Nearly four decades after emerging from Scarborough’s hard-rock scene, Little Angels are preparing to step back into the spotlight with a November reunion tour that has already exceeded expectations. Ticket demand was so strong that a sold-out London show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire quickly led to an additional capital date, along with new stops in Newcastle and Cardiff. For fans, the return of the classic line-up — complete with the Big Bad Horns — feels less like nostalgia and more like the revival of a band whose energy, hooks and stage presence helped define a vital era of British rock.
Ahead of the tour, we caught up with frontman Toby Jepson to talk about the emotional pull of returning after 13 years away, the enduring connection with the Angels Army fanbase and the band’s legacy alongside heavyweights such as Van Halen, Guns N' Roses, Faith No More, ZZ Top, Aerosmith, Bryan Adams and Bon Jovi. We also touch on the band’s abrupt break up, the upcoming shows with special guest Luke Morley of Thunder, and why this reunion feels like the right moment for a band whose story clearly still has chapters left to write.
Hi Toby, so good to speak to you today, we've been looking forward to this for quite some time!
Thank you, thanks for having me.
Thank you for your time today because I know how busy you must be right now.
My pleasure, it's nice to be back doing this actually, I've kinda forgotten what it's like. Certainly this amount of volume of interviews shows me that there is real interest in what we are doing.
Let's start there then. You've added extra tour dates in London, Newcastle and Cardiff already since tickets for the tour went on sale last week. Has the demand and interest taken you by surprise?
We knew that there would be a sensible level of interest given the fact that we last played in 2012 and there was good engagement and ticket sales back then. That was a slightly different tour than this one is going to be – it was prompted by the fact that Michael Lee (Little Angels' original drummer) had passed away and we hadn't been in touch with each other for quite a while. It forced us to face ourselves, face the music and face the fact that we had lost one of our own.
The tour went great and we all had a great time which meant we kept the conversations going. We wondered whether we would be able to do it again so it's been quite a few years in the making. We've had various stumbles along the way where we talked about doing something together but for a number of private and personal reasons it just wasn't possible.
However, when we started talking about it again, perhaps about 18 months ago, the planets started to align and it began to feel more achievable. You kind of go back to talking to each other in the same way that we did when the band first started, which is really funny. I don't tend to think about how many tickets we are going to sell, I'm thinking about the show and how we are going to stage it and what songs we are going to play. We've never had over expectations about anything really, we've always been quite a modest bunch of lads in lots of ways – I mean, I was initially quite surprised at the size of the venues that Andy Copping and the promoters choose to book for this tour but I was quietly confident that the demand would be there but I could not have anticipated the outpouring of love and support for the band that happened last week and continues to carry on through this week – it was extraordinary!
I was pottering around on Friday not really thinking about ticket sales and I thought I would have a look on Monday and try and ignore it for the weekend! My phone started lighting up and then the emails from the rest of the guys started coming in telling me to look at the ticket sales! (laughing) I couldn't believe it. It took about four hours for the Shepherds Bush Empire to sell out! I was flabbergasted, gobsmacked! By the end of the day about 6-7 of the shows were 80% sold out so it was an astounding reaction for which all of us are very grateful.
I've always felt that the band had a very loyal set of fans. I've thought about it a lot over the years in terms of trying to work out what it was that made people feel like we were one of them. We came from a small town up in the North East of England, we were always very realistic about who we were and always tried to be positive and optimistic – that was us. I always felt we were a little removed from the rock scene in a way, even though we were part of that movement with bands like Thunder, the Quireboys and the Almighty, I do think we were a little more pop orientated and our music got on the radio, which made us a little more visible in some respects. The fans were the heart and soul of our band and i'm thrilled that they are still there with us in 2026.
For me, Little Angels always felt like ‘one of us,' if you know what I mean. I was only a couple of years below you guys in age and you felt like lads that I might have gone to sixth form with, which made you very relatable in a way that maybe bands like the Quireboys might not have?
I think that is a really good observation. A lot of that is to do with the fact that we never shied away from writing songs about where we came from, who we were and what we wanted to achieve. My central remit was always to remain as authentic as we could. We were young so we were never going to write with a vast experience of life but we were growing and what we did was we showed ourselves growing up through our music, and I hope that was relatable to a lot of people at the time too. We started with ‘Do You Wanna A Riot,' and progressed to ‘Young Gods' and songs that talked about where we came from and what real life was like – there is an earthiness to that. A lot of kids came from the backstreets of small towns, just like we did, and our music attached itself to those people all over the country.
I first saw you supporting Saxon at Bradford St George's Hall with my best mate and our sixth form tutor – which probably wouldn't be allowed these days! From there you supported and played alongside some behemoth rock acts from Bon Jovi to Bryan Adams to Van Halen. Was there one particular artist or band that sticks in your mind as being the most enjoyable or mind blowing?
