Stu Allan was born on Anglesey in 1962. His fascination with DJing was sharpened by hearing Grandmaster Flash’s The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel, a record that demonstrated how turntables themselves could become instruments. In 1982 he moved to Manchester, a city whose club and radio culture was about to become central to British dance music.

Manchester in the early 1980s offered Allan a musical education that crossed electro, soul, funk, hip hop and the developing club underground. He worked regular jobs while DJing wherever opportunities appeared, and began making mixes for Piccadilly Radio. Those early radio appearances were crucial: specialist dance music had very few dependable places on mainstream British broadcasting.

By 1986 Allan had his own programme on Piccadilly Radio. The timing was extraordinary. Imported Chicago house and Detroit techno records were beginning to reach Britain, and his shows gave them an audience far beyond specialist record shops. He was among the British radio DJs who treated house not as a novelty but as the beginning of a new musical language.

Artists and producers understood the value of that platform. Manchester acts including 808 State have remembered bringing new music and test pressings to Allan because a play on his programme could immediately put a record in front of thousands of potential dancers. Before social media, streaming or even widespread legal dance radio, a trusted specialist show could act as a distribution network of its own.

As Piccadilly became Key 103, Allan’s programmes followed the music through acid house and into rave. Weekend listeners heard the tempo rise and the breakbeats become more prominent. His radio work created a bridge between underground club music and young people listening in bedrooms, cars and workplaces across Greater Manchester and beyond.

The relationship worked both ways. Allan was increasingly active in clubs and raves, so the records heard on radio were informed by what was working in real rooms. Through the early 1990s he became a major booking on the rave and hardcore circuit, while his broadcasts retained a rare sense that new music was being discovered in real time rather than programmed by committee.

In 1993 DJ Magazine ranked him the world’s No.3 DJ, a remarkable measure of how far a regional-radio specialist had travelled. Production formed another strand of the career. Working with Peter Pritchard, Allan became involved with the commercial dance project Clock, while aliases including Visa and 150 Volts connected him to the harder and happier side of 1990s dance music.

Unlike many figures associated with a particular boom period, he did not treat the rave years as something to escape. Later broadcasting through Old Skool Nation allowed him to revisit the music with the same enthusiasm he had shown when it was new, while continued bookings connected original ravers with younger listeners discovering the records decades later.

Allan was diagnosed with cancer and died on 22 September 2022, aged 60. Tributes from Manchester and the wider dance world repeatedly emphasised not only his DJing but his importance as a broadcaster — a person who made the underground audible at a time when access to it could depend on nothing more than being within range of the right frequency.

His legacy is therefore bigger than a list of rave bookings. Stu Allan helped create the listening habits that made a mass rave culture possible. He taught people to tune in for music they did not yet know they needed.