When the group Berlin started in the early ‘80s, audiences in Los Angeles weren’t sure what to make of them. The scene at that time was all about punk and power pop bands, not cool electronic groups with glamorous frontwomen.
“We come in and people are like, ‘What the hell is this, and what’s a synthesizer? Where’s the guitars?’ recalls lead singer Terri Nunn. “But we really believed in what we were doing, and thank God we kept at it.” As for her onstage style, “We loved that film-noir kind of vibe, we never went onstage in jeans. For me the idea was to set an example that being an adult is fun, that it’s something to look forward to. For a lot of my friends, and for me with an alcoholic dad, it didn’t look like much fun getting older. And I wanted to put it out there that some really good parts were still coming to us.”
Nunn has lately reunited with Berlin’s other core members, bassist and main songwriter John Crawford and synthesizer player David Diamond, and this lineup will appear with fellow ‘80s survivors Culture Club and Howard Jones at Xfinity Center on Tuesday. And for Nunn, the band is sweeter the second time around. “It’s not like I’m somebody else, but there’s so much growth I’ve gone through, and I see that in them too. There isn’t all that fear and ego that we had as kids. I met John when I was 18, and we really didn’t know how to do this. Now there’s so much gratefulness, that we get to do it together as who we are now.”
After their modest start, Berlin had a run of hits including “Sex,” “Masquerade” and “No More Words.” But their greatest hit, 1986’s “Take My Breath Away,” proved a tipping point for the band. It was a soundtrack song (for the movie, “Top Gun”) brought in by German synth maestro Giorgio Moroder, and that was a tough one for the band’s main writer Crawford. “It wasn’t until recently that I really heard what that meant to John,” Nunn said. “He said, ‘I was struggling to write songs that the label would like, that the audiences would like. And in walks Giorgio with this song that everybody loves, he pulls it out of his hat, while I’ve been killing myself trying to write the next album’. I can see how that pressed on him.”
Crawford and Nunn are both writing new songs for Berlin, and their next new release is likely to be an original Christmas album. But meanwhile Nunn has another project on tap: She’s executive-producing a movie that her former boyfriend, TV and radio personality Richard Blade, wrote about their wild romance in the 80s. Nunn said that a number of big names — including Julia Garner (“Ozark”), Florence Pugh, and Anya Taylor-Joy — are in the running to play her.
“Our romance was spectacularly good and bad, it had all the elements of a rock and roll nightmare — Very high and very low. Richard is an amazing man and I think we’re better friends than we were lovers. We were both jerks and not there for each other, but it’s important to not sugarcoat things. I didn’t even find out that he’d run around on me until I read the book.”
How does she feel now about her 20-year old self? “I look at interviews I did back then and I say, “Augh, she’s so serious!’ But I have compassion for that woman because she was scared all the time. I was afraid to feel things because I thought I’d fall apart if I did, so I hid behind this intense, ‘I have it all together’ personality. It was bull, but that’s how I walked around. So it’s nice to be older and to know that the universe is benevolent, that everything that happens is for our greatest happiness and benefit. I sure didn’t know it then.”
