Interview: Toby Jepson (Little Angels)

Interview: 5th November 2026

On the eve of the release of the Big, Bad and Back EP (review here), the band's first collection of new songs in over thirty years, Hotel Hobbies spent some time in the company of Little Angels' vocalist Toby Jepson.

Hotel Hobbies: With this reunion in mind, when was the point where the band realised you wanted this to be more than "just" playing the old songs?

Toby Jepson: It took a while. Obviously we toured in 2012, which was the first time back after God knows how many years. But that was very specific. That was in response to the death of Michael, which was obviously extremely sad and it woke us all up to the fact that life is precious and you've got to put aside your differences because the end of the Little Angels was pretty messy. And I personally mourned the loss of the band for about a decade. It was very difficult for me and I lost touch with the guys, and so getting back on that stage in 2012 was a big thing. And you sort of look at each other at the end of that tour and go, "Well, what we're going to do now?" 

We wanted to carry on with the conversation. There was never any, "Well, we'll never do it again" sort of thing. It was always a question of when rather than what, sort of thing. We reached September, October last year and we’d been discussing getting back together for about two or three years. We were trying to aim for 2023 at one point because it was the thirtieth anniversary of the Jam album and, for a collection of reasons, we couldn't make it work. So it was always a little bit tentative. I got to a point really, maybe about eighteen months ago when I just thought it was never going to happen because we just could not make it work. You have to get everyone in the same room. You've got to make sure everyone can do it. Everyone's got to be committed in the right way. You've all got to feel positive about it. And that wasn't happening for a number of reasons.

In September, October last year, all of a sudden the clouds parted and we realised we could do it. There was never any mention of new music only that we would do a tour. But I said from the very off that I didn’t want to do it if it was only going to be one tour and goodbye. It's so much effort to do it. Also, I thought it would be really unfair on the fans. I thought it would be very unfair on us. I said that with my heart it my mouth but everyone agreed that it would be great to do something more.

Initially, the conversation then quickly accelerated into the idea of doing a box set of the old albums. We were going to get them remastered and do a fourth disc with B-sides on it and extras and stuff. That was the only mention of any sort of release of any music. We may well still do that, because that hasn't been done properly. We haven't curated it. Not since Little of the Past, and that really wasn't down to us.

When we were discussing dates, I brought up the subject of new music again. Here’s the thing. I'm the only one out of all of the guys that carried on playing Little Angels music and I've done it ever since the end of the band. I've done three albums with Wayward Sons; I've done an album with Fastway. I've produced a lot of records. I know what the environment of the rock world is. It's been my bread and butter for a long time. And so, I said that we would be foolish if we go into this tour without having something for the fans to commemorate this whole thing with it. It's to do with music, you know, we have to do something.

And so the conversation then went on to maybe what we'll do is find some tracks that we kind of didn't think we'd done justice to on the records or maybe recover some old demos and figure out if there's anything that we like in those. It seemed like quite a good idea and everyone was sort of going, "That's a good way of bridging the gap." But I thought we had to write some new stuff. I didn’t think it would be a problem.

The only issue really rested in the fact that there was a nervousness about it, because how do you take music created by 20-year-olds 30 years ago that was very specific and had its own idiosyncrasies about leaving a small town, about being kids who were growing up in public, bringing their audience with them, but talking to our own generation of young people, young teenagers and young people? How do you take that, all that energy, all that intrinsic excitement and sort of bedazzlement of the future and how it's all going to go, and do that with guys in their late 50s?

I think that’s why there was a bit of reticence. Little Angels was very specific. It was about young kids getting out of a town, taking on the world, being positive and arms around each other. I think it is important to note that songs like Too Much Too Young pay dividends now because we can say it with more conviction. It actually makes sense from a looking-back point of view, kind of the same thing with Kicking Up Dust, Don’t Pray For Me and Young Gods in a way. So crazily, the world of Little Angels back then kind of means more now from a narrative perspective.

