“Liza’s a legend. Well, she was until the Ruby Wax show.” — Neil Tennant
Looking back at that time to the summer of ’89 when the Pet Shop Boys gave Liza Minnelli gave her something she’s never experienced before: a big hit single. Written by Stephen Sondheim, it’s the story of Losing My Mind.
There was a time when, to get Bondian for a minute, the Pet Shop Boys were the men with the Midas touch.
Having released an album a year since their dazzling debut — 1986’s Please — enjoyed five* transatlantic No.1 singles, gave Patsy Kensit her only decent record and brought back Dusty Springfield from utter obscurity, by 1989 they took a breather, opting to prepare for their first tour in lieu of a new album. Under their own name, anyway. Before the seminal synth duo jetted off to peddle their stagecraft — because they “quite like proving that we can’t cut it live” — Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe spent most of March and April that year recording an album after all. Only this time the vocalist wasn’t Tennant but Liza Minnelli, celebrated singer of showbiz and showtunes who also happened to be the daughter of Judy Garland, one of the world’s most beloved gay icons.
In recent years, Tennant, in particular, has expressed belated niggles about the ‘gay icon’ label, but Dusty was a lesbian and gay icon, and acknowledging that fact doesn’t detract from her musical achievements in the slightest. In fact, it makes her now legendary status as Britain’s greatest ever blue-eyed soul singer even more remarkable. And after years in the doldrums, recording with the boys just cemented her LGBT following.
So the Pet Shop Boys producing Liza Minnelli’s “first pop record” — ably assisted by Aussie expat Julian Mendelsohn — must have seemed like a natural fit. In keeping with the one word nomenclature customary for PSB releases, at one stage a mooted title for the album was the not unsubtle Pink, suggesting the boys had already conceded exactly what kind of icon she was, and who her target audience were. Though she’d begun her recording career back in 1963, she hadn’t released a record for over a decade.
These were trifling matters though, as the Cabaret star of stage and screen was already an admirer of the duo, and they of her, so it was a felicitous teaming from the very start. With typical chutzpah, Liza had effectively demonstrated a knack for falling for friends of Dorothy — just like her mother before her, who’d married two of them.
To paraphrase Shirley Bassey, it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
Marrying Liza’s torchy, theatrical style with a layers of contemporary Fairlight synths, throbbing dance beats and topped off with Courtney Pine‘s classy sax interludes and darkly rich, John Barry-esque orchestration (courtesy of Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti and the Art Of Noise’s Anne Dudley), Results was – and is – unlike anything else in her six-decade catalogue.
The whole concept screams very very postmodern — a pop pairing of the Queen of Corn with the Kings Of Cool, the emotional Yank with the reserved Brits. Liza found working with the duo to be great fun but also challenging and uncompromising, confessing that Tennant would push her to sing ranges lower than she was used to.
Awash in gaudy, glitzy glamour, Losing My Mind — the LP’s lead single — was a souped-up blow-it-up-to-the-size-of-a-Times-Square-billboard dancefloor reimagining of Stephen Sondheim’s paranoid evergreen from Follies, his 1971 musical that’s been threatening to transfer from stage to screen for years.
In the first literary resume of his career, Finishing The Hat, Sondheim reveals that the song is a pastiche of the Gershwin’s glorious The Man I Love. Nonetheless, it’s a cracking lyric about being unable to think about anyone else beside your lover, and wondering if you’re going out of your mind in the process.
And yet when I heard the cover the first few times while working at the Bletchley Park codebreakers site I wasn’t sure how much I liked it.
Indeed, for some it was a disconcerting experience to hear a real gold-plated Broadway singer emoting over the top of a typically high-energy PSB synthpop production, and one person did actually tell me they found Liza’s vocals were “too projected” for the music (that’ll be my bestie Judi then).
But what did we know? Probably more than Terry Wogan, I grant you.
Pitchfork’s Alfred Soto summed it up perfectly.
“Over an ebb-and-flow electronic backdrop, Minnelli nails the tumult of romantic obsession. The telling moment occurs at 2:37, during which Tennant and Lowe add a high keyboard squiggle straight out of Italo disco. She doesn’t sound upset—she sounds like someone acting upset, which makes all the difference.”
Losing My Mind gave Liza her first ever chart single in Britain, peaking at No. 6 on its second week on the ‘hit parade’ during the third week of August. It remains her only top 10 hit in the UK, and one of the most brilliantly kitsch singles to reach the upper echelons of the chart until the equally subversive KLF got Tammy Wynette to sing “We’re justified and we‘re ancient and we drive an ice cream van.”
Curiously, it’s also the only hit single Tennant/Lowe produced for someone else that wasn’t written by them.
And to this today, the LP for Liza is still the only complete album Pet Shop Boys have made for another artist.
Now that’s what I call Results.
Steve Pafford
33 at 33: Liza with a P — when Minnelli met the Pet Shop Boys they got Results is here
