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).

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

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)

i’m with punctum and others in liking ‘take my breath a way’ a lot – for me it’s the stateliness and the enormous booming grandeur of the arrangement. good call on ‘falling’ but i think it’s ‘i’m not in love’ that it most reminds me of, along with the above mentioned ‘don’t give up’. i remember first really falling for this when i heard it really loud while on a fairground ride – always a good way to hear music. i’m also with witchita lineman in falling for berlin’s dastardly subliminal marketing/wish fulfilment and being surprised anew each time that they aren’t central european – the singer’s odd polecat hairdo surely helps in this regard too.

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.

My brother owned Count Three and Pray, the parent album, and this felt like a total mismatch for it; the rest was produced by Bob Ezrin, a producer worlds away from Moroder. The song’s movie tie-in nature also prejudiced me against it; I never saw Top Gun at a cinema, only on video some years later, so the tie-in video for the song felt like a meaningless advert. That, and the crazy arm movements Terri Nunn made halfway through looked as if she was trying to flap to the moon.

Now that its movie and album contexts are safely in the past it feels easier to assess the song on its own merits. Tom’s astute comparison with Julee Cruise’s “Falling” (a song I loved) makes me hear new things in this, as does my greater awareness of its place among Moroder’s productions; and I’m really liking it. Just as it was out of place on the album, it’s a song out of its time, as “I Feel Love” was a decade earlier. I thought I’d give it 5, but it’s at least a 7.

Given how ubiquitous “Take My Breath Away” was in late 1986, I was surprised to see it reached only number two in Australia – until seeing that late ’86 was when John Farnham’s “Your the Voice” was swamping all competition in its home country.

What-Might-Have-Been factoid of the day: Terri Nunn auditioned for the role of Princess Leia.

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”.

Not associating the song with the film, I’ve always found it to be a piece of very fine slo-mo synth balladry, not quite up there with Sealand or Soft Cell’s Youth, but way above the Tinkerbell-nuances of Drive. It certainly doesn’t suggest a sex scene, or venetian blinds; to my ears it’s another (late in the day) 80s monochrome revisiting of mittel Europ. But maybe I’m as suggestible to the band’s name as most here seem to be to its Top Gun connection.

Punctum – nice ONJ observation; Tom – Falling is a great shout. Both calls only make me like this more. It moves slowly but purposefully, like Mad Men, and can suggest a dozen different situations depending on which angle you’re approaching it from. That adds up to a 7 for me.

Didn’t Tom Whitlock get to the world darts final this year, only to be beaten by bunny-baiting Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor?

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.