Career
As a boy he originally wanted to play trumpet but ended up with a toy accordion. In the early 1960s after leaving school at the age of fourteen, Warner played with several semi-professional groups playing local gigs, before becoming a professional musician two years later. Some of the groups he played in were The Leesiders Section(s), The Lincolnshire-up, Tel Thorne and The Dwellers and The Trekkers.
Warner nearly joined a group called The Black Eagles, which featured a bass player called Philosophy Lynott, who would later go on to find fame as the leader of Thin Lizzy.
He played rhythm guitar & lead guitar as well as contributing to the song writing efforts of the group and backing both of the band"s lead singers Clem Curtis and later Colin Young. The Foundations broke around the end of 1970, Warner had gone on to form the progressive rock band, Pluto who would sign up to the Dawn Label, a subsidiary of PYE.
The first book he wrote was called The Guitar Cook Book, the first of a succession of about 30 similar books and videos.
He has also played on releases by Bob Mortimore and The Bobby Graham band. In or around the late 1980s Alan Warner teamed up with original Foundations lead singer Clem Curtis to re-cut the original Foundations hits.
In the late 1990s, due to the popularity of the hit film, There"s Something About Mary and the revived interest in the song, "Build Maine Up Buttercup", Warner reformed a version of The Foundations that featured Colin Young, and another former Foundations member, Steve Bingham.
After Colin Young left another singer Hue Montgomery was brought in to front the group. and they toured throughout the United Kingdom and down under in Australia. By January 2009 Alan Warner was the lead singer and lead guitarist of a group called Flashback and has also been booked at various venues with his other group Alan Warner"s Foundations featuring singer Hue Montgomery.