Ray Wilson must be wondering when he is going to wake up. Imagine: you are a singer with a jobbing rock band. You play the occasional gig, sell a few records, hit your highest high when Levi's likes a song and uses it for a TV commercial.
You make enough to pay the mortgage, but you are never more than a footnote in the rock 'n' roll pantheon.
Then one day you get the call: 'You're it son!' and suddenly you're a new species - the face of a legendary rock band with a 30-year history and sales of a mere 100 million albums behind it. Now you're really famous. Your dream has come true. What are you going to tell the neighbours? Such problems must have been weighing on the likable Wilson's mind. For his is the public profile of Genesis. Art-rock. Pretentious. Progressive. Dinosaurs. Call them what you will, but call them successful.
Starting out as the archetypal 'high-brow rock' outfit, Genesis survived their first cataclysm when singer Peter Gabriel quit in 1975. They metamorphosed into a soft-rock monster, scaling new financial and fan-worship heights.
Fronted by perhaps the world's biggest pop star, selling albums by the ton, Genesis - unfashionable for at least 20 years - became far bigger than they had ever been when they were just big.
So in March last year, when frontman Phil Collins announced his departure in favour of his own stellar career, the game was finally up, wasn't it? Not so. Despite their own respective, successful 'jobs' in film-score writing and the band Mike + the Mechanics, remaining original members Tony Banks (keyboards) and Mike Rutherford (guitars), picked up the Genesis standard and marched forward undaunted again, quietly searching for a replacement vocalist (well, you'd hardly advertise) and soon identifying their man: the first outsider recruited since guitarist Steve Hackett and Collins himself in 1971.
Dumfries-born Wilson, who had the occasional glimpse of stardom with outfit Stiltskin, suddenly found himself stepping into a large pair of shoes. Does he have the guts to sing to 70,000 people at Wembley? 'I've got the guts at the moment,' he said. 'Anyway the intimate gigs are sometimes worse - with a few people you can hear what they're saying.' Wilson, 28, has had to hide the 'little secret' of his recruitment for a year while the outfit recorded an album: Calling All Stations, their 15th studio effort, to be released on September 1.
