The ghostwriter behind the memoirs of the Rolling Stones guitarist and David Bailey on difficult subjects, the pain of the 60s and why he’d like to write about a woman next
Since co-writing Keith Richards’s award-winning, bestselling 2010 memoir, Life, James Fox, 75, has become one of Britain’s most successful ghostwriters. He became a journalist at 19, working for the Daily Nation in Kenya and the Drum in South Africa in the 1960s, before exploring culture, politics and celebrity for the Observer, the Sunday Times and Vanity Fair. He has also written two novels: 1982’s White Mischief and 1998’s The Langhorne Sisters. Look Again, his biography with photographer David Bailey, came out last month.
In 2014, the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary called you “the wild man’s ghostwriter of choice”. How does that sit with you?
Did they really? I guess that started with Keith, and although I’ve known him now for over 30 years [Fox wrote a profile for the Sunday Times in 1973, the first ever with the guitarist], he actually was a wild man back then. I’d been obsessed with guitar playing since I was 12, so I approached him wanting to speak about that, which worked as a way in. We then became friends, which was quite dangerous at the time, for various reasons.
