James Woodall

James Woodall is a music writer and journalist.

Prior to turning freelance in his early 30s, he spent five years in London publishing. In a quarter-century of arts journalism since, he has interviewed, among many others, musicians Karlheinz Stockhausen, Peter Gabriel, and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and authors such as Javier Marķas, Amos Oz, Jose Saramago and Wisława Szymborska. A recent, non-author highlight was the French movie-star Isabelle Huppert – James writes regularly about contemporary cinema.

James’s four published print books cover flamenco (IN SEARCH OF THE FIREDANCE, 1992), Jorge Luis Borges (BORGES: A LIFE, 1996), music in Rio de Janeiro (A SIMPLE BRAZILIAN SONG, 1997: also, since 2014, a Little, Brown e-book) and The Beatles. An interest in Spanish led to wider engagement with Latin America in the 1990s – an interest that persists to this day, along with a love of all the languages and literatures of Europe.

His affair with The Beatles began in 1971. He hopes to continue writing about them for as long as people want to read about them. He considers their story to be the greatest one of the 20th century.