Allan spent his early life in Brazil and Nigeria. For his secondary education, he was carted off to Lindisfarne College in Ruabon, North Wales, a public boarding school. :-(
By his own choice, he went to Blackpool Art School, studying graphic design. Like most of us, he didn't really make himself useful in his early career, but when he became involved in guitar design, he soon became invaluable. Allan studied electronics and found himself repairing TV's and Radios. Allan got his first guitar in 1962 aged 15. It was a rectangular (A 'la bo diddley) with a pickup made from a telephone earpiece "liberated" from a phone box! He bought his first guitar in 1964, it was a Russian Steel String Acoustic, again it acquired a pickup from a telephone box, but the trouble was he was living in Dominica with his parents and there was only one telephone box in the capital Castries at the time. It caused a serious problem because a new ear piece had to be sent out from London.
Allan started working on guitars around 1967 and after he moved to New Zealand, he worked for Jansen in Auckland, who built Guitars and Amps. He started making pickups himself, in 1974 to go onto his own custom guitars, out of necessity as commercial units were unavailable at the time in New Zealand. After a brief return to the UK in 1977-8 he returned to New Zealand working as luthier for Capitol Music Wellington, then moved over to Brisbane, Australia. Allan opened his own Shop/Workshop, known as the Guitar Garage with Trevor Wilkinson. They built many custom guitars from scratch, with Allan doing the guitar and electronics, with Trevor actually hand making the tremolo's and taking care of the final finishing’s.
In 1986 Allan moved back to the UK and worked for Rock City in Newcastle as resident luthier. Allan invented and developed the ATN (Advanced Tonal Network), a passive inductance circuit that fitted into a strat, giving it a vastly enlarged tone range. The ATN was very successful, with thousands fitted to guitars across Europe.
In 1990 Allan was recruited by the Hohner group as they wanted to develop an innovative, high quality European range of guitars. The result was a revelation, which with it's 27 inch compound radius fingerboard ATN circuitry, Entwistle/White pickups and Wilkinson US100 term system, looking and sounding like something from another planet, compared to the rest of the world's 1991 offerings. Testimony to good design is that the guitar was still in production 16 years later. Also in 1990, Allan developed the Hohner JT60 Hollywood based on a Fender Jaguar with 3 strat pickups, again using the innovative ATN circuit. Clearly, this was the start of Allans Retro influenced design career as Allan went freelance in 2000, doing R&D work for various companies, including Burns London and Tanglewood.
Alan then met Gary Hutchins. They shared similar design ideas and decided to work together to produce a dedicated retro classic guitar range...Hutchins Guitars was born! The Hutchins range covers more than four decades of instrument types and styles and in a sense, is a great tribute to many of the innovative makers of the past, many who are sadly no longer in the business. Having been pushed out by the overly conservative attitudes of the 70's,80's and to some extent the 90's, were in was considered unacceptable to play anything but a few boring models, pumped out by a handful of name brand manufacturers who were spending too much on advertising and not enough on their instruments.
Allan now lives in Malaga, Spain where he still operates a repair and customizing workshop, as well as making frequent trips abroad to various manufacturing plants, to keep an eye on quality and develop new designs. Allan is also heavily involved in the design and development of highly specialized diagnostic and treatment instruments for the alternative medicine fraternity.
