BERLIN – "Take My Breath Away"

I have, although not for many years after its release so I didn’t make the connection between the film and the then-ubiquitous song.

What I do remember is the cold, arrogant eyes of Tom Cruise apparently scrutinising me from a huge poster opposite my favoured boarding point for the Central Line at Bank (the spot just perfect for getting off at Notting Hill Gate before being swept away). I think he was supposed to send shivers down my spine but he didn’t look like my kind of man and it didn’t look like my kind of film. When I did see it, it was better than I expected (but not that great).

And another piece of the modern world falls into place. Two days after this reached number one, Alex Ferguson was appointed manager of Manchester United…

I remember refusing to believe this was by Berlin. All their other songs were jittery (the sound of cocaine?) and this song is stately to the point of stasis. While it’s playing, it feels like it will never move and never end.

One more thing, Terri’s soiled jumpsuit in the video is intensely annoying. Did she have an accident in the kitchen? Is she a messy eater? Has she indulged in some coprophilic sex act? Did she simply run out of Vanish Stain Remover? What???

A big power ballad right in the middle of a very loud movie. Also, a #1 in the States. Not my favorite movie power ballad of the 80’s, and definitely not my favorite Berlin song. I give this a 7.

Over-identification of this song either with ‘Top Gun’ or with the power-ballad genre is unfair. ‘Take My Breath Away’ deserves be taken on its own merits and, to my ears, it’s simply a stunningly-produced, ethereal synth classic. As Tom kind-of concedes, it’s a world away from the trite, turgid luuurve ballads that were to bedevil the charts thereafter. Terri Nunn’s vocal is (rather like Terri herself, phwoar!) a thing of beauty, hitting all the right notes of tenderness, vulnerability and genuinely-felt passion, but without ever coming close to histrionics. Similarly, Moroder’s production is, thankfully, free of the overproduced bombast (#14 – no, it really DOESN’T need it) that inflates and dates so much popular music from the mid to late 80s. I’ll concede that the lyrics are a bit contrived, but that really matters little when they’re set to music as scrumptious as this.

WUUUNNNG! WUURR-WUUNNG!

Sometimes all it takes is a simple bit of striking arrangement to make a record stand out.

I really liked this at the time, completely buying into the heroic aspirations. Actually, I rather enjoy this now, though in a kind of karaoke ersatz-emotional way. But oddly, I really hated this during its second outing in 1990, as high as number 3 on the back of either a Guinness advert or a TV screening. I wonder what changed my mind between 14 and 18? I imagine that it was some surly association on my part.

Good catch by 2, Steve Mannion above about this song resembling the Cars’ ‘Drive’ – there’s an identical keyboard part in the background squelching everything along. I much prefer the Cars’ song tho’. ‘Take my breath’ is an ugly channel-changer for me, as is Top Gun in its medium. I saw TG on campus somewhere about a year after its first release, and it was the first movie I was ever bored enough by to just drop off to sleep in.

No Doubt’s bunnyable song, Don’t Speak, reminded me a bit of ‘Take my Breath away’, when it came out. But again the comparison doesn’t work in Berlin’s favor (Gwen S. in polkadots is a lot more phwoar-worthy than Terri N. in whatever the hell that is in this vid. too). Next (oh no…).

I believe its recharting was due to use in a equally famous baffling Peugeot 405 advert where the somewhat unbreathtaking car drives past a burning cornfield whoofing up in flames. One of the most memorable peaks in the long history of bizarrely off topic car ads which continue to this day.

With Top Gun, American cinema finally located its equivalent to Leni Riefenstahl. There is such finely-angled, cold beauty to the monoliths of technology which are the film’s real stars that it’s scarcely surprising that director Tony Scott didn’t find much use for its human components. Even at a human – or more precisely, an ahuman – level the film is not much more than a homoerotic paean to machines and the power and destruction that they can wield. What use has Top Gun for its women? Did Kelly McGillis’ career ever really recover from playing fourth fiddle to Tom Cruise, his rookie buddy and several dozen magnetically exploding rods of harsh metal?

As a film it is a foolish, smug, alienating endeavour so utterly in love with the cold rationalism of technology in and of itself that it imagines “beauty” is enough. It is directed by the kind of mindset which locates beauty in the bodies purposely falling to their deaths from the Twin Towers, preferring to be broken in death than incinerated – and in the malabsorbed wargames which lead to such disasters in the first place.

And yet its “love theme” is one of the great number ones, with a futurism which could properly define awe. It is hardly surprising that the man behind “Take My Breath Away” was Giorgio Moroder, the electronic musician who above all others understands not to discard the human heart at the machine’s centre, and so there is a very natural grace about the huge, rising bass line which emerges like the gleaming corner of the apex of the newly-built Canary Wharf into the unwary lower right eye of the helicopter passenger. It stuns but does not flatten. The musical model is the OMD of “Stanlow” and “Sealand,” odes to semi-abandoned mountain ranges of technology marooned somewhere in a vanishing sea, as though a torch had newly been shone upon its remoter corners, with perhaps a nod to H20’s 1983 Top 20 hit “I Dream To Sleep.”

