Paul Kriwaczek


Paul Kriwaczek was a British historian and television producer.

Life

He was born in Vienna on 30 November 1937. He escaped from Nazi Austria to England in 1939. He attended grammar school in London and studied at the London Hospital Medical School.

Career

In 1970, he joined the BBC where he remained for twenty-five years. He also served as head of Central Asian Affairs at the BBC World Service.
Writing in Guitar Magazine in 1973, guitarist Andy Roberts said:

I’ve also got an instrument called a Kriwaczek string organ,I made a friend of mine Paul Kriwaczek, who’s a television producer, amongst other things. It looks like a steel guitar, and has six strings tuned a whole tone apart. They’re raised across the neck and the frets are raised to just below where the strings are. You play it with both hands, pushing the strings down to the frets. It has a pick-up, like a guitar pick-up and the actual vibration for the strings is generated by an electro-magnet. The lovely thing about it is that it’s touch-sensitive. If you just press the string down ever so gently, it will start from nothing and as the magnet gets a grip on the string it will roar up to a certain volume and sustain there until you release the string. But if you hammer the string onto the fret you get a very heavy percussive attack, then it will settle down to that constant. It’s a lovely instrument. I’ve used it on a number of things, with Scaffold, on Cat Stevens' Teaser and the Firecat'' album, and so on. But I can’t really play it, I’ve never fully developed it in the way I’d like to. The trouble is, when you’re a guitarist, with a living to earn, you don’t really have a lot of time to devote to other things. Which is very hard on Paul. There’s this beautiful instrument and no one to use it properly. It’s an instrument without a player, rather like the gob-harp before Larry Adler came along.

Books