The hitherto unacknowledged people, products
and "things" that
have helped shape rock 'n' roll.

Lemmy, The Pixies, Meat Loaf, Teenage Fanclub, Sad Café, one of Russia's most esteemed composers…all of them crop up in the frankly bizarre genealogy of a grey-haired, music-crazed man from Northwest England who lives near Macclesfield with his girlfriend and daughter, and manages to ooze Zen-type contentment from his every pore.
His name is George Borowski, he's split his working life between sessioneering, working as guitar technician, and indulging in his own electrically-enhanced solo spots, and he was guaranteed some kind of beyond-the-grave existence when - according to Northern myth - a road-worn Mark Knopfler sat down to write Sultans of Swing. "Check out Guitar George" went its globally-disseminated third-verse. "He knows all the chords/Mind he's strictly rhythm, he doesn't want to make it cry or sing/And an old guitar is all he can afford/When he gets up under the lights to play his thing…"

GEORGE BOROWSKI was born just outside Wrexham, North Wales, in 1950. The son of a Russian mother and Polish father, his great uncle was the composer Rachmaninov -and his musical bloodline soon led him into pre-pubescent opera singing. Unfortunately once the family had relocated to the Northwest, raging hormones put paid to his spell singing the high parts, and he was ordered to rest, pending promotion to the part of the stage reserved for the deep-voiced big fellas.
Ever impatient, he made a beeline for the guitar, played truant, and ended up in a '60s beat troupe called A Certain Kind. In time, he crash-landed in a more mature assembly who went under the oddball name of Swede Larson, and finally formed The Out, a briefly acclaimed late '70s bunch who plied their not-quite-punk power-pop around the right holes of Manchester.
"We had the job of opening for the bands at a place called Rafters." he remembers. "When Dire Straits played, Mark Knopfler came over to me and said, 'That's a great guitar sound you've got. How come you don't play solos?' The thing is, I can't really play solos, I just play chords.
"He had a go on my guitar; it was a piece of plywood with two pick-ups and a reject neck, but it sounded teriffic. I said 'You can have it if you want, it's only worth eighteen quid.' And he was like , 'Oh no, no, I can't take it.' That was about the long and short of it, really.

"About six months after that, our manager phoned up and said 'I've just heard a track about George, a song with him in it.' It just about adds up, I suppose. I don't play lead, I've got an old guitar… whether it's true or not, it's indelible now. I try to keep low profile about it."
In time, The Out imploded, George had a brief spell in the dourly-named Fabulous Wonderfuls, and eventually joined manc floss-rockers Sad Cafe: luckless rhythm guitarist Ian Wilson had broken an arm and leg, and George was his replacement. That stint over, he

arrived on the enormodrome stages that were being paced by a deep-throated human outhouse who was staging a carefully-formulated comeback.
"Meat Loaf was returning after four years' absence," he remembers, "and he had Terry Williams - who ended up in Dire Straits - on drums. Terry says to Meat, 'You know who that is playing guitar? That's Guitar George!' And Meat Loaf just went, 'Ding!' When it came to encore time and I did a little solo, he'd shout, 'This is Guitar George!' Everyone seemed to know what he meant."

The Meat years saw a welter of highlights; multi-night stopovers in dozens of arenas, a writing partnership with the Loaf that produced two still unreleased tunes, a festival appearance with a multi-headed one-off assembly who were the embodiment of rock piggery (Lemmy, Meat, the frontline of Thin Lizzy) - and a solo support slot that accompanied his second stint as rhythm guitarist.
"We were in Germany, and I was doing four or five songs on my tod," George recalls, "and the audience responded and started chanting. In Frankfurt, they were going, 'Georgie! Georgie! Georgie!' When we got to Munich, there was an 18-inch sticker on the Meat Loaf posters, saying 'Special Guest: George Borowski'."
His burgeoning Deutsch-centric fame would probably have snowballed, had it not been for some spanners unwittingly thrown in the works by a feckless record company who funded George's debut solo single. In a heart-wrenching turn of events, he returned from a brief tour of America to find himself delivering phone directories in the Buxton area, so as to tide him over for Christmas.
Thankfully, things were eventually re-infused with globe-straddling pizzazz: George ended up guitar-teching for the Pixies, and going for the solo displays he'd added to the Meat extravaganza. So impressed was chief Pixie Black Francis with the small man/big noise nature of George's spot that he adopted the idiom for a spate of UK shows in 1994.

 

 

Which only leaves a quick mention of The Bait, George's 1989 album on White Rhino, and his current associate membership of Teenage Fanclub: as a Jerry Lee-esque, Dervish-like keyboard player, walk on provider of maracas to the intro of Sparky's Dream, and, for a recent radio session, occasional bass player. The phrase 'A Life In Rock' barely does him justice, does it? "Well," George surmises, "I've nothing to complain about, have I? I'll probably finally be enormous in the next 10 years. Maybe God's got me down for my last quarter…