On October 17th Scottish singer-songwriter Ray Wilson will be playing a concert at the Fabrique venue in Milan. It is a charity event as the proceeds will go to the Centro Clinico Nemo, a section of the city’s Niguarda Hospital that specializes in the treatment of ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Schlerosis. This is the condition that afflicts Stephen Hawking.
Wilson and his band will mainly play music by Genesis, the group that he joined as lead singer when Phil Collins left in 1996. Prior to that Wilson was the lead singer of Stiltskin and since then he has enjoyed a successful solo career. Today he lives in Poland where he also runs a charity organization, The Ray Wilson Foundation. We asked him whether he had any advice for aspiring musicians:
Ray Wilson (Standard British/Scottish accent): It’s like anything in life, you know, if you’re going to... to follow your own dream, whether it’s a musician or an actor or a painter or whatever it is you do, the first thing you need to have is a lot of self-belief and passion. And you have to really feel it, that you can do this, you know, and one of the positive sides of being Scottish is this burning passion, you know. I have that Scottish passion, I’m quite lucky with this. When I was young I was always fighting at school. I had many different schools, so every time I started a new school someone would be picking on me and I would be fighting and I would be fighting for my brother ‘cause he was also starting the new school, and when I got to the age of 15, I fell in love for the first time and it wasn’t cool – to the girl I was with – to behave like that, so I started to put my passion into music because I realized I could sing, you know, and I had a voice. So that passion has carried me all the way through my life and the passion and self-belief – I always believed that I would do well, always. I never doubted it.
where is the love?
As a Scotsman living in Poland, Ray Wilson has a European perspective, but he says that he finds recent developments very disturbing:
Ray Wilson: If there was ever a time when peace and love needs to be spread around, you know, where’s John Lennon? You know, we could do with him right now! It’s worrying, really, this kind of rise of right-wing sentiment and nationalism and isolationism and protectionism. I don’t like these emotions, you know, and I don’t like these things, I think that we’re better together.
Of course we have differences, but that’s life. That’s what’s magical, if you think about Europe as an entity, for me what’s interesting and what’s great about Europe is the fact that you have all of these different cultures together, you know, you have the Italian way of life, the way Italian people are, and you take the way the British are, what we’re good at, and the Germans as well, the French, I mean, there’s just... we have so much to offer together, you know, and the right-wing sentiment can only lead one way and that’s to disaster, you know, and history tells us that, you know, we just have at look at history to see where it goes. And it seems like the same thing’s happening all over again as happened, you know, before the Second World War. And it’s frightening and sometimes I look at this and think, “Can you not see this, what’s happening here?” And the rhetoric that you’re getting from people like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage in the UK, or even in Poland, with the politics there, which is changing as well. I look at this and think, “My God, have we learned nothing?”