Craig Pruess

Craig Pruess is an American composer, musician, arranger and gold & platinum record producer who has been living in Britain since 1973. His career has covered diverse areas including: record production for international stars such as Sir Cliff Richard, Anu Malik, Sarah Brightman, Sheila Walsh; musical arrangements for Massive Attack, Def Leppard, Bond; feature film soundtrack music ("Bend It Like Beckham, "What's Cooking?", ""Bhaji on the Beach"); television music ("Peak Practice", "Sue Lawley Show", "Rich Deceiver", ZigZag Kenya", "Samson Superslug") and also arranging and sound design work for such well known composers as Patrick Doyle, Carl Davis, John Altman, Rachel Portman, and George Fenton); television and film advertising/corporate music (over 300 commercials to date); lecturing and teaching; concert performing (solo and with his own ensembles but also with Mike Oldfield for the world premiere of "Tubular Bells II", Sept 92, at the Edinburgh Castle); sound engineering, synthesizer and computer music programming, sound design and music technology innovations.

As a songwriter, Craig has penned the Christmas No. 1 UK chart single (Dec 1999/Jan 2000), one of the double A sides ("Two Worlds") of Sir Cliff Richard's chart hit, "Millennium Prayer" (sales over one million). In November 1999, Craig was nominated to be the composer for the most successful independent television drama series in British history, "Peak Practice", completing the last four series for Carlton Television. He also completed the original music score for Gurinder's Chadha's 2002 number one UK box office smash hit film, "Bend It Like Beckham". Craig has scored the music for all of Gurinder's previous films, including "What's Cooking?" which opened the big US Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 2000 and released throughout the USA in October, 2000, to critical acclaim (UK release in Sept, 2001). Earlier in 2000, Craig contributed keyboards and sounds for composer John Altman on the US television film, "RKO 281 - the Making of Citizen Kane", which received 13 nominations for the Emmy Awards, winning the Emmy for best music soundtrack for 2000. Craig worked in his home studio the director of the film, Ben Ross, to record and perform the initial music sketches, and then also played keyboards with the orchestra for the final recordings of the soundtrack in London.