Education
He studied languages in Switzerland.
He studied languages in Switzerland.
Barbey, best known as Tom Hooker, was brought to Europe when he was six months old. At the age of ten, he started his musical career as a drummer. At 13, he created his first band.
At 15, he first appeared in public at a concert as a drummer/singer.
Hooker co-wrote and sang lead vocals on the first two albums, and co-wrote many subsequent songs under the name T. Beecher. When Hooker was credited for vocals at all, it was only for background vocals, as it was the producer"s intention to have a lip-synching model to be the public face of Stefano Zandri, the project"s lead vocalist.
In 2010, Tom Hooker recorded and published on YouTube a press conference-style video in which Hooker, flanked by co-producer Miki Chierigato, states and demonstrates that he was the vocalist on most of the records, and in which he accuses Stefano Zandri of continuing to publicly lip synch to those recordings. He also states that Zandri made threats and insults against Hooker and his family on Facebook for exposing the vocal inauthenticity of the recordings.
Hooker asserts that Zandri no longer has permission to publicly lip sync to recordings that use Tom Hooker"s voice.
This collaboration marks the return to the roots of the same production team that was responsible for all of the initial and Tom Hooker output between 1985 and 1988. In 2011, Hooker released a new recording and music video of the track "Future Brain", which features himself.