Bruce and I were discussing Slippery When Wet which we think is a brilliant record and it's right in our wheelhouse in terms of what inspired us when we were young people. I specifically remember way back that we were rehearsing in this little scout hut in this village called Hunmanby where me and Mark Plunkett lived. You Give Love a Bad Name had just been released and Bon Jovi played Top of the Pops.  We stopped our rehearsal to watch them perform. We'd seen the video but we thought this was amazing. We watched with open mouths. Here was this bunch of young people, relatively young to us, if you like, that were our contemporaries. A little bit older than us, but not much, doing the kind of music we wanted to do. They felt like our band. We felt like we were part of their gang, and that's what we wanted. We wanted our fans to feel like they were part of our gang and we were all in it together.

We were all in this glorious world of rock'n'roll where it doesn't matter that you were in the audience or you were on the stage. We were all part of the same thing. We had a fundamental love of music and fundamental love of live music and bands. So when were discussing Slippery When Wet more recently, Bruce said wouldn’t it be great if we could have our own Raise Your Hands. I went home that night and I wrote All For One which was a title suggested by Mark Plunkett. I thought I’ll use that title and write Little Angels’ Raise Your Hands. I didn’t say anything to the others; I just sent it to Mark, Bruce and Jim along with some other ideas but for that one, I specifically said it could be our Raise Your Hands. And they all went, "Oh my God, it's great. We love it."

So really, that was my license to then start writing and I had this outpouring of songs. I mean, to date, I've written sixty working ideas for Little Angels. That's no joke. That happens to me. I'm not saying they're all good but it just inspired me. In a couple of weeks, I had Small Town Boys and Hero. I’d had the Hero riff for a long time and I woke up one morning at 4:00am. I suffer from insomnia and I came down to work on stuff and I played that riff. Within about fifteen minutes, I had written the entire song. Very quickly, all this music started to arrive and thankfully the guys all liked it. And of course, I can't do it without them. I might write the songs, but the reality is that until I get in that room with those guys and Mark brings his bass, and him and Rich nail it down with a rhythm, Bruce comes up with a riff and Jim brings in a sequence, until those things start to happen, it isn't Little Angels.

Photo credit: Chris Blanden

Hotel Hobbies:  From your own point of view, how different as a musician and a person are you now compared to the person who was on stage in 1994?

Toby Jepson: Very good question. I think one of the overriding factors is that I don't believe the hype anymore. I think when you grow up through the industry, it changes you. We were signed to Polydor Records, a major record label. The pressures were enormous. We weren't allowed to enjoy our success really in lots of ways. It was all like, well, you've had that success, we need some more. The pressures were pretty big and that contributed to the dissolution of the band. My lesson from that was that you just literally can't listen to the bullshit. Nobody knows what a hit is. I haven't met anyone who can tell me what a hit is but yet they pretended they did. I don't believe in the idea of being a rock star. I don't know what that is. I think it's a ludicrous concept. It certainly wasn't invented by musicians. It was invented by the press or the media to put a bracket around bad behaviour if you ask me.

What I've realised about myself, and a lot of it's taken a long time because I've been through mental health struggles myself, and a lot of us have, is I've got to trust my authentic self and I believe in myself a lot more than I ever did. I don't feel I've got anything to prove to anybody anymore and by virtue of that thought process, I actually am a better writer because I'm not trying too hard.

I think my personal journey into music from the end of Little Angels to where I am now has been one of consideration of myself, a valuing of my own work, belief not just in myself as a musician, but also belief in the audience that they're smart, far smarter than me half the time, to figure out whether they think it's any good. And I believe in the concept of music as a great healer. It certainly helped me heal when I was not very well.

I think all of those things combined have just made me look at Little Angels in an entirely different way. I just think I'm so grateful, so grateful that those guys are still around and we can all give each other a hug and tell each other we love each other, and that the music is secondary to our relationships because really, when it comes down to it, the music industry is about two things and two things only. It's about the songs, without a doubt, and I've always said this: the only thing that matters is the songs. But the other key thing is the people. In actual fact, it's probably more important than the songs. It's the relationships that you have. You cannot make great music unless you have three, four, five, however many people it is, all on the same side, all pulling in the same direction, all supporting, lifting each other up, allowing each other to be the people we are and not the people we perhaps would aspire for us all to be. There was a lot of that in Little Angels. This kind of pressure to be something else because, I don't know, Skid Row had just appeared and Sebastian Bach had hair like that, so you've got to look a bit like them. It's all that nonsense. You're under this kind of illusion that somehow if you were a bit like them, things would be better, but it's absolute nonsense.

