The battle behind Berlin’s Top Gun classic Take My Breath Away: ‘We turned on each other’

A few hours after recording the song that would change her life, Berlin’s Terri Nunn went home to her mother in tears. “I remember saying, ‘It’s ruined. It’s never going to go anywhere. It was good, but he’s demanding to do it his own way…’ And it was the biggest hit we ever had.”

“He” was Giorgio Moroder, the superstar producer behind such effervescent smashes as Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and Irene Cara’s Flashdance…What A Feeling. The song was Take My Breath Away, a doomy power ballad Moroder had written for a disposable summer flick starring a callow newcomer named Tom Cruise – Top Gun.

“I was good at working on other people’s songs,” recalls Nunn, who still tours the world singing with Berlin (they recently co-headlined a festival at LA’s Rose Bowl alongside Blondie and Morrissey). “I was trying to play around with his melody. Elongate it. I just thought: ‘Okay, Giorgio will like it.’ Mmmm. Not necessarily.”

Take My Breath Away was written by Moroder and Tom Whitlock, a former mechanic whom the Italian producer had met when Whitlock came to repair his Ferrari. They also collaborated on the other big tune from the Top Gun soundtrack, Kenny Loggins’s Danger Zone. And in his vast North Hollywood studio, Moroder was happy to take on board Nunn’s suggestions – at least, up to a point.

“In some ways, he did go with it. In other ways, he was like: 'No.' Because I would add all this stuff to the chorus: 'Take my breath away-aaa-aah…' Adding all this melody to it. He’d bring it back in. He’d say, [adopts Italian accent] ‘No, Terri – people want to sing along. They want to remember it. They cannot remember 'aah-aah-aah'. You must just do 'take my breath away' – stop.’”

Later, when her tears had dried and Take My Breath Away became a global chart-topper, Nunn saw the wisdom of Moroder’s philosophy. And 36 years on, with Tom Cruise returning for the long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, she is reminded all over again of the track’s blockbuster power.

“People are reinvigorated by the new movie. What I liked about the first one is [that] it wasn’t just a guy in a plane, beating his chest, being all badass and macho. It was a deep character study [of Cruise’s character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell]. That made it interesting to women. It got into his frailties and problems and vulnerabilities.” Though she hasn’t yet seen the sequel, she adds: “I’m hearing that this is similar.”

Nunn and her bandmates John Crawford (bassist, backing vocals) and David Diamond (keyboards) hadn’t seen Top Gun when they recorded Take My Breath Away. Moroder arranged for Berlin to watch the key scenes, so that they had the gist. But he had his work cut out in producing a group that was divided over whether they even wanted to be there.

“John Crawford didn’t want to do it,” says Nunn. “It was scary to be running this band, trying to write songs that would keep us going and alive. Trying to write a hit, and trying to do what the record company wanted and what the band wanted. And so all of a sudden, here comes this producer, who’s amazing.”

They were familiar with Moroder’s pedigree, having convinced him to co-produce material on Berlin’s 1984 album, Love Life. Now he was returning the favour by having them sing Take My Breath Away (albeit after unsuccessfully auditioning several other artists, including rock band The Motels). Nunn felt it had every chance of becoming a hit, so Crawford was outvoted.

“I love Giorgio,” she says. “If he’d farted, I would have sung it. I loved his whole style. I loved him. I loved the music. We all did. That’s why we were working with them at the time. And John is like, ‘Jesus… I’m failing. I can’t seem to do what this guy does. He s--ts out hits, one after another. I don’t want my band taken from me. It’s not Berlin, it’s Giorgio Moroder.’ The rest of us didn’t care.”

Crawford has since changed his mind about Take My Breath Away, and is today grateful to his bandmates for twisting his arm. But back then, who knows? Perhaps that tension was what made the song work. Take My Breath Away could so easily have ended up just another 1980s hairdryer ballad – something Bonnie Tyler might have belted out with all the subtlety of a F-18 fighter jet roaring down the runway.

For Nunn, the magic ingredient brought by Berlin was sadness. Take My Breath Away is, in theory, a love song – written to order for Top Gun producer Jerry Bruckheimer to accompany the falling-in-love montage between Cruise and Kelly McGillis. Berlin turned it into something darker, and tinged with tragedy.

