Considering that Ray Wilson has watched two gilt-edged career opportunities – with Stiltskin and Genesis – crumble to dust, he’s probably entitled to a little navel-gazing now that he’s tipped into his forties.
Instead, he’s gazed into the navels of some of those closest to him: the embittered former friend, the over-analytical friend who still gets it wrong, the childhood friend paralysed by an accident who commits a pre-planned suicide back in his hometown, the girlfriend facing a career-threatening injury.
Wilson probes each navel with an observant lyrical clarity though obviously, as the narrator, he gets to put his own slant on it. And his voice draws you in; there is a reason Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford picked him as a Genesis singer. Obviously you can’t gaze into other navels without poking around your own and discovering your own spiritual fluff. But Wilson makes a convincing thread out of it.
