My Inspiration: Tunnel Club – Never Stop

Newcastle-based electronic music artists Graeme Stoker and Stephen Key, aka Tunnel Club, release their 3rd studio album, Never Stop (on vinyl and digitally on Tunnel Club Music). The album, informed by the pair’s clubbing years, is an exhilarating, pulsating listen with pounding beats, delicious lows and soaring melodies that’ll have you throwing your hands up to air with every listen.

Here, the pair tell us more about some of the inspirations found in Never Stop…

Looking back at our three albums since From The Old School back in 2016, our recorded sound has changed quite a bit, and in particular, from 2018’s Exit Space to our new album Never Stop, we’ve very much grown our studio sound to something that is more akin to what Tunnel Club sounds like live.

Since 2018 our focus has predominantly been on our live shows. We started our live music with what were essentially minor variations to our recorded music, but constant feedback from audiences has gradually re-formed how we approach live music. Seeing first-hand what works, what doesn’t, what gets the best reaction and so on has been hugely important to us, and has helped us to craft a live show that is a real journey, as opposed to a collection of live songs. Our headline show at Lindisfarne Festival was probably the pinnacle of this – we knew exactly what we had to do from there.

So this comes to the inspiration for Never Stop. We’ve taken inspiration from that Lindisfarne show, and from dancefloors wherever we’ve played live, from reactions to very subtle elements of our compositions to how a show flows to deliver the maximum possible level of excitement, engagement and enjoyment to our audiences, to firmly define the music on this album. We want listening to Never Stop to be like going to a Tunnel Club show. The tracks have been very deliberately sequenced as a journey, and the songs themselves are written in such a way as to transport the listener to a live environment in their imagination. You might be on the Metro on a rainy Tuesday morning, but music can take you to anywhere for just a few moments, and that emotion is what we’re trying to deliver here.

For us, music is about emotion and taking you on a journey, and the inspiration of seeing thousands of people over the last 5 years on our musical journey is firmly behind Never Stop.