With “Grease” sing-alongs, John Hughes retrospectives, Duran Duran tours and “Top Gun 2” in the works, the 1980s are back, after a couple of decades in which we pulled our sweatbands over our eyes, turned up our Walkmen and tried to forget.
The revival may be good news for Berlin, an ’80s-identified band that’s playing a free show Saturday in Claremont. Still, Terri Nunn, the band’s frontwoman, can’t blot out some of the decade’s more obvious excesses.
“There was a lot of awful hair and clothes,” Nunn told me by phone. “I look back on some of my clothes and wonder what I was thinking. Even the band did an intervention on me one day.”
Say what? Bandmates gently told her she didn’t have to select her own outfits and do her own hair. They were successful enough to hire a stylist.
“I was devastated,” Nunn recalled with a laugh. “‘I like that pink dress with the orange hair! It looks good!’ But it didn’t.”
Celebrity interviews aren’t my thing, but given a chance to interview Nunn, I made an exception. For one thing, I’m of the right age to remember the band’s heyday, when they hit it big with “No More Words” and “Take My Breath Away,” the latter a No. 1 song featured in “Top Gun.”
For another, I was at the L.A. County Fair in 2008 when the Motels, Berlin and the Bangles performed. Nunn worked the crowd masterfully, singing as if she were playing the Hollywood Bowl, not a Pomona grandstand, and stole the show.
In the highlight, she left the stage during the romantic “Take My Breath Away,” singing from a roadie’s shoulders as he walked her around the audience. (I would hate to see the band’s workers compensation premiums.)
Berlin has a new album, “Animal,” that employs electronic dance music in place of its original synth-pop and makes it sound like a natural progression. In fact, the music seems lighter on its feet.
Nunn was inspired by a stint as disc jockey for KCSN, an adult alternative station in Northridge, where she hosted a weekly two-hour show from 2012 until earlier this year. Filling the airtime forced her to listen aggressively to newer music, and artists like Skrillex and Calvin Harris felt fresh and yet relevant to her past self.
“I could sing over these songs,” Nunn thought. So she sought out producers John King (a Pomona College alumnus) and Derek Cannavo to co-write and shape her songs.
Berlin seemingly will play almost anywhere, from the Orange County Fair July 23 to, on Saturday night, a restaurant and lounge in Riverside, Romano’s.
And at 1 p.m. that day, to promote both the album and the Riverside show, Berlin will perform at Rhino Records, 235 Yale Ave. in Claremont. The store has a small stage in a back corner that occasionally hosts an in-store performance. Berlin is one of the best-known bands to ever play.
“Her management contacted us,” said an impressed Dennis Callaci, Rhino’s general manager. “They’ve played big shows at the L.A. County Fair. We’re a little record store. We’ve got a ton of people on social media who are excited about coming.”
Fans can bring one item to sign. If they buy the album early at Rhino, they can get a wristband for a spot toward the head of the line.
“We’re going to play probably 30 minutes, some Berlin they know well and some Berlin they’ve never heard before,” Nunn promised.
She has a big voice and stage presence for Rhino — will she even need amplification? — and I have a mental image of Nunn riding on someone’s shoulders into the store aisles, her legs bumping into people flipping through racks of vinyl records.
Nunn loves performing, and that’s worked out well because that’s about the only way bands can make money any more in an age where music seemingly is free.
“You can’t replace that: being in the same room with your favorite artist. You can’t digitize it!” Nunn exclaimed.
Either as a fan or as a performer, Nunn wants that feeling of rapture from concerts. Two formative experiences were watching Jim Morrison and INXS’ Michael Hutchence.
“It’s better than any drug I’ve ever had,” Nunn said, “to get into that space and hopefully help other people get into that space.”
A highlight of her life was the US Festival in 1983 in Devore, where Berlin performed for 670,000 fans — “I loved that I got to be a fan and had my dream of being a rock star,” Nunn said — but good shows can happen anywhere, even in unpromising venues.
Is it hard as a legacy act to get new music heard?
Yes, but it wasn’t easy as a new band either, Nunn said, with the audience staring throughout an entire set, nobody knowing any of the songs. Having an established body of work is very satisfying, yet it does create limitations.
“Something new is something people don’t know. People listen with a cocked head. ‘What is this?’ People don’t come to concerts to hear music they don’t know. They want to hear songs they know,” Nunn said matter-of-factly. As a fan, she admits she’s the same way.
She always performs “Take My Breath Away” for just that reason. People expect to hear it. And she likes performing it, likes having produced a standard. She has a sort of awe herself at its impact.
“When it comes on, people go into a zone to where they were at the time,” Nunn said. “It’s so inspiring to me to see them in that state.”
(For her, a personally meaningful song is the Zombies’ “Time of the Season”: “That’s when I got my first kiss. A boy kissed me while that song was playing.”)
Berlin formed in 1978 in Orange County. Nunn left in 1987 for a solo career that yielded one lone and confused album in 1991. Her label dissolved. She realized she had “no life, no love, few friends.”
“The ’90s were really a lost time for me,” Nunn said.
She married, had two sons, divorced and married again, a union that has lasted and produced a daughter. Nunn is 52 and lives near Moorpark.
Being identified with the 1980s was a liability for years, especially during the grunge era of the 1990s. The decade was considered tacky beyond redemption.
Nunn, who formed a new version of Berlin for the ’00s, remembers clearly the moment when she felt the disdain toward the ’80s lift: an ’80s-themed KROQ “Inland Invasion” concert in Devore in 2002.
Backstage, a member of the new band Interpol told Nunn earnestly: “We’re really trying to get that ’80s sound. That’s so cool.”
Nunn found his lack of irony refreshing.
She recalled thinking: “Oh, they don’t look at that as a negative. They just like the sound.”
Her own attitude toward her 1980s origins pivoted. “Rather than be embarrassed by it, I was proud of it,” Nunn said.
Combining the best of both worlds, these days she dresses better.
David Allen dresses things up Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Contact david.allen@langnews.com or 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
