Berlin’s Latest Album Marks An Unlikely Alliance Of Synths And Orchestra

For over four decades now, the Los Angeles-based group Berlin have been known for their sleek and sexy synthpop music from the 1980s, with such hits as “Sex (I’m a),” “The Metro,” “No More Words,” and the massively popular “Take My Breath Away.” On their latest album, however, their electronic-dominated sound has recently gotten a bit of a makeover from an unlikely source: an orchestra. Call it the New Wave meeting the Old Wave.

“All of this has come out of left field, as well as a lot of things in my life have,” says Berlin singer Terri Nunn about her band’s latest album, the appropriately-titled Strings Attached. “I had sung with orchestras in the past maybe only three times, usually for charity events. Honestly, the first time I heard my music come out of an orchestra, I cried. I couldn’t believe it. It was so majestic and beyond anything I ever imagined.”

Strings Attached was recently released via August Day, a record label that have previously paired ’80s New Wave acts such as A Flock of Seagulls, Cutting Crew and Wang Chung with orchestras; Berlin’s new album features re-recordings of their aforementioned hits and other tracks accompanied by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and the Slovenian Symphonic Film Orchestra. When August Day first approached Berlin about the idea of collaborating with an orchestra, it was a no-brainer, according to Nunn. 

“I couldn’t sign up fast enough,” she says. “It is a great marriage because we’ve been using strings from synthesizers. It’s real and it’s bigger. I had so much fun.” (laughs)

Thanks to technology, the process of marrying Berlin’s music together with the orchestras only took days instead of weeks. “We recorded the band tracks,” says Nunn. “Sare [Havlicek], the producer, is also an orchestral arranger. He created the sounds and the parts digitally first, and [then] put them on the songs so we could listen to them and tweak. Then once we had it to 90 percent of what we thought would work, he wrote the charts, and then the Prague Orchestra played the parts.”

Nunn cites a couple of Berlin songs that benefited from the new orchestral accompaniment. “I thought they did an especially good job on “No More Words,” because it had that little overture. That really blew my mind. And then “Now It’s My Turn” with that James Bond treatment of it, it was: ‘Wow, that was cool.’ And then “Hideaway” from the third album [1986’s Count Three & Pray]: ‘Whoa! They added stuff to it.’”

Of course, the new album wouldn’t be complete without the inclusion of Berlin’s memorable ballad “Take My Breath Away,” which was first recorded for the Top Gun soundtrack and went on to become number one in 1986. “It’s already a lush song,” Nunn says. “It already has digital electronic strings to it, so [on Strings Attached], it’s bigger, it’s fantastic. But it’s not that different than what it was before because it was already written that way. With these songs, what they did to it by making it so lush and so much bigger and adding parts that we would never have, it really brought it to life for me in a new way.”

Nunn says she would consider having Berlin perform live with a local orchestra, similar to the approach of the Who’s recent tour. “Once the charts are written,” she says, “it’s really a matter of just running it through with them. So it’s possible to do that, and I’m definitely entertaining that idea.”

The new record comes on the heels of Berlin’s 40th anniversary tour, which saw the reunion of the classic band lineup members of Nunn, John Crawford and David Diamond, which resulted in the 2019 studio album Transcendance. Since Berlin’s revival in the late ’90s following a hiatus, Nunn had steered the ship by herself with a cast of different players. A few years ago, she, Crawford and Diamond were brought together again amid some upheaval in their personal lives and realized they still had something in common. “The three of us are kind of like in this group, huge commiserating and going through this,” Nunn says. “And then as we’re just hanging out and going through this, of course, we’ve always been musical. We were like: ‘So what are you listening to?’ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Well, I’ve got this piece of music.’ It just started to develop from there.”

Nunn notes the evolving working relationship she has now today with Crawford, who co-founded Berlin and wrote much of the group’s songs back in the day. “John, bless his heart, is so much more open than he used to be with collaborating. To me, that’s what it’s all about, is getting to work with different people. For him, he was more close to the chest—’This is my music, and that isn’t.’ But he’s changed, and he does see the value and the contribution that so many people have brought to Berlin in over 40 years. He is now much more available to people and sharing his talents instead of keeping them to himself.”

Berlin’s arrival towards the end of the 1970s coincided with the then-growing synthpop movement that first flourished in the U.K. and the rest of Europe through such groups as Ultravox and Kraftwerk. Along with Roxy Music and David Bowie, those predominately cutting-edge acts were influential on Berlin’s hypnotic electronic pop music on their early albums, 1982’s Pleasure Victim and 1984’s Love Life .

“[Synthpop] wasn’t really happening in America,” Nunn recalls, “and John loved the music. It wasn’t a business move. He just loved what that sound was. I didn’t know any of those bands until I met John. When I heard what he was doing with it, and then he turned me on to all this other music, I thought it was just the coolest thing ever. And it ended up being the smartest decision for us.”

“But in the beginning, it was awful. We were playing the clubs here [in Los Angeles], and nobody really understood. We have this weird sound that nobody knew, and they’re just like, ‘What the f***? You’re not punk. You’re not power pop. We don’t even know what this is.’ It was hard for a while. But we got better. Then other people were starting to do it because it was great, and I love electronic music.”

Berlin made their mark during the MTV era with their New Wave hits and stylish videos. One of Nunn’s memories from that period was the band’s appearance at the US Festival, the brainchild of Apple Computers co-founder Steve Wozniak, in 1983. Berlin appeared on the ‘Rock Day’ portion of the festival’s lineup that included David Bowie, U2, Pretenders, Joe Walsh, Stevie Nicks, and Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul.

“Oh my God, to be on the same stage as David Bowie,” Nunn remembers, “and then get to watch him from the side of the stage…that’s definitely one of the highlights of my life. That confluence of talent on one stage and one weekend, it is very rare that that has ever happened.”

Following a hiatus that occurred in the late 1980s as well as personnel changes over the years, Berlin are still touring and recording new material. Nunn credits both love and the focus on the music as being the factors for their staying power. “When I’m making music, I’m making music. It’s not that I have to—I want to be there. I want to experience it because it’s great. I think that’s helped with the longevity.”

“Great music lasts,” she adds. “Nobody back then knew if it was going to last. Most bands lasted two or three hit songs and were gone. So I didn’t know if we would be any different because we were doing such new music anyway. I’m seeing it with a lot of ’80s bands: those songs are great. It’s just great music. It happened to be in the ’80s, but they’re still great songs, and so heartfelt and well done.”