Andrew Knight was born in the North Yorkshire seaside town of Saltburn-by-the-Sea on January 3rd, 1959.   In 1970 he and his family emigrated to Sydney, Australia.

In 1980 Andrew started work at Sydney’s highly respected specialist guitar shop, Guitar City and soon joined the renowned Guitar City workshop as an apprentice guitar-repairer to Dan Kellaway and as a guitar-making student of luthier Jim Williams.

Around this time Andrew also started performing at the folk clubs and folk festivals of New South Wales, sometimes as a solo singer/guitarist and occasionally in an acclaimed duo with guitarist John Free or with the band Red Ships. In 1983 he joined the folk-theatre group The Huldre Folk and in 1984, along with Huldre Folk songwriter Paul Hemphill, he founded a recording studio and record label, Freefall Music, where he achieved occasionally artistic (and rare commercial) success. In 1987 he recorded his first album, “Shadow Language” and between 1985 and 1990 produced a number of albums for other artists including the exceptional “Green Chaos” by Helen Ripley-Marshall.

In 1988 Andrew joined Sydney’s best-known guitar shop, Guitar Factory, as head of repairs. In 1990 -1991 he worked for twelve months on the hit musical “Buddy”, where he was in charge of all staging and maintenance of all the show’s instruments and also appeared on stage as Buddy’s 1950s-style roadie when required! 

In 1991 Andrew sold his interest in Freefall Music and established Sydney Guitar Repairs at Guitar World on the famous Annandale Strip, where for the next 14 years he was one of Australia’s busiest and most respected guitar repairers. He also established Scintilla Guitars as a label for his hand-made and custom-made instruments. In 1991 he also recorded another album, “The Dream Archipelago” and then he and Lisa got married and moved to the Blue Mountains.  

During the 1990s Andrew also continued to occasionally work as a producer, notably on two Aria Award nominated albums for ABC/EMI by celtic harpist, Dawn Egan.

In 1995 he took up competitive Kart Racing and formed his own race-team Scintilla Corse. Scintilla is the Italian word for “spark” and corse is the Italian word for “racing”. After exactly 100 races and one win, Andrew hung up his helmet. Two weeks later he and Lisa miraculously survived a huge car accident at Wentworth Falls - Andrew fell asleep and crashed into a telegraph pole at 80 km/h. Oh dear. Ouch. Is this irony? Lisa was hurt. Andrew was hurt. The car was a pretzel. The telegraph pole, by the way, was fine and didn’t have to spend nine days in hospital.

With the trip from Leura to Annandale being 99.8 dangerous kilometres each way, whilst in hospital Andrew and Lisa decided that life was, frankly, too short for this nonsense and made the decision to move away to the country. In 2004 they moved to the hills of northern NSW where Lisa works as a medical secretary and Andrew established Andrew Knight Guitars in the centre of Lismore.