Berlin singer Terri Nunn is surprised by the group's impact
By Mark Brown (The News-Times/Orange County Register)
You add up the real influential musicians of the '80s, and the list is pretty short. Prince. U2. The Replacements. And ... umm ... Berlin? At a May concert by Cleveland radio station WMMS-FM, Gwen Stefani of No Doubt stopped midset to pay tribute to Berlin singer Terri Nunn for giving women a voice in modern rock. She then dedicated the band's "Just a Girl" to Berlin. "I had no idea that Berlin has as much of an impact on those kinds of bands," Nunn said. "A lot of different bands came up and talked to us and told us what we were for them. It's weird. It's great. But also, in a sense, you feel so old." Nunn is surprised how much a new generation of rockers were reared on her music, especially since the reunited Berlin has been out of business since the mid-'80s. "I didn't even know that people would remember us," she said. "But it was insanity. It was the first time I've seen moshing at a Berlin show. When 'The Metro' came on, they went out of their minds." The band bolted out of the gate with its "Pleasure Victim" EP and hit "Sex (I'm a ...)" in 1982. The success had its benefits but also let the band get pigeonholed. "People wanted to minimize me as a person because I talked about sex that openly. 'She must not have a brain. She's a bimbo, she's an idiot'," Nunn recalled. "That really bothered me." Despite hits such as "The Metro," "No More Words" and "Take My Breath Away," the band splintered. "It was the first chance I had since my teens to have a life," Nunn said. "It was nice to live a little and fall in love and find out what it's like to be off the treadmill of touring and recording, touring and recording, that went on for me for six years solid." What little music fans did hear was Nunn's duet on Sisters of Mercy's "Under the Gun" from the Sisters' greatest hits album. A solo album, 1991's "Moment of Truth," didn't do much, and Nunn dismisses it as a transitional album now. After years of wishing she was in a band, the punk revolution inspired Nunn to give it a shot. The music of the '60s was great, but the '70s left Nunn cold. "Most of it was horrible disco (junk). I felt betrayed. I felt like why the hell didn't I get my musical revolution?" Nunn said. "Finally in '77, '78 punk came in, and that was the beginning of the revenge I got to have as a teen-ager." A host of live Berlin gigs this summer will be followed, eventually, by an album of new material. Success came so quickly that "I don't think that ... I appreciated it as much as I could have," Nunn said of success. "I could tell how much Gwen appreciated what's happening for her now." "It's a different perspective to see someone like Gwen. She's young, and she's going through a lot right now," Nunn observed. "She's going through that nuts, heavy, hectic touring, no home-life, no social life kind of a time right now that I remember." So what advice did she pass on? "It's really important to keep the connection with friends and family. It's easy to lose those connections with everything that's going on," Nunn said. "You're alone out there, and you're traveling a lot." "It's nice to be able to talk to her and give her a chance to talk to somebody who knows what she's going through," Nunn continued. "There's nothing that can prepare you for the craziness of it. There's nothing in life like it - being on the road and having no one even touch you who you know for upwards of a year. It's a weird situation, really strange. I think that's why a lot of people get into drugs and o.d."