From a very young age, Ben was drawn to art, music and cinema. Banging wooden spoons on big sweet tins filled with LEGO bricks eventually resulted in being presented at age nine, with a proper full size 5 piece Premier drum kit. Despite an initial enthusiasm for drums; It was the age of the drum machine, and he found the sounds his kit made were lacking a certain...thud? Also, he soon found it was the guitar that compelled. Long before he could even play a note; he was dancing around in his pants posing to Elton's 'Funeral for a Friend' or 'Pinball Wizard' with the ubiquitous family BM Classico, or making extremely breakable (but cool) flying V's from LEGO and Mechano. At 14 he got his first real acoustic guitar, then a year later, and by now completely frustrated with the drums; he traded them in for a shiny new Electric Axe, and set about teaching himself all he could. Always a keen graphic artist and illustrator, the music bug had bitten so hard that by the close of the 80s that school studies took a back seat to shredding in the music block. All that mattered was trying to master this crazy beast, and then writing beautiful music with it...oh and getting rich and famous of course. To that end, music college in Liverpool beckoned, and by the end of the 90s he was carving a career producing music for television and film. Decades of experience, learning, playing, crafting, writing, and honing whatever skills he can muster on the guitar on stage, behind a mixing console as well as a desk career in unrelated areas of the music business, and he's still not rich and famous, but he does know a few things. Ben brings this passion for music to his love of cinema also, and was lucky to have grown up with a father who also enjoyed going to the movies (particularly Sci-Fi). This combined with his terribly advanced age; ensures that most often Ben is the team member that bores the others rigid about actually having seen older movies at the cinema...so for goodness sake don't get him talking about seeing Star Wars or Tron."
Steven studied Media and English and has been working in the publishing industry since the early 2000s. Books, Magazines, Online, Looseleafs... he's done them all. He was also the originator of the film based review website www.Filmwerk.co.uk which he ran from 2010 to 2017 before it went on hiatus. In that time he also ran the Filmwerk Podcast, which he invited both Benjamin and Sean to join. They have now resurrected and rebranded the show as Film Utopia hosted on the Werk website.
Sean is a music producer and media composer from London. He used to pen reviews for Blu-ray re-releases on the old website; Filmwerk alongside Editor Steven Hurst and co-contributor Benjamin Pegley. They immediately disagreed on subjects such as Star Wars and Rocky and generally had huge personality clashes; and so naturally they concluded that going into long-form Podcast discussions as a team simply had to be done. Sean is a massive contrarian and will often disagree with Ben and Steven during podcasts just ‘because’. He likes terrible, kitschy b-movies from the 70s and 80s, still has a huge VHS collection of mostly garbage moves and un-ironically thinks that films look better in grainy as hell 8mm.