Tom Hooker
Come Back Home

American composer and singer transplanted to our beloved Boot since 1980, Tom Hooker is best known for lending his voice, from around '84 to '88, to that musical project called Den Harrow which, thanks to the use of mime Stefano Zandri (idol of the girls of the time) and the commercial strategies of Roberto Turatti and Michele "Miki" Chieregato, achieved very good sales results ("Future Brain", "Mad Desire", "Catch the Fox" among many others) inversely proportional to the quality of the offer. These successful outcomes allowed him to enrich his parallel solo career until the late Eighties, with the usual, overused, formulaic Italo disco.

But before landing at Baby Records and the subsequent Den Harrow project, Tom Hooker released several singles that went almost unnoticed, although, for the record, with "Toccami" in 1981 he managed to secure a spot at the Sanremo Festival. Among the various works, a twelve-inch from 1983 is worth mentioning: "Come back home" is a long track over six minutes, which does not yet fully feel the Italo disco about to explode.

The extensive use of electronic instrumentation, the overwhelming rhythm, the vaguely funk echoes, the excellent command of the language and singing techniques allow the track to achieve its own dignity and, in its being an ordinary fresco of the era and at the same time an anomaly in the Italian music scene, to look overseas: it is closer to the Kool (blatantly Eighties) and Raydio than to the Righeira. Finally, the reimaginings of the track, in various forms, on the B-side are negligible and not at all transcendent.

After the Eighties, Tom Hooker struggled in the face of the inevitable decline of Italo dance, so in '94 he returned to the States and left music behind. Finally, through a series of curious circumstances, he changed his name to Thomas Barbey. After several controversies with Stefano Zandri concerning authorship rights, he returned to the scene in 2011 and reinterpreted in a dance key the "hits" of the Den Harrow project.