Benjamin Clark
Guitarist | Musical Director | Arranger | Creative Director
Ben is a London-based musician, MD, and creative director with over a decade of experience across live touring, broadcast television, theatre, and production. From large-scale UK and European tours to live broadcasts and his own production company - CNS Productions - he's equally at home leading a band, designing a show, or building something from scratch in the studio.
Ben understands the importance of narrative within any live experience; from a simple guitar solo through to a whole score, he believes that story telling is the most important element of music and performance.
Performance & Touring
Ben is a guitarist with a genuine breadth of style and a serious amount of stage time behind him. Trained at Leeds College of Music, he's equally comfortable navigating the pocket of a funk band, the dynamics of a theatrical production, or the delicacy of a nylon-string passage - and has spent most of his career putting that versatility to use on the road.
Touring credits include The James Brown Experience (UK & European), Waterloo: A Tribute To Abba, Just My Imagination, Walk Like A Man, Disco Inferno, and Dancing In The Streets, among plenty of others. He's also shared the stage with Mark Lettieri of Snarky Puppy, opening for him on his 2018 UK Tour - good company by any measure.
Before moving to work in these commecial environments, Ben spent his early career touring with emerging pop outfits such as Alleyways and Mercutio.
Musical Direction
Ben has worked as MD across touring, broadcast, and orchestral contexts. Credits include Broadcast MD for the Univision Song Contest, MD for the Smiley Charity Film Awards at the Odeon Luxe on Leicester Square, and Musical Director & Composer for Northern Opera Group's Opera Rave: Carmen. He conducts an orchestra as part of The Knowledge Exchange (Creatives Acorss Sectors) with Jez Willis of Utah Saints, and has served as Band Leader for P&O Cruises and Supervisor & Arranger on the Cilla & The Swinging 60s UK Tour.
As an MD, Ben's priority is always the integrity of the show as a whole. He thinks carefully about how a performance moves - its energy, its arc, the moments that land - and works with musicians and creatives alike to make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction.
Show Design, Arrangement & Production
This is where a lot of Ben's most interesting work happens. He writes and produces across contemporary orchestral, pop, theatre, and electronic contexts - including work with Warner Records artist Jordan Higo, arrangements for Imagine Theatre and the Leeds Contemporary Pop Choir, and contributions to large-scale live productions as both arranger and show designer.
For Ben, arrangement isn't just about the notes on the page - it's about architecture. How a song builds, where it breathes, what it makes an audience feel two bars before they know why. Whether he's scoring for a live orchestra, programming an electronic production, or designing the sonic landscape of a full theatrical show, the question he keeps coming back to is the same: what's the story, and how does the music tell it? That instinct runs through everything he does, and it's what turns a good show into a memorable one.
Studio & Playback
Ben has worked as a producer on some sizeable projects — including production work for Imagine Theatre pantomimes, the Cilla & The Swinging 60s tracks, and the electronic production behind Northern Opera Group's Opera Rave: Carmen - as well as collaborating with a wide range of artists in both producer and session player capacities. It's a side of his work that sits quietly behind a lot of what ends up on stage.
On the playback side, Ben designs and runs playback for live productions at a serious level. Credits include Rave: The Live Experience, Cilla & The Swinging 60s, Shades Collective, Jordan Higo, 00s Reloaded, and Between The Lines. Getting playback right is one of those things that's invisible when it works and catastrophic when it doesn't - Ben has built a reputation for making it the former.