Its power, however, is centred in the extraordinary vocal performance of Terri Nunn, who negotiates Tom Whitlock’s rather arcane lyric (“Watching every motion/In my foolish lover’s game/On this endless ocean”) as though it’s the most important message on Earth, with the tonal purity of Olivia Newton-John (“If only for today, I am unafraid”) and also a desperate urgency when required (“When the mirror crashed, I called you!”), finally dovetailing into her own harmony as the song moves up a key for the final verse, where happy closure is attained; there is blissful wonder in Nunn’s last “Watching in slow motion/As you turn my way and say” before sighing “Take my breath away, my love” into herself, in that it is a request rather than an observation; her voice climbs higher to little death heaven as the song disappears into the blue vapour. It is a shame that Nunn’s voice has not been put to the extensive use it deserves – her equally extraordinary contribution to the Sisters of Mercy 1993 hit “Under The Gun” is the only other example which immediately springs to mind – but at least Moroder knew how to find the humanity which Top Gun, as a film, seemed to find something of an inconvenience.

This is the Cocteau Twins of Hell!

I was thinking “Dollar – The Even More Hairspray Years” when I saw the sleeve.

I tend to associate Top Gun in my mind with An Officer and a Gentleman, since I must have seen the films in fairly close succession. They’re both glossy US forces recruitment ads, Morning in America and all that, from that strain of American politics which had gotten over Vietnam thank you very much and was supremely confident again (you’ll still see their like night after night on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, most recently Pat Robertson saying the Haitians got their due for their pact with the Devil two centuries ago – but I digress). Whereas “Officer” was one long adoration-fest for Richard Gere, I thought Top Gun at least had some leavening humour about it in the banter between Cruise’s character and the rest of the boys – although having said that I’ve seen them once each a long time ago.

Anyway, the point is, Top Gun > Officer, and “Take My Breath Away” >> “Up Where We Belong”. The deal is sealed in the opening moments, with that sumptuous opening musical phrase, and the vocal maintains the tone while resisting the temptation to histrionics (I doff my cap once again to the wonderful way Marcello describes Terri Nunn’s vocal upthread).

Number 2 Watch unimpressive, but further down the chart two of the best singles of the decade were peaking – at 4, Swing Out Sister’s “Breakout”, and at 9, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush with “Don’t Give Up”.

@erithian,28: What a pain ‘Breakout’ didn’t hit #1! It seems precision-tooled for that spot in the UK. Corinne of Swing Out Sister’s *hair* alone (Best Louise Brooks ever?) should have been worth a week or two at the top. 🙂 And SOS had really nice 12″ mixes too, esp this one Oh well. I guess neither ABC earlier nor Terrence Trent D’Arby later ever got to #1, so perhaps the point is that sophisti-pop or whatever this sub-genre is just never plays that well in the singles market-place (its fans buy albums perhaps).

Arrgh, can’t believe I have a glaring your/you’re typo in my comment and no 15-minute edit window left. The horro’re!

I’ve never seen Top Gun either, I just remember my Dad telling me he came out of it wanting to invade a foreign country.

I do like this a lot but it’s bombast does point the way toward the use of loud, thunderous numbers by Celine in Titanic, Aerosmith in Armageddon (?) and Nickleback in Spiderman — perfect soundtracks for the senses-assaulting spectacle of modern Hollywood films.

let us not forget Charlie’s choreographed ballet to this song during the dance off on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelpha”.

Punctum @23…I remember Meg Ryan has one of the best lines in the film “Take me to bed or lose me forever!”. Of course, Kelly McGillis’s career falters after Top Gun, but Meg’s is about to er… take off.

Interestingly, Terri Nunn as a teen actress dances to Donna Summer in the film Thank God It’s Friday (1978).

#40 – really sorry for the delay on this, double column deadline week but even so I should have diverted some of my faffing about time into Popular.

Light Entertainment Watch: Just the 2 TV appearances;

THE MONTREUX ROCK FESTIVAL: with A-Ha, Bananarama, The Beastie Boys, Berlin, The Blow Monkeys, Boy George, Club Nouveaux, Cock Robin, The Communards, Curiosity Killed The Cat (1987)

THE TUBE: with Jools Holland, Paula Yates, Pepsi & Shirley, Berlin, Julian Cope (1987)

#7 And another piece of the old world fell away Ian with the peaking of “Ask” the last worthwhile Smiths record. I know not everyone agrees with this but the last few singles and “Strangeways Here We Come” LP were piss-poor bordering on self-parody.

Also worth mentioning that Madness checked out (for a while at least) with “Ghost Train” around this time.

Intrigued like many on here I trawled the internet to find out what machine created that distinctive synth bass, and with it coming from the mid-80’s it should surprise no one that the most likely culprit was the DX7*. Is there anything from that period which doesn’t have it’s fingerprints on it?

It seems Nunn was the only individual in Berlin who had any role in the creation of this song. The other members reduced to running minor errands for Morodor and Arthur Barrow**.

*See also ‘Night Train’ by the Commodores.
** See also Trevor Horn’s Tea Boy/Car Valeter/Dog Walker circa 1984 (aka – every member of FGTH who wasn’t Holly Johnson).

Is there a Tony McKenzie in the house? Don’t push your luck, lad! 😉