Terri Nunn doesn’t seem like the sort of artist who’s afraid to take chances. Nunn’s been a TV and film actress and a radio host in her career, but she’s best known as the vocalist and front person for the 1980s electro-pop outfit Berlin. The band is set to start a summer tour with Boy George and Culture Club and Howard Jones in mid-July, with an August 11 date slated for Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion.
With so many interests and so much verve for the arts, we wondered whether there were still professional mountains for Nunn to climb. She said she’s soon to add “executive film producer” to her impressive entertainment resume.
“I get asked about writing a book a lot and I will do that definitely before I leave this planet,” she said, “and the other new thing that’s kind of happening now is executive producer on a movie that’s coming out about a piece of my life.”
Nunn is lavish with her laughter over our 20-minute phone chat and that’s fun because it’s a great, enveloping laugh which she doesn’t mind directing at herself occasionally. The laughter seems to suggest she can’t quite believe what she’s about to tell us.
“It’s a book that was written by DJ Richard Blade. It is called World in My Eyes and it was optioned by a producer and a writer and they are interested in making a movie about our romance, my romance with him, what they called ‘the rock and roll nightmare.’”
Nunn recently told Yahoo Entertainment the filmmakers are interested in Florence Pugh or maybe Julia Garner to depict her in the film, which would chronicle a brief but memorable romance between Nunn – then a rising music star – and Blade, an influential Los Angeles DJ who helped usher in New Wave. The love affair began in 1982 and was done by ’83, but the tale draws in pop culture icons like David Geffen and is so uncensored and intimate that Blade sent Nunn an advanced copy of the story – one single chapter of the book – before it was published.
“It’s in development,” she said of the film. “Of course, with the strike in Hollywood everything is stopped but it is in development and they’ve asked me to be an executive producer. I’ve never done that before.”
She is familiar with film and TV. Longtime fans know Nunn began her career as an actor, most notably featured in the 1978 disco ensemble comedy Thank God It’s Friday. That cult classic put her in the company of fellow artists like Donna Summer, Debra Winger and Jeff Goldblum.
“It was exciting for me first of all because it was the first movie that I ever did. And the last movie that I was ever in as an actor. At the time I was doing television episodics and TV movies were big then. Now, they’re big again, there are actually movies that are on TV with Netflix and Prime and all that, but at the time they were called TV movies and I did a number of those. But, I had never done an actual feature film,” she said.
“My takeaway from it was watching Donna Summer and meeting her and meeting Giorgio Moroder who later produced and wrote ‘Take My Breath Away’ and produced ‘No More Words’ for us. But that was in the future. That was a few years away. But getting to see them and be around them — wow. That was my dream. It was being exposed in real time to these people and this dream and this life that was coming for me and at the time I just really wanted it and I didn’t know how to make it happen.”
Nunn followed those good examples and her own instincts to a music career, one that’s soon to visit your city, perhaps. She said Berlin has shared the stage with Boy George and company previously. The bands got on well and the fans loved the pairing, so it made sense to jump on this tour.
“When we got the call for the tour it was an instant yes. For me, it’s a privilege to play with Boy George and Culture Club and Howard Jones. They’re iconic, great artists and really nice people, too. That’s unusual. It doesn’t always go together in my world,” she laughed.
“I love playing multi-band shows and I also really like going to them because getting turned onto new music, maybe I’m going for one band but I don’t really know another band and I get to see more. And the show lasts longer, too. I like that.”
Good thing because Berlin has a huge festival date approaching later this year. They’ll be performing big hits like “Sex (I’m A…),” “The Metro” and “Take My Breath Away” at Corona Capital Festival in Mexico City this November. The fest blends diverse acts, veterans like Berlin, The Cure and Pet Shop Boys, with acts they might have influenced, like Arcade Fire, Soccer Mommy and Feist. How does Nunn spend her time at that type of festival? Is it more a reunion with old friends or running from one stage to another to catch buzz bands like the rest of us?
“Yes, yes and yes,” she said. “All of that. I mean, that’s the fun of a festival, you know? That’s a big deal for us, the Mexico show, because we can’t remember ever playing in Mexico, if you can believe that. This might be a first all the way around and it’s definitely a first time getting invited to that festival. I’ve heard of it, it’s been around for a long time, it’s a huge event.
“We just played the Cruel World Festival and once we’d done our show, getting to go around and see all these (artists), my daughter who’s 18, she wanted to see Billy Idol so went over and saw him and then Love and Rockets played and I love their music but I’d never seen them live, so we got to see them. And Gary Numan blew me away,” she said. “He was awesome. He has great new music.”
Nunn said “It’s hard to say where our specific influence has been,” when asked to consider the question about Berlin.
“The stuff that we were doing has become so pervasive. Listening to Nine Inch Nails the other day and one of Trent’s songs started with a TR-808 drum machine sound and that was our whole first album, it was a TR-808 drum machine. We couldn’t afford anything else at the time so we had that little TR-808. And now they’re still using them,” Nunn said.
It’s not just Berlin’s sound that’s evident in today’s music. The band helped advance music’s dialogue beyond the TR-808. Nunn agreed that a song like “Sex (I’m A…)” was controversial on its release but inched the door further open for future artists to make big, brash statements through music. Nunn was hard to escape on TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s and some girls who watched her front a band on MTV grew up to front their own acts.
Berlin was also at the forefront of the 1980s trend of huge hits on radio and MTV attached to movies, a merger of all the entertainment worlds she’d explored. The band’s biggest hit, “Take My Breath Away,” from the Top Gun soundtrack, won an Oscar and topped the Billboard charts in 1986. The song, written by Moroder, is an all-time pop music classic. When a song is so overwhelmingly popular and expected to be in the set list every night, we wonder whether the artist simply tires of it. We recently posed the question to Seal about “Kiss From a Rose,” a megahit which was also attached to a movie.
Nunn’s response to our question was essentially a discourse on art, how it starts from a personal place but, when done right, takes on a larger life.
“Honestly, I haven’t gotten tired of the song yet. My relationship with it has changed and keeps changing obviously because it’s decades ago that we did it and I’m a different person. Singing it, it’s a different experience now than it was then because I’m looking out at people who have a history with that song,” she said.
“They zone out when that song starts and I watch them go to these places. Whether they grab their guy or their eyes close and they sway or they’re looking at me because maybe I was a direct part of this history they have with it – it’s all different. But it’s all playing out in front of me. It’s cool. It’s weird. It’s something I didn’t have when I first sang it and you don’t have it with every song but you really have it with that one. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
Berlin, with Boy George and Culture Club and Howard Jones, Friday, August 11 at Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, 2005 Lake Robbins Drive, The Woodlands. Gates at 6 p.m., music at 7 p.m. $22.50 and up.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