What you've got to do, and what we are doing with this now, and what I've tried to do through Wayward Sons, is be authentic and allow that to be what it is, because you can't be all things to all men. You've just got to do what you do and hope for the best. And the whole concept of being unique is really important. And it's ignored by a lot of bands, I think. A lot of bands these days, there's a lot of copying going on. There's a lot of anxiety, I think, about being familiar. Well, I don't want to be familiar. I want to do something that people go, “God, that's different. That's unusual. Oh, I didn't expect that from them.” That's important.

Now, I'm not saying Little Angels are this kind of unique proposition but we know who we are and we know why we are and we're completely secure in that. It's now about authenticity. It's about being true to yourself and being supportive of each other and taking that into the audience and allowing the audience to judge it for us.

Hotel Hobbies: You mentioned the word success. It seems like because you don’t have those negative influences guiding you any more that you are going to judge success very differently this time around.

Toby Jepson: Very differently because people sometimes ask me what is my greatest moment? So I said, well, the greatest moment is being able to be a professional musician most of my life. That's making it. Making it isn't the champagne, the Rolls Royces and the smashing of hotel rooms. That's just bad behaviour. It's much more about achieving a kind of personal sense of creativity, and the success of that is really in one person sending you an email saying that song changed my life or thank you for writing that song, it's really helped me. That sort of thing is what I deem a success. It's not the amount of record sales. I mean, we did all right and here we are, but it's much, much more about how you value the work. And the fact I can continue to do the work, that's the way I look at it.

Hotel Hobbies: Was there a point where the band talked about the past and you had a view of something or a perspective on something, and someone else said, “Oh, I saw that completely differently back then” or “Oh, actually, I didn't realise you felt that.”

Toby Jepson: Oh, absolutely because we grew up in the public eye as young people and so we didn't really know how to deal with ourselves. I regret a lot of the stuff I said and did, really, in lots of ways towards the other guys, because I was anxious. I did not realise it at the time, but I had been badly bullied at school, and it took a lot out of me. I did not realise how much of an impact that had on me when I was in the band, because I still had that fight-or-flight situation, and those things impacted me. I now realise that because I've been through therapy and I've come to terms with it.

Even if I had not gone through these things, being an older person, I would have thought I would have been able to look back at it differently. But we have had those conversations and we have talked about things that were bothering us, and it's quite amazing when you go, "Well, I thought this," and then someone will go, "Well, I had no idea you thought that," or "I can't even remember that happening." It's just mad that something you built up in your head for thirty-five years of, "Oh my God, it must have been terrible," and they cannot even remember it happening. But that's just life and you learn that you just have to let that stuff go.

Hotel Hobbies: As you have mentioned, the fans and your interaction with them has always been a huge part of Little Angels. How does it feel when someone say decades after you have written a song that it still means something special to them?

Toby Jepson:  It's a huge privilege and it gives me enormous sense of wellbeing because it must have meant I got something right. The world of the music industry is so complex but it's built off the back of something actually very simple, which is communication. I've always written songs for myself first, and then hopefully  other people will like them. I think you have to be selfish when you're a songwriter, but I never expected or felt I was entitled to people's love and appreciation of the music. You have to build. I feel very privileged and very happy that songs such as Don’t Pray For Me or No Solution, which gets mentioned a lot actually, are cited as being part of the soundtrack of someone’s life. It blows my mind that something I scribbled down on the back of a bit of paper whilst on a bus or something managed to make it onto a record. It's extraordinary. The music industry is full of nonsense. For me, everything comes down to the audience and what they feel about it.

Hotel Hobbies:  Focusing in on the new EP, I was lucky enough to be sent it to review so have been listening to it for a while and I was struck by how naturally the songs fit alongside your back catalogue while simultaneously feeling completely fresh. It feels like you did not put any pressure on yourself to make it sound completely like the Little Angels of thirty years ago but that you had the freedom to say, “This is Little Angels now.”

