It’s a synth-pop power ballad that was seemingly everywhere back in the summer of 1986, when it was released as the love theme for the blockbuster film Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise.
The song was Take My Breath Away, performed by Los Angeles band Berlin, and it was written by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock.
Within weeks of its release in June 1986, Take My Breath Away had shot to No.1 in the UK, US, Canada, Holland and Belgium, and was perched at No. 2 in 12 other countries around the globe.
Its achievements didn’t stop there. The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 59th Academy Awards and a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song at the 44th Golden Globe Awards in 1986.
Take My Breath Away is a haunting, atmospheric composition that is as big and bombastic as the film with which it is associated. It is also impeccably crafted by Moroder and features a beautifully-realised vocal performance from Berlin’s lead vocalist, Terri Nunn.
40 years on from its release, Take Your Breath Away retains an enduring appeal.
Action dramas don’t get much more gung-ho than Top Gun, in which the reckless antics of hotshot US Navy fighter pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Tom Cruise) create an intense rivalry with cool-and-collected fellow pilot Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky (Val Kilmer).
When he’s not battling G-forces, Maverick is falling hopelessly for the charms of Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Blackwood, a flight instructor and astrophysicist, played by Kelly McGillis.
It’s high octane stuff, due largely to the fact that producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson made the film with the cooperation of the US Navy, which means they got to use their planes, ships and air bases but allegedly on the condition that the US Navy were given full script approval.
The flying scenes are an absolute blast and they probably did wonders for boosting US Navy recruitment, but did little for creative character development.
As writer Tom Breihan of Stereogum put it in a piece in 2021. “The characters in Top Gun aren’t really characters. They're classic American archetypes – steely, sweaty blank spaces who work mostly as vehicles for the audience's fantasy projection.”
Early on in the production, Bruckheimer and Simpson contacted revered Italian composer and producer Giorgio Moroder about writing a song for Top Gun.
Moroder was famed for his work with high-profile artists including Donna Summer, David Bowie and Blondie, and had previously collaborated with Bruckheimer and Simpson on the 1983 movie Flashdance, co-writing the theme song Flashdance... What A Feeling, sung by Irene Cara.
Moroder came up with a synth-rock composition and chose as his lyricist an aspiring songwriter called Tom Whitlock, who Moroder met by chance at the Davlen Sound Studio in North Hollywood. When the two men got talking, Moroder happened to mention about defective brakes on his Ferrari. The resourceful Whitlock went off to buy some brake fluid and promptly fixed Moroder’s car.
At some point in that conversation, Whitlock mentioned that he wrote lyrics and Moroder decided to give him a shot. He asked Whitlock to collaborate on the piece he was working on for Top Gun. Whitlock came up with the lyrics on the drive home, finished them that evening and then he and Moroder made a demo of the track the following day.
Whitlock called it Danger Zone and Bruckheimer and Simpson loved it.
Toto, Bryan Adams and REO Speedwagon all reportedly passed on the song.
It was Kenny Loggins who eventually recorded Danger Zone, which became the first single from the Top Gun soundtrack, peaking at No. 2 in the US.
After the completion of Danger Zone, Bruckheimer and Simpson told Moroder that they needed a ballad for the film’s big love scene, which had only been added in reshoots when test audiences requested it.
“Jerry said they needed something slow for the romantic scenes with Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis,” Moroder told Dave Simpson of The Guardian in 2020. “I set a click to a slow tempo and made a rough demo playing everything.
“I sang the melody over it but was torn between two slightly different sections. At home, I listened again and chose the one we know.
“Then I went back to the studio and did a proper demo. The components are the five-note motif and the melody, and the distinctive bass sound, with a key change in the middle. I played it as an instrumental from beginning to end, and I loved it.”
The song that Moroder wrote featured an iconic bass synth sound using a Yamaha DX7.
Once again, Moroder asked Whitlock to write the lyrics and they recorded a demo of the song using a backing singer on the main vocal.
Bruckheimer, Simpson and Top Gun director Tony Scott were impressed by the demo and were reportedly inspired to film additional romantic scenes between Cruise and McGillis.
Moroder then sent the song to Californian new wave band The Motels. The band recorded a version for Moroder but he couldn’t get Bruckheimer and Simpson to approve their demo.
