Berlin’s Terri Nunn celebrates the band’s resurgence ahead of Hollywood Bowl shows

Terri Nunn and Berlin don’t usually play as many shows as they will this year, the singer says. But when the offers are as good as they’ve been, it’s almost impossible to say no.

“This year was an exception because the tour was just so great,” Nunn says of the Letting It Go Show with Boy George and Culture Club and Howard Jones. “I mean, the venues, the Hollywood Bowl, you know it’s just great. Just how often does anybody ever get a chance to play that?

“I can’t turn something like this down,” Nunn says of two nights at the Hollywood Bowl on Aug. 25-26. “The two other bands are great. These are once-in-a-lifetime events that might never happen again for me.”

Or maybe they will.

Because for Nunn and Berlin, the last few years have seen a resurgence of popularity for the band responsible for such new wave hits as “No More Words” and “The Metro, as well as the pop ballad “Take My Breath Away,” a massive hit from the original “Top Gun” soundtrack.

Earlier this year, Nunn and Berlin played the Cruel World Festival in Pasadena, the only band to play a second consecutive year of the ’80s new wave and goth music festival.

After the summer tour wraps at the Bowl, Berlin will travel to Australia to open for Boy George and Culture Club there, too. The group returns to the States for a one-off show on Oct. 13 at Agua Caliente Casino, and in November travels to Mexico City for the Corona Capital music festival.

And somewhere off in the future, Hollywood might deliver a movie version of the ’80s love affair between Nunn and longtime KROQ DJ Richard Blade, whose chronicle of his life’s story, and in particular this romance, is currently in strike-interrupted development.

“I don’t get these kinds of offers every year,” Nunn says. “And that’s OK. But when they come, yeah, it is pretty, pretty exciting.”

Cool to be kind

Anyone who watched MTV four decades ago would be more than familiar with the sounds and visuals of Berlin and Culture Club. The former for music videos such as “The Metro” and “Sex (I’m A …),” the latter for videos including “Church of the Poison Mind” and “Karma Chameleon.” Howard Jones would have been in there plenty too, with clips of him singing “What Is Love?” and “Things Can Only Get Better.”

But Nunn says she didn’t really get to know her tourmates until now, though she did first meet Boy George and Culture Club when they shared a bill or two in 1999 and 2001. Still, common history and the wisdom of age, have made the Letting Go Show a delight, she says.

“It’s a privilege for me because they’re such great bands and performers, and I have so much respect for them,” Nunn says. “You don’t know what it’s gonna be like when you’re on the road together, because it’s a traveling circus. It’s a bunch of band members and crew, all caravanning around.

“And honestly, the great thing about this one is everybody’s kind,” she says. “There’s no egos – just everybody helping each other out. That’s huge in this kind of situation because (stuff’s) going wrong, you know, right and left all the time because there are so many moving parts. So having everybody pulling for each other makes it worth it.”

Cruel World had a similarly familiar kind of fun to it. So much so that when the Motels bowed out of the 2023 festival and Nunn agreed to step in with Berlin – even though the festival was just a week away – she wasn’t sure she could round up the rest of the band in time.

“It was like, ‘OK, I’ve got to cobble together a band,’” Nunn says. “Because the guys, some of them, like Carlton (Bost), he’s also in Orgy, he’s also in Stabbing Westward. You know, people are booked. But I managed to figure it out.”

Playing Cruel World was a thrill for Nunn as a music fan, too – especially getting to see Peter Murphy and Bauhaus for the first time in 2022 – because of her longtime love for goth rock, she says.

“I’m kind of a closet goth,” Nunn says, laughing. “I’m really not scary enough to pull it off. But I love it, and it was just so exciting to get to play with all of those goth bands and fans.”

Rebuilding Berlin

Because Berlin’s hits became staples of alternative radio in Southern California it’s possible to forget how short its original run was. But in 1987, the same year “Take My Breath Away” won the Oscar for best original song – for songwriters Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock, not Berlin – the band split.

Nunn, who eventually ended up with rights to the name, restarted Berlin in the late ’90s, but it was not until much more recently, she says, that Berlin fully rebuilt its reputation as a standout of new wave rock.

“In the last few years, I think what really changed everything – I know it did for me – was John Crawford and David Diamond rejoining the band,” Nunn says. “That, none of us saw coming. It just kind of happened in a way organically.”

Diamond, who joined the band on synthesizers and guitar for “Pleasure Victim,” its 1982 major-label debut, came back about five years ago, she says. Bassist Crawford, who founded the band in Orange County in 1976, had almost exited the music business entirely to focus on his family. But after his marriage ended, he talked with Nunn, who’d experienced a divorce of her own, and slowly came back to Berlin.

“He came down to some shows and we talked him into getting on stage,” she says. “And that slowly developed from him standing in back, you know, hiding behind the drums basically, to slowly coming out front and feeling confident again.

“The whole thing, honestly, it feels full circle,” Nunn says. “We started this and we were kids. And I’m so grateful that we get to maybe finish it. Because I don’t know how much this will continue. We’re celebrating 46 years that this has been going on, so who knows?

“But it does feel like, ‘Wow, there we were, and here we are, the three of us again,’ And that really created a resurgence of interest from a lot of fans, because now it’s not just me. It’s the band. It’s the original feel, the sound, you know?”

Sex and rock and roll

In 2019, Berlin released its eighth studio album, “Transcendence,” from which the title track and “On My Knees” have shown up regularly in live shows this year. A year later, a ninth album, “Strings Attached,” delivered the hits rearranged for an orchestral backing.

There’s a new album – a Berlin Christmas album – half-finished and likely out next year, too.

But it’s the biopic on the Richard Blade-Terri Nunn love affair, which Blade wrote about in his 2017 memoir “World In My Eyes,” that might put Nunn and Berlin in the cineplexes.

“It’s on hold because of the strike,” Nunn says of the movie’s current status. “The writer and the producers, they can’t even have meetings because that’s crossing the line. So we’re on hold, but there’s definitely a lot of interest.

“It’s a fun story,” she says. “It’s got all the elements of good and bad that you can imagine. Two people taking off at the same time in music. He as a DJ and me as a musician. So yeah, it was awful and it was great by turns.”

Nunn has no qualms about a movie version of her torrid love affair being turned into a movie. (In his book, Blade says the hot-and-heavy song “Sex (I’m A …)” is based on their relationship.)

“To me it made sense,” she says. “You know, I can feel a movie made about Richard Blade’s whole life because he’s fascinating. But yeah, if you want just romance and sex and drugs and rock and roll, then that part of the book is probably the most filled with it.

“So it made sense to me that they would pick that,” Nunn says, laughing. “It’d be fun to watch.”