Berlin’s Second to Nunn

SANTA ANA — Old acquaintance won’t be forgot if Terri Nunn and Berlin keep up the engaging effort they put into their New Year’s Eve show at the Galaxy Concert Theatre.

Clearly, this comely, likable, energetic and strong-voiced trouper has what it takes to succeed on the nostalgia circuit that has emerged for veterans of the electronic, glamour-conscious wing of ‘80s rock.

The question that remained unanswered in Tuesday evening’s adoringly received early set was whether the wall that divides oldies acts from current contenders can fall for Berlin.

Berlin’s history began in Fullerton in 1978; what started as an all-male New Wave guitar band had by 1979 turned into a more electronic, synth-based sound with dance-rock beats.

That’s where the L.A.-based Nunn came in. After some ups and downs, Berlin hit big in 1982 by ostentatiously and shamelessly playing the sex card.

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Nunn played the erotic-fantasy object role to the explicit hilt on the career-establishing hit “Sex (I’m a . . . ).” “Pleasure Victim,” the EP that contained it, became the first million-selling release by an Orange County modern-rock band.

In an era when MTV was making it easy for bands with style, but not a lot of substance, to connect, Berlin stuck around long enough to follow “Pleasure Victim” with two more albums before its 1987 breakup. Each one had a song or two that got radio and video exposure.

Any band that can accumulate a pocketful of hits, stretched out over several years, will make enough fans to pursue a nostalgia-leaning career knocking it out on the club circuit--assuming those fans can rely on the band to play the oldies with accuracy and zest.

Nunn, now in her mid-30s, accomplished that at the Galaxy. She revived Berlin last spring with all new players (the key absentee is bassist John Crawford, who founded the band and wrote most of its songs).

But her aim isn’t just to be an oldies act. The two New Year’s Eve shows, and a recent one at the House of Blues, were warmups for recording sessions that Nunn hopes will land her a record deal. It would be her first release since the flop of her overdone 1991 solo album, “Moment of Truth.”

While a first impression as blatant as “Sex (I’m a . . .)” is bound to stick, Berlin’s first run enabled Nunn to branch out quickly from the role of seductress.

At the Galaxy, she came off as a lively pop actress, capable of donning a variety of guises, playing them in stagy fashion, but with commitment and a sense of fun. She related easily to the audience, strolling frequently into the crowd, embracing them (sometimes literally) like old friends and modifying the dramatic romantic-diva turns of much of her material with a charmingly upbeat and down-to-earth manner between songs.

Nunn pranced, bounced and twirled relentlessly, sometimes at her own peril: She demonstrated the dangers of sashaying in a satin gown and long, diaphanous cloak when she fell flat on her face during the opening number, “Masquerade.” When she got up smiling and undaunted, singing as if nothing had happened, you knew you were in the presence of a real trouper.

A thin-voiced novice when Berlin first hit, Nunn made herself into a capable singer by the band’s second release. She was in fine voice at the Galaxy, negotiating extended high-wire passages with confidence and ease, balancing them with a tawny mid-range.

Berlin’s old repertoire was scattered stylistically between the early, stripped-down techno-rockers of “Pleasure Victim” and the gushing pop ballads and inflated, chiming, Simple Minds-like pomp-rock that came later.

The band had enough craft in the old days to come up with consistent hooks, and Nunn’s vocal strength, energy and winning manner revived the surface shine of such questionable fare as the show-closing ballad, “Take My Breath Away.”

Like them or not, that song and others like it had hooks as clingy as Nunn’s slit-skirted dress. Some good, meaty rock backing from a solid backup band powered three of Berlin’s choicest catalog items, “No More Words,” “Masquerade” and “The Metro.”

If the old repertoire gave Nunn a wide range of romantic roles, it didn’t offer any that really cut deep emotionally or established a strong individual identity. That’s the job confronting her now as she tries to get beyond recycling oldies.

The five new numbers that made up about a third of her 70-minute show found her dividing time between roles as seductress, romantic diva and rocker.

The show’s three seductive numbers--two forgettable new ones, plus “Sex (I’m a . . . )”--were among the least successful. Nunn cast them all in the same pattern, with a male foil (guitarist Dallan Baumgarten) singing call-and-response answering parts, leading up to a simulated erotic clinch-and-grope.

It was all a bit awkward and campy, with no sparks ignited or steam given off. Nunn almost certainly could generate a hotter current by going solo on her sexual flights, but she apparently is stuck in the duet approach established by “Sex (I’m a . . . ).”

Two new songs had possibilities. “Gabriel” had a plaintively calling, high-reaching chorus and a stormy backdrop; Nunn, who is married to a chiropractor, confided that it was “about my last boyfriend--he’s a junkie now, and I don’t know how to handle it.”

The other, “Sex in a Restaurant,” was notable more for its rock drive than any provocativeness promised by the title. It had some of the tension of a Garbage song, but without the psychological dimension and cutting edge of that recent-vintage band’s excellent 1995 debut album.

Berlin may have been near the forefront of bands linking guitar-rock to electronic beats and synthesizers, but Garbage has taken the method to a higher level, and that’s the standard Nunn faces as she tries to rebuild Berlin for the late ‘90s.