It was then that Moroder began considering the band Berlin, whose 1984 single No More Words he had produced. The six-piece band had formed in Orange County, California back in 1976.
Lead vocalist Terri Nunn told Dave Simpson of The Guardian in 2020: “People laughed at us at first because power pop or arena rock were popular and we were into electronic music – Kraftwerk and Ultravox. The band name was our attempt to make people think we were German.”
Berlin were huge fans of Moroder’s work. And while the band was not particularly well known, Moroder championed their merits to the film’s producers.
“We hadn’t had big hits, but he [Moroder] could be very convincing and told them, ‘Oh, they’ll be huge’,” Nunn told The Guardian. “We went into Giorgio’s vast studio complex in North Hollywood, where he was doing three or four projects simultaneously with an assistant producer in every room.
“He would blow in and say, ‘I don’t like the horns. Take them out. We’ll do more later. Okay, bye.’ Then he’d return later. ‘Oh I love it! Do more harmonies!’”
Moroder added horns and guitars and made everything more lush, says Nunn. He kept urging her to simplify the vocal, she says, arguing that “People need to want to sing along”.
Nunn had trained as an actor, appearing in TV dramas such as Lou Grant, TJ Hooker and Barnaby Jones. She drew on her acting training to achieve the performance Moroder was looking for.
“In acting, I’d learned a lot about channelling emotion. I was alone. I’d been so busy with the band I’d not had a relationship for four years. So I sang it from a feeling of sadness and longing, and maybe that’s what resonated.”
From the opening bars of Take My Breath Away, it’s the iconic synth bass line that dominates, a vibrato-heavy ring-modulated sound that emulates a fretless bass. The sound was later identified as a stock DX7 patch, a tweaked version of the Bass 2 (Preset 16).
Sonically, Take My Breath Away is grandiose but it’s not awash in strings and power chords. It’s a slow, stately composition which, despite the colossal ’80s snare, has a sparse and spacious clinical sheen.
The descending vocal melody cascades mournfully on the verses, underpinned by a simple chord progression – twice around G-Bm-Em-D before shifting up to Am-C-D-G-Bm-C-D and ascending into the chorus over a G-Dm-C-D chord sequence.
Moroder’s decision to keep the vocal delivery simple was a wise one. This is a song that could so easily have been obliterated by power ballad vocal histrionics. By contrast, Nunn pulls back and in the process evokes a sense of honesty, loss and vulnerability.
Lyrically, it makes little sense. Even in the context of a commercial pop song created for a blockbuster Hollywood action drama, the lines seem addled and disjointed.
“Watching, I keep waiting, still anticipating love/Never hesitating to become the fated ones/Turning and returning to some secret place to hide/Watching in slow motion as you turn to me and say…”
But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. As Tom Breihan of Stereogum put it in 2021: “Take My Breath Away sounds like exactly what it is: a song written by Giorgio Moroder and a Ferrari mechanic. It’s a sleek, mechanistic piece of business that only seems glancingly concerned with actual messy human emotion. That’s what makes it effective.”
For all its bombast, 40 years on from its release, Take My Breath Away has a timeless grace.
Allegedly, not everyone in the band was happy about the decision to record the song. In a 2023 interview with Lily Moayeri of Spin magazine, Nunn recalled that John Crawford – Berlin’s bassist and co-founder – was reportedly not keen on covering the song.
“Giorgio was a great writer and such a talent,” said Nunn. “I was all in for him. He could have farted and I would have sung it. But John’s like, ‘I’m not doing this. Fuck this guy! This is not our song’.
“The record label jumped in and said, ‘You’re doing this. You need all the help you can get. This is a movie. Regardless of whether it does well or not, your song will be on it.’”
Nunn says they had no idea it would even be a single. They were simply in the right place at the right time, she believes.
“One of the reasons that it worked, honestly, is because, at the time, I was in such a dark place romantically. I hadn’t gotten laid in probably two years. I didn’t know if I would ever find love again. My job was working well, but my personal life was in the toilet. It was just awful.
“I couldn’t sing it happy because I wasn’t happy. The sadness in my voice gave the song more of the depth that I think it needed. For me, the way a song works is to connect with it emotionally in an honest way.”
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.