Brought up in Totnes, Jon Allen (born Jonathon Allen on 12 May 1977 in Winchester, England) was educated at the "progressive" Sands School, where he admits he spent most of his time practising drums and learning to play guitar, taking his first steps towards a music career as lead singer in various rock'n'roll school bands. He wrote his first song at 16 and once he'd got a four-track recorder he started laying down his own tracks, winning a place at Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. He then moved to London, started gigging with his own band and raised his profile in appearances with Seal, Mark Knopfler and KT Tunstall. One of his tracks, "Going Home" was championed by BBC Radio 1 DJ Jo Whiley, featured in a TV commercial for Landrover and achieved 20,000 downloads from his website. This gave him the money to fund his debut album Dead Man's Suit (2009) at his house in Balham, South London. Initially, the track was only available via download but was picked up by Absolute Distribution and released into stores in the summer of 2009. Jon Allen's second studio album Sweet Defeat followed in 2011, produced by Tristan Longworth, with his third (Deep River) and fourth (Blue Flame) emerging in 2014 and 2018, respectively. The UK singer-songwriter unveiled his fifth album, ...Meanwhile in 2021, which was released via OK! Good Records. Two years later, he welcomed the release of his sixth studio album, A Heightened Sense of Everything. In 2025, the songwriter returned with an album tinged with blues, folk and rock, Seven Dials.