Toby Jepson: That's a very good observation. I didn't put myself under any pressure at all. I don’t write songs like that. I've written over six hundred songs in my life and I just write songs. I don’t write songs for Little Angels or songs for Wayward Sons. I just write songs. With the 60 songs I've come up with, I know we were sifting through them and one of the band might say it sounds more like Wayward Sons or something better suited to me as a solo artist. I’m kind of unaware. I like that because I don’t want to corner myself. I don't think the guys want to corner themselves either because I'm not the only writer. Bruce comes up with riffs too. When we make the album next year, there will be a lot more collaborations between me and Bruce, me and Jim and I’ve co-written a song with Mark Richardson and also one with Mark Plunkett. Writing for this EP felt very natural. Once I had the narrative trail and the feeling for it, it just flowed. It was obvious that Hero, All For One and Small Town Boys would form the backbone of the record. Little Angel sounds like Little Angels because we all trust each other.

Hotel Hobbies: Over the course of the EP, it sounds like a band having enormous fun, loving every moment.

Toby Jepson: Yes. That's exactly it. We love being in each other's company. We're all very strong characters. Jim's like the mad professor: studious, tucked away in the corner messing around with keyboards and coming up with amazing ideas. Bruce is the riff meister, incredibly intelligent. Mark Plunkett is extremely steady and strong; if Mark talks, you listen. Then there's me rabbiting on in the background, throwing out a million ideas. Rich is quieter, but a very powerful presence. He can say two words and completely change the atmosphere in the room.

At this point, we understand how each other works and know how to roll with each other's punches. One of the biggest things that's happened over the years, as we've got older, had kids, mortgages and other jobs, is that we've developed complete trust in one another. There's no judgement. The only question is whether something works. If it does, great. If it doesn't, we all accept it and move on. There's no griping and no preciousness anymore. That's a huge part of it. I've known Mark Plunkett since I was eight years old. We went to junior school, secondary school and sixth form college together. When your roots go that deep, there's a lot that doesn't need to be said.

Hotel Hobbies: With Hero – the lead track from the EP, you also had great fun with the video.

Toby Jepson: When I saw the first cut Jim put together, I burst into tears. Jim's great at that sort of thing, but I genuinely hadn't anticipated how it would make me feel. I think I got the song right, and I'm very proud of it. The energy in the riff, the way the track unfolds, even the structure. I deliberately wrote it so it feels like there are almost three choruses. Just when you think it's heading one way, it goes somewhere else, continually telling and re-evaluating its story. It's a very emotional song, and even now, when we play it in rehearsal, it brings a lump to my throat because it really is true. It's very autobiographical. It's about us being kids, getting a record deal and discovering it wasn't quite what we imagined. All those daft ideas about what the music business is. Do you want to be a hero? What does that even mean? It's all a bit tongue in cheek, but it's also a genuine act of self-examination. As crazy as it sounds, that's the sort of bullshit people used to say to us, and those were the ideas that drew you in. You'd think, "Oh my God, maybe we could do that." Then, when you finally get there, it isn't quite what you thought it would be.

Hotel Hobbies: I love all the songs on the EP but I genuinely think Small Town Boys is among the best songs that Little Angels have ever released. What does that song mean to you?

Toby Jepson: I had this brilliant conversation with Bruce. Bruce is such a smart man. He said to me, "Look, I don't think this is about us anymore. We can't sing about the things we were singing about before." And I said, "No, of course we can't. We're not that age anymore." We both agreed on that. Then he said, "You know what, Tobe? I think this is about us looking back and going home." The moment he said it, I thought, you're absolutely right. The song is about reflecting on where we came from and being happy to go back there. We're older now. We've been through the ringer, we've seen the ups and downs, but we're still standing and we're still just as excited about making music as we ever were. There's something really important about that.

