Beware the savage jaw, Terri’s just turned 64…
“Of course, the record we’re best known for is Take My Breath Away, from Top Gun in 1986. Giorgio Moroder wrote and produced that track. He’d previously worked on our song No More Words. He’s said in interviews that he is the most proud of his work on Take My Breath Away. The most proud! The guy has two fucking Oscars for Midnight Express and Flashdance, and worked with Blondie and Bowie and fucking everybody, and our song is the one he’s most proud of!” — Terri Nunn, Electronic Sound, 2020
A rather under-appreciated band, Berlin was, and still is, a much misunderstood Californian collective, however much their misnomered moniker suggests otherwise.
Never knowingly European except for their love of the more keyboard-based late seventies output of Kraftwerk, Moroder, Sparks and Bowie/Eno, when Terri Nunn assumed the role of front woman the new wave wonders slightly came across as a B-movie Blondie, releasing their debut album Pleasure Victim just weeks as Debbie Harry and co went on a long hiatus in the autumn of 1982. Case in point: as electronically evocative as it is, The Metro is so loaded with Autoamerican-ish atmospherics they should have called it Angels On The Underground and be done with it.
Take away the psychic leverage afforded a beautiful blonde by a cool sense of irony, and she becomes just another lifeless derivative. At their best, Blondie offered hip mystique and a somehow sultry sexual negation. Yet with the next ‘controversial’ cut, Berlin went one step further and packaged Terri as a living blow up doll that just stepped out of the telly in Videodrome.
One day in July 1983, my older Springfield chum Steve Day showed me his 12-inch: an extended version of a hilariously tacky Donna Summer pastiche called Sex (I’m A). Hearing a Nunn deadpanning “I’m a slut” can’t be anything but exciting, especially for this 13-going-on-14-year-old.
On the last day of school before the summer holidays Steve let me borrow the record as some of us were given the opportunity to play a song in music class for our fellow pupils. When I had to endure squares like Gavin Wilson offering up a slice of Glenn Miller I knew I was out on a limb but I was allowed to play the crass cut anyway. Thing is, it goes on for over eight sodding minutes and about a minute before its conclusion the teacher got up and took the record off, exclaiming, “I think we’ve heard enough of that.”
I was mortified, especially as my juvenile sense of humour had been gearing up for the gushing denouement. I wanted the class to hear the spoken outro more than anything, the bit where Terri the “blue movie” “bitch” “hooker” suddenly squeals “I think we hit orgasm!”
Kids, eh?
The godfather of synthpop was hired for a couple of cuts on their next LP, 1984’s Love Life. The one that bagged all the attention was No More Words, its lead single and the group’s first hit on home turf.
With its fusion formula of streamlined dance-rock and sharp collapsing synths the 45 made it to number 23 thanks to Giorgio Moroder’s automatic pilot production, with Blondie watchers feeling they’d heard it all before — possibly on Rush Rush, the Italian’s solo single with Debbie the year before, in fact.
Still, the team-up with Moroder produced the next monster hit that was so omnipresent it propelled and destroyed the band at the same time. Indeed, the rest of the line-up were so adamant Berlin should only record their own material, Terri Nunn basically forced them to do it, with calamitous consequences.
Often cited as Moroder’s own personal favourite project, the epic ballad was the “love theme” from the soundtrack to Tom Cruise’s breakthrough movie Top Gun. After hearing a demo, director Tony Scott decided to give the song extra potency by ordering additional scenes to be shot focusing on Cruise and Kelly McGillis.
With fittingly feverish lyrics by jobbing wordsmith Tom Whitlock (get this: Whitlock, a mechanic, got the job by fixing the brakes on Moroder’s Ferrari!), the power of Take My Breath Away is memorably propelled by a hugely distinctive synth-bass part (itself referenced, however obliquely, in the 2024 Pet Shop Boys 2024 single A New Bohemia) — courtesy of the decade’s ubiquitous Yamaha DX7 — while Terri Nunn’s vocals are heavy with emotive chorus, key change and lashings of reverb.
A transatlantic chart-topper, the single won Moroder more Academy Awards and Golden Globes, and went to number one in seven countries. Most surprisingly, it returned to the Top 3 in the UK in 1990, prompted by its use in a Peugeot car advert as well as ITV’s network premiere of Top Gun.
Oh, that bathroom basin scene, eh?
Steve Pafford
Further reading: 45 at 33: Giorgio Moroder and Martin Degville on Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Love Missile F1-11