“I wasn’t in love,” says Nunn. “I hadn’t been for years. I was lonely, I was working all the time, didn’t have a lot of social life… I couldn’t go, ‘Hey, I’m so happy.’ It wasn’t going on for me.”

Nunn’s life could make for a Hollywood blockbuster of its own. She was born in Los Angeles in 1959, to a family intimately familiar with the dark side of showbusiness. Her father had been a former child-actor in Hollywood, but struggled later in life and died by suicide when Nunn was a teenager. Desperate to help her mother support the family, Nunn would spend her spare time auditioning for acting jobs – eventually testing for Princess Leia in the original Star Wars. She was 15, trying out opposite a 30-year-old Harrison Ford.

“As much as I applaud George Lucas for what he created,” she says, “I’m still happy it didn’t happen for me. Music would have [remained] a dream…. I never saw that actors could be considered serious musicians. It was better that my path diverged.”

Nunn was subsequently offered the role of Lucy Ewing in Dallas, but turned it down to pursue music (whereupon her agent dropped her). Shortly afterwards, she joined Berlin, and amid a series of line-up reshuffles, the group became a fixture on the LA new-wave scene. With a catchy synth-driven sound, they delighted in pushing people’s buttons. Their 1981 single Sex (I’m A), for instance, is a salacious duet between Nunn and Crawford, featuring lyrics such as “I’m a toy, come and play with me, say the word now/Wrap your legs around mine and ride me tonight.”

“We wanted to be an adult band… We wanted to make it cool to be an adult,” she says. “Both John and I were afraid to be adults. We had examples in our families that didn’t make it look very cool. It looked hard – healthwise, it looked problematic. People were struggling in our families. But we had a vision that getting older would be cool. And we [wanted] to make an example of that, which could help kids like us to transition into adulthood with more optimism.”

Take My Breath Away carried Berlin to another level. But it brought intolerable pressure as they tried to build on its success. They also made commercial mistakes, such as refusing to perform at the Academy Awards, at which Take My Breath Away won Best Original Song. And then, in 1987, after the release of their album Count Three and Pray, they broke up.

“What I’ve noticed about success is that it doesn’t change people,” Nunn says of that period. “It makes people more of what they are. So if there’s goodness, there’s more good, and if there’s s--t going on, there’s going to be more s--t.

“[Success] intensifies everything. [Take My Breath Away] intensified what was already going on in the band – basically, we were tired. We turned on each other. We didn’t know where to go from there. We had a hit that John was not happy about because he didn’t write it. It just made everything even more intensely hard.

“I don’t blame the song, or Giorgio, or anybody else. It was us. If we’d had the advice from people around us to take time off, that would have helped. We didn’t. I don’t blame the people around us, either – it was a business, and they wanted to keep the business going.”

But Nunn’s story wasn’t finished. In 1991, she released a solo album, Moment of Truth, featuring a track co-written by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith of Underworld. And she has the distinction of singing on the last ever single by the Sisters of Mercy, duetting with frontman Andrew Eldritch on the classic chugger Under the Gun.

“When I was doing my solo album,” she says, “I contacted him. I contacted Trent Reznor [of Nine Inch Nails], and I contacted Moby – to write with them. Trent and Moby turned me down. Andrew said, ‘I live in Hamburg. Do you want to come out? We can write something.’

“I flew out there, stayed with him and brought that song. It was originally called Living For Love.” Eldritch, a musical recluse for years, has a reputation for aloofness. “He was weird. Not easy to get to know. Not warm and fuzzy, that’s for sure.”

The original line-up of Berlin got back together several years ago, and in 2019 released a fantastic comeback album, Transcendance, followed by an orchestral reworking of their catalogue, Strings Attached. But needless to say, a large part of their ongoing appeal is down to Take My Breath Away. And even if they didn’t write it, in terms of royalties they continue to benefit from it.

“It changed my life financially,” says Nunn. “Giorgio Moroder wrote the song, but it’s licensed all the time, and they want the original – they want the recording. So that means they have to talk to my camp. It’s an incredible gift that keeps on giving.”

She has still never met Tom Cruise. However, 10 years ago she crossed paths with Kelly McGillis at an event in Italy celebrating movies and music. Top Gun’s other star ran up, hugged her and started weeping. “She was wonderful. She cried about the song. I guess it really meant a lot to her.”

Berlin’s album Transcendance is out now on Cleopatra