Wojtek Pilichowski

I was born in Warsaw and grew up in the infamous Grochów district. It might sound like a cliche, but music was my form of escape. I wanted to study drums in a High School of Music but they didn't take in people like me too eagerly. I thought that I didn't fit the stereotype of 'the musician' - a sensitive artist - generally everything which I wasn't, with my slang and background. However, a friend of mine had a bass guitar to sell. I was instantly hooked and started saving up for the instrument. It seemed to take ages but I finally managed to earn enough money to buy a bass. The first five years of my education on the bass were pretty strange. I couldn't watch video lessons, because only two people out of all that I knew actually had a VHS! My first bass tutoring came from Tony Oppenheim's "Slap It!". The irony of it all is that I never had any proper musical education yet now I'm an author of three bass tutoring schoolbooks.

In 1991, I went abroad to earn some money. I worked as a stage technician in Italy. Then I promised myself never to work on the black market again. I took up a job as a security guard in a cafe in Warsaw. One day I received a phone call from one of the most famous guitarists in Poland, a man who sold over 6 million records in total - Jan Borysewicz. He was starting a project named Jan Bo and was holding auditions for bassists. I was overjoyed to hear that I got the gig after my first rehearsal with the band. I was also pretty lucky, considering that a few days later, a bomb went off in the cafe I used to work in.

After a year of work with Borysewicz I was able to pay off all my debts and buy my first car. I soon began working with various stars of the Polish music market. In 1993, I took my first trip to the States. I was able to see the live shows of the people I could only see on video tape in the past (and I came up with the conclusion that these are not gods in any way but normal guys who have to brush their teeth in the morning just like me and a great deal of other people). Since then I've recorded mote than two hundred records, more than ten of which were my solo albums and one under a nickname Dyplom.

Nowadays, I'm working with the most popular musicians in Poland - big stars such as Kasia Kowalska, Woobie Doobie, Jan Bo