About

Ben Castle is an award-winning musician (saxophones, clarinets and flutes), composer, arranger, songwriter and producer. He has worked with a vast array of artists across many genres, including Gregory Porter, Radiohead, Blur, Amy Winehouse, Quincy Jones, Villagers, Matthew Herbert, Little Simz, Stan Tracey, Jamie Cullum, Duke Special, Elton John, Paloma Faith, George Michael, Matthew E White, Grace Jones, Lianne La Havas, Sting, Marlena Shaw and Jools Holland, and has featured on countless film and TV scores for top composers, including John Williams, Hans Zimmer, David Arnold, James Newton Howard, Stephen Sondheim, Gabriel Yared, and David Brent among many others. He currently features heavily on the soundtracks for the Netflix series ‘Sex Education’, BBC’s ‘Staged’ & ‘Motherland’ and Channel 4’s ‘Toast of London’. (Full list of shameless namedropping below).

With Ben’s love and grasp of so many styles of music and his ability to blur the genre lines, he has become a sought-after composer. He has written music and songs for film, TV, theatre, and adverts, as well as music and songs for his own projects, and for other artists. Most recently, he scored the Grammy Award winning film ‘Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story’ with Paul Pilot for Sony Pictures. He contributed some additional music to Aoife Crehan’s 2019 film ‘The Last Right’ and to the BBC series ‘Everything I Know About Love’ and was the composer and musical director for ‘Double Feature’ at The National Theatre in London. The song ‘Wrapped Around Your Little Finger’, written with Beth Rowley for Lone Scherfig’s 2009 film ‘An Education’, made it onto the Oscar nomination shortlist. Ben was also one of the musicians who jumped up out of the pews in the Love Actually wedding scene.

His own albums are an eclectic mixture of all the things he doesn’t get to play elsewhere, and the influences he’s picked up along the way. His trad jazz inspired band ‘The Tombola Theory’ were described by Jamie Cullum as “Punk Trad” when they performed live from Maida Vale for his BBC2 Radio show. They have a new album brewing. ‘The Heckler’ from his 2004 record ‘Blah Street’ won first prize in the International Songwriting Competition jazz category, judged by Pat Metheny. Weather Report’s Joe Zawinul asked Ben if he could record his own version of the tune, but sadly died before he had the chance.

In 2023, ‘Ben Castle and the Blah Street Band‘ released ‘An EP’. It’s a collection of preposterous versions of well known jazz standards, with guest appearances from Matt Berry, Beth Rowley and Roy Castle, released on Ben Castle’s Major Record Label in the Spring.