FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Results: When the Pet Shop Boys met Liza Minnelli
09.27.2017
03:53 pm
Topics:
Tags:


The ‘Results’ cover by David LaChapelle

Whenever I have posted on this blog in the past about her mother Judy Garland, some of our less culturally-enlightened (troglodyte) readers accuse me of having “the musical tastes of a middle-aged drag queen”—so what if I do?—but that’s not going to stop me from recommending a somewhat obscure (in the US at least) 1989 collaboration between Liza Minnelli and the Pet Shop Boys.

Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant had already teamed up with Dusty Springfield, providing England’s greatest blue-eyed soul singer with a featured role in their “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” worldwide smash, her first hit single after two decades away from the pop charts, so the Pet Shop Boys producing Liza Minnelli’s comeback album must have seemed like a natural fit. Minnelli, who had not been in the recording studio since 1977, was already a fan of theirs, they of her, so it was apparently a bit of a love affair from the very start, Liza having a demonstrated knack (like her mother before her) for falling for gay men…

The results of the pairing of the chart-topping duo, then at the height of their hit-making powers and the showbiz royalty (who was working around her London concerts with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. during the sessions) were so stellar they opted to call the album Results, in keeping with the one word nomenclature customary for PSB releases. The material, cannily selected with Minnelli’s own tabloid-documented experiences—and age, at the time she was 43—in mind came together to sound exactly like what you’d think it would sound like with Minnelli’s iconic powerful/tender/vulnerable/triumphant voice placed atop typical (but by no means second rate) Pet Shop Boys symphonic electronic disco beats. Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti and Anne Dudley from the Art of Noise did the orchestral arrangements.
 

 
Originally released in September of 1989, Results went gold in the UK and Spain, with the “Losing My Mind” single hitting number #6 in the British singles chart. In America however, Results didn’t even make the top 100 and it was easy to find the CD for cheap in the cut-out bins not so long after it came out. It remains an undiscovered gem. Results spawned four singles: “Losing My Mind”; “Don’t Drop Bombs”; “So Sorry, I Said” and “Love Pains.” There was also a VHS video EP release titled Visible Results. The by now 28-year-old album has just been given a make-over in the form of a remastered and expanded edition three CD and one DVD box set by Cherry Red Records and hopefully it will (deservedly) pick up some new admirers with this latest iteration.

If you are even slightly curious if the Pet Shop Boys and Liza Minnelli are indeed two great tastes that taste great together, then I am pretty sure that you will love this album. But the beauty of writing about pop culture these days is that you don’t have to take my word for it, you can simply hit play on this clip of Minnelli lip-syncing “Love Pains” and make up your own mind:
 

 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.27.2017
03:53 pm
|
‘Divine decadence, darling’: Photos from behind the scenes of Bob Fosse’s ‘Cabaret’

000cabpos.jpg
 
In the right circumstances of time, place and imagination—it is possible to time travel. This was firmly impressed upon me in my teens while reading Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. I had just moved to Glasgow as a student and was renting a room in an apartment owned by a birdlike lady who whistled music hall songs and sniffed pecks of snuff off the back of her hand. She was long retired. Renting a room supplemented her meagre state pension. Now here’s the connection: she had once been a furrier in Berlin during the 1930s and had witnessed at first hand the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. She had seen the Jewish shops vandalized and some of her Jewish friends disappear to who knew where?

It wasn’t just the fact this dear old lady had an experience of the events which I was reading in Mr. Isherwood’s book—but the flat in which I was a lodger had been untouched since the 1930s. The whole interior, its decoration, the heavy furniture, the coal fire, the carpeting and rugs, the cast iron bed, the wooden mantlepiece, the dressing table with polished vanity mirror—everything in this apartment was as it had been in the days just before the Second World War.

Only in the kitchen was there a slight capitulation to modern technology. A 1950s fridge and an electric cooker unused—still wrapped in its protective polythene. I cooked simple meals off a bunsen burner gas ring—a blackout cooker as my landlady called it. It was winter. The apartment was cold. At night I could hear, like Herr Issyvoo, the men outside whistling in the dark. Except these men were not calling up to their lovers to come to the windows but to their dogs off somewhere in the small misty park below. In such circumstances of place and time and imagination, it was all too easy to find myself transported to the decade of Goodbye to Berlin.

That snowbound Christmas I watched Cabaret on television. A multi-award-winning film version of the musical inspired by Isherwood’s Berlin novels. I must have seen that film about thirty times since. It is an almost perfect movie—story, character, sex, politics, and a powerful overarching narrative. Not to mention Liza—with a “Z”—Minnelli at the very height of her talents. Based mainly on the short story “Sally Bowles” from Goodbye to Berlin and John Van Druten’s adapted play of the book I Am a Camera, Bob Fosse’s film Cabaret brilliantly captured the world of Isherwood’s writing.

The film starred Michael York as Isherwood’s alter ego—named here Brian Roberts, Liza Minnelli as night club singer Sally Bowles, Helmut Griem as rich playboy Maximilian von Heune and the incomparable Joel Grey as the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub.

Apparently director Bob Fosse wanted to play the MC himself but the studio insisted on Grey. The film was shot at the Bavaria Film Studios in Germany—well out of Hollywood’s reach. One day the studios cabled Fosse to say he was spending too much money on smoke for the nightclub scenes. Fosse read the telegram out to the assembled cast. Then he ripped it up and threw it over his shoulder. That was the end of Hollywood’s involvement. Fosse had been considered a risky choice as director. His previous film Sweet Charity had flopped disastrously. Away from the studio’s interference, Fosse was able to achieve what he wanted. Cabaret swept eight Academy Awards from ten nominations.
 
012cabjoelgmc4.jpg
Joel Grey as the Master of Ceremonies.
 
060cabjolg.jpg
 
More photos from the making of ‘Cabaret,’ after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
08.18.2016
09:41 am
|
Judy and Liza go grocery shopping
11.30.2011
09:01 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
I was happy to see that those purveyors of fine campy video products, Punchy Players, have returned with another animated adventure of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli.

This time, the mega-talented mother-daughter duo goes grocery shopping and meets Ann Miller. It’s pretty great. Like all their other ones.
 

 
Via our friends at World of Wonder

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
11.30.2011
09:01 pm
|
Judy Garland animation: Judy’s Baby Daddy
08.19.2010
06:04 pm
Topics:
Tags:

 
The Punchy Players return with another Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli animation, Judy’s Baby Daddy. Liza helps Judy get her beat. This one is as good as their first one, Judy’s Cream of Wheat.

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
08.19.2010
06:04 pm
|
Judy Garland’s Cream of Wheat
05.25.2010
11:42 pm
Topics:
Tags:

 
This is every flavor of awesome. More in this Judy series are promised by the creators, Punchy Players. I’d like to see more of these.

Thank you, Marc Campbell!

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
05.25.2010
11:42 pm
|