COURTESY MOB AGENCY Berlin is, from left, guitarist Cartlon Bost, drummer Chris Olivas, singer Terri Nunn and keyboardist Mitchell Sigman. "4play," the band's newest album, is pictured on facing page.

Berlin

The group gets past its '80s breakup and performs here Saturday

Ask anyone of a certain age about Berlin -- the new-wave group, not the capital of Germany! -- and they'll almost certainly mention "Take My Breath Away," the chart-topping ballad from the Tom Cruise movie "Top Gun." Looking back on the band's all-time hit, vocalist Terri Nunn recalls that the group almost didn't record it.

"(Producer) Giorgio Moroder asked us if we'd like to record that song for the movie soundtrack and John got very upset. He thought it wasn't our song -- we didn't write it, it didn't sound like what he do, and he didn't want it on our album. But I loved (Moroder's work), I loved the song, I loved romance. Everything about it worked for me.

"The final third vote was the record company's. They said we should do it."

The soaring love song became an international hit and made Berlin a stadium-rock attraction. The group then toured Europe with Frankie Goes To Hollywood -- and promptly broke up at tour's end.

"We'd already gone through a lot of problems working with each other, and doing 'Take My Breath Away' was one more thing we didn't agree with. It was another nail in the coffin."

How a million-selling single contributed to the breakup of Berlin in the late '80s works nicely as the midpoint of the story of the band that goes back to earlier in the decade and a five-song release titled "Pleasure Victim." Thankfully, their story continues post breakup with their reformation in 2004, thanks to a VH1 reality series that attempted to reunite fan-favorite rock bands for a special one-time gig.

Berlin performs at the Pipeline Cafe on Saturday. They're currently wrapping up a tour promoting their latest album, "4Play," a collection of both new material and their own arrangements of vintage hits by acts like Peter Gabriel, Depeche Mode, Prince and Marilyn Manson.

"4PLAY" ALSO contains a live acoustic version of Berlin's 1984 hit, "No More Words," as done by Nunn, Crawford and David Diamond in '04, and a previously unreleased recording of Buffalo Springfield's classic indictment of U.S. politics, "For What It's Worth." Nunn says the key to successfully covering other artists' hits is personalizing it.

"A song is basically an emotion expressed, and emotion is timeless. So it doesn't have to do with any specific time, it has to do with 'can I feel that emotion when I'm singing it?' If I can, then how can I frame it? For me, I frame it as a Berlin song with Berlin's instrumentation around my singing."

It's true that artists can get tired of singing their greatest hits night after night, but there are Berlin songs that Nunn always enjoys doing.

"'The Metro' is just a magical song. I don't know why it is constantly interesting to me, but it is. 'Sex' is another one, because I can play with it. I don't have to do the original lyrics. I can be whatever I want to be that (particular) night."

The songs that most Berlin fans are probably most looking forward to -- other than "Take My Breath Away" -- go back to the aforementioned "Pleasure Victim" EP that introduced Berlin to the world back in 1982. The five-song collection got the group a deal with major label Geffen Records.

The group's first single off the EP was the provocative "Sex (I'm a ... )." "People had never really heard a woman talk that frankly before about sexual role-playing," Nunn said, "so we got a lot of (negative response from it), especially in the south of the U.S., and other radio stations that wouldn't play it."

Nunn adds that a priest actually appeared on television in one city that Berlin was scheduled to play and denounced the group as "the devil's children."

Not surprisingly, Nunn said that show sold out. Berlin then wondered if it would be possible to get the same type of promotion in every city they were scheduled to play.

"I think we were thinking of actually paying a priest to go on TV for every city and help our sales. It really worked out."

THE SONG wasn't written as a call to hedonism. "I was in a relationship at the time, and we were kind of stale sexually, and so I was trying to introduce some new things to do. One of them was role playing, and I was throwing ideas around ... and he said, 'I'm not a pirate, I'm not a burglar, I'm just a guy, and I just like normal guy things.' So I wrote the chorus saying that. He's saying 'I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a man,' and I was (role playing) all these different (characters).

"Now, it's nothing. Everything has been talked about sexually in a song and on the radio, but at the time, the idea had never been put into a song before like that."

Did Nunn think back then that Berlin's songs would have staying power? "I hoped so, absolutely. The goal was for them to hit ... and I hoped to have a long career (as well, like) Ann Wilson, Stevie Nicks and Grace Slick.

"It didn't bother me what age they were. I was in love with them, so getting to see them go through life and sing about it was really interesting. ... One of the things that really pissed me off about Kurt Cobain killing himself is that I really looked forward to watching him grow up, go through being a father, having problems in his work, maybe getting a divorce and being a single father and writing about it because his perspective was so unique. It really would have been great music, and I missed that."