Neville’s music has attracted attention from the BBC and the specialist music press. Stuart Maconie featured him on BBC 6 Music’s Freak Zone, Electronic Sound magazine praised his debut album The Edge of Destruction which established Consett born Neville (53) as a distinctive voice in contemporary British music. The critically acclaimed debut featured on this site in July 2023.
“I’m hoping to build upon the success of the previous two albums, which certainly found an audience, at the same time this album has a different approach. I like the idea of doing something slightly out of the ordinary each time” explained Foster.
What or who was your inspiration when you were young? “As a child I’d a neighbour who had an old 78 gramophone. I still remember the smell of the thorn needles. That was my first musical experience, it seemed like another world with its own smells and sounds. My dad who like a lot of other men in the 1970s took up guitar so I recall him playing.”
“My first record I bought from Woolworths in Durham as a child was Mike Oldfield’s Blue Peter. My dad played Tubular Bells around the house so I’d have heard that and Oxygène by Jean-Michel Jarre. So, Oldfield and Jarre would be my earliest exposure to modern music.”
“Having played guitar myself for many years when I began making this kind of music I remembered Jarre and Oldfield but also discovered I had in my record collection the likes of Terry Riley, Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Michael Rother without really having ever joined up the dots of who these people were or what they were doing.”
Is music in your family? “Not at all. My grandfather was in the navy and played the accordian, he always told me as a child that if I wanted to be popular at parties I should learn to play the piano. My father had a few attempts at playing the guitar which didn’t work out, but it did mean there was a guitar around the house when I was growing up.”
“It’s important to remember, this period in time and in the north east, most families were not affluent enough to have the luxury of a musical instrument in the house let alone a musical education.”
Are you planning any live dates? “The nature of this album makes live dates challenging, I’m against the electronic approach that works with pre-recorded loops and is effectively only live mixing rather than a live show. In the case of this album a live show would mean running several old Windows 98 computers at once, working over the top of them and hoping the results resembled the album, but would in fact be a re-creation.”
“There’s certainly a half way house and I’ve done a few small scale live experiments with other material to test the waters which proved effective musically – which is the main thing, so you can expect more live works in the future.”
Produced by Ciarán Cahill (Van Morrison, Elvis Costello) and John Pilgrim and featuring an appreciation by writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair ‘Through Lands of Ghosts’ will be released 16th January 2026 on Subexotic.
Alikivi January 2026
ALIKIVI : NORTH EAST UK CULTURE 