Italian Disco Interlude: Liza Minnelli and Pet Shop Boys Crafted Eurodisco Excellence.
How the album Results effectively combines Broadway and Eurodisco for something that's greater than the sum of its parts.
Liza Minnelli had just finished performing the Pet Shop Boys-penned ballad “So Sorry, I Said” for Terry Wogan on the July 31, 1989, episode of his show when he remarked on how it was “so smashingly sad.” That was his answer to her “Isn’t that a pretty song?”
Wogan’s remark was by no means a dig. “That’s the major reason I asked the Pet Shop Boys if they’d do this record with me,” Minnelli replied. “I just found that what they said in their songs was so right-on as far as emotions go.” She reflected on the fact that the sadness of her life “[has] been thrust upon [the public],” Minnelli said. “I’ve read some incredible things about myself.”
This interview with Terry Wogan was meant to promote Minnelli’s album Results, which is the epitome of what cabaret singer Kim David Smith once described to me as “Electro Camp”—that unique mixture of soulful vocals, churning machine-like basslines, cosmic synths, and a modicum of strings thrown in. Call it 1980s Euro Disco, if you will. In honor of the publication day of her memoir Kids, Wait Till You Hear This, let’s examine this record.
The duo had already produced a similar artistic feat with Eighth Wonder, whose “I’m Not Scared” combines a Madonna-like vocal affectation bordering on recitativo and a continental, Kraftwerk-like sound classed up by PSB; Minnelli had been curious about the duo ever since she heard their song “Rent.” After a couple of months, she heard that maybe they’d produce and write that album. “I just went crazy; it was just so wonderful.”
The album consists of ten tracks, a combination of covers, reinterpretations of PSB tracks, and songs written for this very project. She had not done any pop prior, but that did not faze the boys. “It’s always good when you’re working with someone that’s a huge star, which is something we get off on,” Chris Lowe told Wogan. “They might’ve assumed, correctly, that Results would be a hit on fumes alone, but they programmed the garish effects and wrote the purple lyrics that market calculations forced them to omit from their own work,” wrote Pitchfork in 2017. “And Minnelli, strutting always like the biggest hen on the farm, inhabits what Tennant called in an interview the ‘power woman’ tropes that the Boys wrote for her.”
PSB covers include “Tonight Is Forever” and “Rent.” The former has minimal chords in the beginning, which give way to swelling strings. In a way, it almost sounds like a Rodgers/Hammerstein track, a Disney love theme of yore, or maybe even Bernstein’s own “Tonight” from West Side Story. Thankfully, the beat drops, but it still feels Disneyesque: “Open the door, you hold the key.”
As said above, “Rent” was actually what got Minnelli hooked on the PSB sound. It includes lyrics such as “you dress me up, I’m your puppet” and “you buy me things and I love it.” It might sound theatrical at first, but this is no “So This Is Love” from Cinderella. While Minnelli strips it of the cynicism of the PSB original, she turns it into an 11 o’clock number. After all, “I love you. You pay my rent” is a great confession—whether it be uttered in an overly emphatic or a deadpan manner.
Other covers include the lead single “Losing My Mind,” which originally appeared in Sondheim’s Follies. To Euro-disco aficionados, this version is the musical equivalent of a Europudding film.
The opening chords are reminiscent of Umberto Tozzi’s “Gloria,” the bassline is very “machine-like” and continental, and if you listen closely enough, you might be able to catch a hint of “Disco Samba.” Overall, the instrumental track is reminiscent of Lear’s “Follow Me” and “Love Is a Stranger” by Eurythmics, but neither song has the anthemic gravitas of Minnelli’s “Losing My Mind.”
