely cynical and Aznavourian”, an exercise in pastiche if not outright self-referentialism. The title was cribbed from something Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant once heard Janet Street-Porter say: “I call it my results wear, ‘cause when I wear it, I always get results.” (Somehow, this seems to canonise Minnelli as an honorary Loose Woman.)

Results represents the genesis of what the modern pop album would become by the 21st century, a line that can be traced all the way through to Britney’s Blackout, an album made almost entirely in collaboration with Danja and Bloodshy & Avant. It’s an exploration of exactly what it means to be ‘Liza Minnelli’ in a late or indeed postmodern context. It might be an album written for her, but Results is arguably more focused on her mythos, offering an interpretation of what, and not always who, Liza Minnelli is. She exists within the record as both iconography and signifier, giving voice to Tennant’s inner monologue and acting as, amongst other things, a canvas through which he could signpost and explore both his sexuality and his politics.

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Writing for maybe the ultimate gay icon as a then-closeted man represents a uniquely artful conflict and while the album navigates that empathetically, it simultaneously winks at the circumstances surrounding its production. Like any Pet Shop Boys record, there are songs that almost drip in irony, but there are also points, as in the orchestral reworking of their own song “Tonight is Forever”, where it’s as if Minnelli is able to reach a truth in it that Tennant himself, through time and society, couldn’t admit. But it’s also a performance: his idea of Liza given voice by the real woman, who is yet herself a step removed from the process.

The recreations of existing songs represent a direct engagement with, and inversion of, our own expectations. The question “What should a Liza Minnelli album sound like?” is answered almost self-consciously in a new version of “Rent”, PSB’s electro-ballad about being a kept man. In Liza’s hands it becomes a torch song, not a world away from something that might have appeared on her mother Judy Garland’s 1956 record Alone. It’s the direct opposite of what Tennant did with “Losing My Mind”; in that song’s transformation, they go beyond the idea of Liza, the musical theatre star, to find female rage and a distinctly modern femme fatalism. In this more luscious version of Rent, there is only solitude. The songs themselves are only objects that are meant to be disrupted and rebuilt, to exist on multiple planes and in varying forms, and to answer the record’s existential questions.

“This seems to capture the album’s essential conflict, that Liza is simultaneously herself, her public image, and Neil Tennant’s private idea of her.”

Often, they are in conversation with the very idea of Minnelli, as if Tennant is working through the concept in almost real time. Of the new material, Don’t Drop Bombs, a rebuke of a cheating ex, contains an interpolation of Minnelli’s early track “Liza With A Z”, itself ostensibly a work of self-parody. It takes the Fosse version of Liza contained within those early songs and challenges it with a new one – a Liza for the 80s, a West End girl Liza.

“If There Was Love” ends with her quoting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 in its entirety, an answer to the song's refrain: “And if there was love / would that be enough?” It’s a meeting of antiquity with the very death of the modern – the song’s middle eight compares the sucking moral vacuum of neoliberalism with the ozone hole. And Liza, child of a twentieth century heroine, mourns the lilies that festered far worse than weeds.

This seems to capture the album’s essential conflict, that Liza is simultaneously herself, her public image, and Neil Tennant’s private idea of her. We might call it the Minnelli matrix, a sprawl of synths and self-reference. It functions as the prism through which the album refracts all of its themes: lust, secrecy, the decline of modernity. And who better to declare it than someone so eminently, almost tragically, modern? Life is, even now, still a cabaret. 

When Liza won the inaugural Grammy Living Legend Award in 1989, she was introduced as representative “of all the people who still care about the story as much as the song”. And Results is nothing if not a good story, with the ending to fit. Liza went back to New York to make a musical called Steppin’ Out, and Tennant and Lowe made Behaviour, arguably their best album. Their paths would never cross again. But in that Grammy performance, as she sings “Losing My Mind” and dances, utterly unchoreographed, by herself, Results just seems so obviously monumental, a gasp of Late Style from maybe our greatest performer. In a world that would never again be so receptive to the essential theatricality of Liza Minnelli, maybe that is why it was destined to be largely forgotten, a last gasp of reverence for a specific kind of female stardom that simply no longer exists.  

In the final song, the Sade-tinged “I Can’t Say Goodnight”, it’s hard not to think of Liza, dancing, still, as someone turns out the spotlight. 

Words: Lizzie Mackarel