Two years prior to hitting number one in France with 'No Stress' (2008), house producer Laurent Wolf made the top thirty with his remake of Fake's single 'Brick'. The original having made number one in Italy in 1985 and top ten in France.
Alongside Fred Falke and Alan Braxxe, Wolf pioneered the electro sound of French house in the Noughties. Like Daft Punk and Etienne de Crecy his work makes links back to artists like Cerrone and Ottawan who were part of the early 80s Europop and space disco genres, around which Italo also skirted.
Befitting given their name, Fake were not really Italo. Formed in Sweden in 1977 by Erik Strömblad and Stefan Bogstedt, they broke through in Italy with the single 'Donna Rouge' in 1984. An album New Art was released including further singles 'Right' and the lost classic 'Frogs in Spain'.
Wolf's re-imagining of 'Brick' deserved to be a hit in the UK: it sits nicely next to Roger Sanchez's 'Another Chance' (2002), which sampled Toto's 1983 power ballad 'I Won't Hold You Back'. The difference being that while Sanchez's retooling scarcely resembles the original, the Wolfe version of 'Brick' is very faithful.
It is testimony to how ahead of their time Fake were in terms of composition and song structure. Like Den Harrow's 'Future Brain', 'Brick' arrived semi- abstracted: a postmodern simulacrum of somebody's idea of what Italo disco might sound in an imagined future. Wolfe's version doesn't tamper with this perfection: it just polishes up the synths and makes the beats a touch more fierce.
Check out Laurent Wolfe's anthology History on Spotify.
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