I was pondering all of this while doing a lot of running. One rainy day, I went to the gym instead, stepped onto the treadmill and, the moment I did, the title Small Town Boys popped into my head, along with the melody and the rough shape of the chorus. The only problem was that I still had five kilometres to run. So, I spent the next twenty-five minutes singing the song over and over in my head. As I ran, the verses came together, then I realised it needed a second section and started working that out too. By the time I'd finished the run, the song was pretty much written in my head. I literally ran home, picked up a guitar and, twenty minutes later, it was finished from start to finish. It was an extraordinary moment. Looking back, I think all those conversations about returning home, who we were and what it all meant, fed into it. I'm sure somewhere in the background, I'd heard someone say, "Of course we were smalltown boys," or something along those lines. That's often how songwriting works. Your antenna picks things up and stores them away until suddenly everything comes together.

I took the song to the band and the reaction was immediate. Everyone felt we'd really stumbled onto something. We started rehearsing it straight away and it came together incredibly quickly. Jim made a few arrangement tweaks on a demo, we talked through some ideas, but the whole process was remarkably straightforward. I think we've all come to realise it's the monster on the EP, the track that defines this moment for the band.

Hotel Hobbies: You Want Love is completely different and features Doris Brendel. You both really went for it on this one. Again, there’s a real sense of enjoyment.

Toby Jepson: You Want Love actually began life as I Want Love which was on Too Posh To Mosh, Too Good To Last. At the time, it was just a demo. I'd written four songs for what was supposed to be the next Little Angels album: Ten Miles High, All Roads Lead To You, I Want Love and Forbidden Fruit. But that record never materialised, so all we had were the demos we'd cut together in a small studio. Even back then, I remember saying that I Want Love could work as a duet. I thought it would be great if we could get a woman to sing it with me. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but Doris ended up recording her parts separately and I wasn't even there when she did it. I sang my sections, she sang hers, and although we always loved the song, it remained only a demo.

When we started looking through material for the EP, I said to the band that the track had been badly undersold and deserved another chance. It stayed on the shortlist for a long time before we all eventually agreed that it was too good to leave behind. Once we committed to it, though, we completely reworked it. I rewrote all the lyrics; we added a middle eight and gave it a fresh lease of life. The question then became whether we should make it a duet again. Everyone agreed we should, and Jim somehow managed to track Doris down online. She was delighted that, more than thirty years later, we were asking her to do it again. When she arrived at the studio, she was just amazing. She's still got such a great voice. We set up two vocal booths facing each other and we stood there with the lyrics in front of us and simply sang the song together. We did twelve takes and chose the best one. It was literally us singing in the moment.

Hotel Hobbies: You are heading out on tour on Monday. You must be really excited about it.

Toby Jepson: Man, crazy. I mean, like I say, we didn't ever anticipate the level of sort of response, really didn't. I mean, we had our hearts in our mouths when we announced those dates. And I was surprised that the promoters were willing to put us in such big venues to start with, to be honest, I really was. But, they all were very, they seemed to know, that's why the promoters, I think they sort of read the room a bit better than I did. And I knew we had massive support, but, of course, people's money is squeezed these days. Touring's expensive, and tickets are expensive, and we tried to keep it as cheap as we could, given the circumstances, and but you're always going, Well, how many gigs do I go to? I go to as many as I can, but it's the same for me, same for all of us, but when we got a call the next day to say that Shepherds Bush had sold out in twenty-four hours, and looks like Rock City was going to go within a few days, and so was Leeds and Manchester, we were like, Oh my God, what's going on? And it was just extraordinary, and I mean, I'm so grateful. We're all so grateful. It's to think that people feel so much about the band after so long. It's been 14 years since we toured last and they're still willing to come out. It's man, we are so lucky. It's extremely, extremely privileged. It's a very privileged position to be in.

Hotel Hobbies: Without giving away anything you don't want to, how difficult was it to put together a set list?

Toby Jepson: Tough, man. Tough. We probably wrote the setlist half a dozen times and kept changing ideas. In the end, though, we concluded that, hopefully, this won't be the only tour, so we don't have to get everything right first time. What we did was simply play the songs, in no particular order, including some we hadn't played together in a room for fourteen years, and judge how they felt. Every time, we all looked at each other and thought it was great, it went on the list. I also suggested a couple of older songs that we hadn't played for years. One of them, we hardly played at all after the very early days. There was some reluctance at first but we had about half a dozen songs in that category and tried them all out. Three of them worked really well, so they made the set.

Equally, there were several songs that all of us agreed we didn't want to play. We were pretty much unanimous on that, and it might surprise some people which songs didn't make the cut. But we have to do this our way. We have to feel confident that we're going to enjoy the show. It's not about going through the motions because it really isn't like that for us. It was important that this tour got the dynamic and atmosphere right. We wanted it to feel like a full-blooded rock show, and that's exactly what it is. And, of course, we're going to play three brand-new songs as well.

Hotel Hobbies: Thinking of full-blooded rock, I know you wanted the EP to be five rockers and no ballads this time around.

Toby Jepson: Yes, exactly. I think we need to make a statement. I've spent the last ten years in Wayward Sons, and that's a full-blooded rock band. The guys didn't want ballads, and I didn't particularly want to write them either. But Little Angels is slightly different. There's a bit more light and shade in Little Angels than there is in Wayward Sons, and that's not to either band's detriment. It's just the reality of what they are. Even something like Don't Pray for Me has a muscularity to it. It may have that lilting feel but when the band comes in and we hit the chorus, it's a big song.

The same is true of Womankind. I've always likened Womankind to Led Zeppelin in a way, and the version we're playing now feels more psychedelic. It's totally recognisable as the same song but Bruce has brought a different element to it. We've tried to reinvent things a little and look beyond the surface level of these songs and what they were when we first released them. We're exploring them in different ways. I'm playing a lot more electric guitar on stage, for instance, and that changes the feel of the show. It feels more muscular, more foundational, which is probably the best word for it. At the same time, it feels progressive because we've got new songs in the set. It's a great nod to what's still to come and where we've got to with this project so far.

Photo credit: Ray Burniston

Hotel Hobbies: With talk of a new album for next year, the band really has a solid plan for the future now.

Toby Jepson: Absolutely. And because why not? I mean, bizarrely, everyone's completely in the position to be able to do it. Mark Plunkett just recently stopped being a manager. He's not managing Ronan Keaton anymore. Jim's taken early retirement and Bruce has sold his company recently, so he's reduced his need to be physically at the coalface for that business. Me and Rich have always been players, you know, so the only thing we have is working around Rich's work because he's obviously in Skunkadancy too. But they've been great. They've sort of said, no, of course, if you want to do something else, that's up to you. But it's just working between, the schedules of everything. But no, we've got a long-term plan. I mean, we'll make a record next year without a doubt. And then there'll be an album tour and there's going to be festivals next year. I genuinely, without wanting to sound too over the top, I genuinely think the best years of this band could be ahead of us.

Hotel Hobbies: If you could go back and sit down with Toby Jepson in 1986 with all the knowledge you have in 2026, what would you tell him?

Toby Jepson: I would probably say to trust your instincts more. Without a doubt, I didn't. I listened to people I shouldn't have listened to, and I doubted myself when I should have believed in myself. I suffered the consequences of that. The only thing you can really do in this life is find your authentic self and trust it, because you cannot get everything right. You can get your own bit right, but you cannot get everything right, especially not in the rock business. It's an impossible task.

All you can do is be as authentic as possible, believe in yourself and stand by the courage of your convictions. Otherwise, you're just chasing your tail. I think there was probably a bit of that when we were young. You'd constantly be asking yourself, "Who do we need to be like? Should we be a bit more like this? A bit more like that?" You're under that pressure all the time. I don't feel like that at all now. If I could sit down with my younger self, I'd simply say to ignore the naysayers. Do what your heart tells you is right. That's probably the best advice I could give myself.

Hotel Hobbies: Thank you so much for your time Toby. It has been a pleasure to speak with you and I will see you at the Shepherd’s Bush gig.

Toby Jepson: Great stuff. Really appreciate it and I’ll see you soon. Thank you for your amazing review of the EP. It blew me away. It was fantastic. You got it exactly right and you really understood. It fills my heart with joy. It really does. Thank you.

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