Goodness me, that's a good question. Quite honestly, every single band we worked with brought something very special and taught us something different. I will say this, I can't remember, apart from one artist, who I will not name, anyone being less than amazing to us. From Cinderella……….. the Marillion guys were amazing, touring with Bon Jovi was amazing and Jon and I became very good friends for a while back there. He spent a huge amount of time hanging out in our dressing room and watching us from the side of the stage. ZZ Top were great guys but if I had to pick out two artists……. Bryan Adams would be one of them. Bryan took a special interest in the band, from meeting him in the studio making our first album to touring with him later. He even edited a track on that first album! I looked to my left and there he was in this little editing suite, working on a track of ours! (laughing) We stayed good friends and then we opened for him on the ‘Waking Up the Neighbours' tour and he sang backing vocals for us on ‘Too Much Too Young.' He never asked for anything, he was the most down to earth, cool guy who always wanted to help us.
The tour that blew us all away and will live in my memory till the day I pass away was the Van Halen tour. That tour through Europe with them………. they were our favourite band and to be touring with them and have Eddie coming into our dressing room…. he gave guitars to the guys, he couldn't have been more friendly and humble. Extraordinary stuff really.
I was also at Nottingham Rock City in 1994 on the farewell tour. Do you think the band walked away too soon or had Little Angels run its course by then?
No, we hadn't run the course. I unfortunately think we ended up finishing too soon for all the wrong reasons. But thems the breaks, that's what happens. There were a lot of things in the way of us continuing back then at that time – there were aspects of the band's existence that forced us into that position. It was very sad to me, I can remember walking off the stage at the Royal Albert Hall thinking ‘what are we doing?' That's the truth.
Things had got quite bad, there was some bad feeling in the ranks at the time and do you know what? It's kind of inevitable. When you spend 8 years, 24/7 with the same people, it's inevitable that the wheels come off the bus a bit. I look back now, with hindsight, and think about all the stupid things I said and did. I wasn't smart enough. I wasn't grown up enough or mature enough to deal with what was happening. If I had this head I have now back then I certainly wouldn't have allowed it to happen. But it did. We left on a high with a number one album and a sold out Albert Hall show – which feeds into this kind of lustre that I think hangs around Little Angels and I think that's a big part of why people have showed up to support the band now. We didn't drift off into the ether and end up playing clubs to 50 people, right? We left with a mythology and legend around the band that built up over the years I think.
I've interviewed (Thunder guitarist) Luke Morley a couple of times in the last few years and he is quite vocal about how they had to fight the change in tastes as Nirvana ushered in Grunge, he's even mentioned it in a couple of songs now. Alongside the internal pressures in the band back then were you also fighting a culture shift into a style of music that wouldn't have suited Little Angels would it?
There's a lot of truth in that, for sure. That shift definitely formed part of the reason why we started to feel under pressure in the band. The record label was certainly feeling under pressure as the music scene changed but I don't think that's the whole story. I totally accept what Luke is saying and I know Bruce (Dickinson, Little Angels guitarist) feels the same but I'm not certain. Where would those 7,000 people who filled the Royal Albert Hall to see us in 1994 have gone? They were still there. Yes, times were a-changing, you could weather those storms – Thunder weathered that storm brilliantly well and went on to have terrific longevity.
Look at Def Leppard, and I've spoken to Joe Elliot about this before, they downed tools for a little bit and then came back with ‘Slang' and re-invented themselves. Their audience didn't go anywhere. You can't avoid the fact that music changes and popularity comes and goes but look at the artists that have survived all these changes down through the ages – Judas Priest, Whitesnake – they all had times out of the picture a little but they all came back stronger again at other times.
I think if Little Angels had stayed together we might have been a little like Thunder. We might have had to go away for a few years but the reality was that people still wanted to listen to that music and they missed the band so that it would have been easier for us to get back together again a few years down the line, like Thunder did.
Your ‘Toby Jepson and the Whole Truth' project wasn't a million miles away from that Little Angels sound, just a bit darker.
I think the thing with ‘The Whole Truth' record was that I was looking at it from the point of view of looking back on a career that I had watched fall apart in front of my eyes and reacting to that. It's quite an angry record but it did make me grow up. Bizarrely, that album was the instigator of me maturing as a songwriter. I absolutely and completely crashed to the floor at that point and had to pick myself up and try and figure out what to do next. These things are all components in the future of your art – somebody once said to me that you should always learn to use the difficulties that you face: don't fight the difficulty, use it. I've learned that over the years, make good of what you can but remain authentic to yourself.
Which of Little Angels' three albums do you feel the most emotional attachment too or are most proud of?
I was talking to Bruce about this as well the other day! We both feel the same, it would be ‘Young Gods.' It was a pivotal record for us because it was our second album and everyone was warning us about ‘second record syndrome.' We didn't have that experience actually, we wrote a lot of songs which is why there are so many on the album! (laughing) There's arguably too many songs on that album. If I was sequencing that record today I'd probably leave two or three songs off it with hindsight.
As a solid piece of work it was inventive, it was fun and it was quite clever in places. I think Bruce plays absolutely out of his skin on that record but it was of the moment – it sounds like a record from that period of time although I do think it's a very complete piece of work.
Bruce said recently that he hates the guitar solo to ‘Kicking Up Dust' and he doesn't play it like that anymore. Are there any other songs that might get played in November on the tour that you might tweak, change or re-imagine from their original format?
Yeah, there's quite a few. We're leaning quite heavily into a lot more of the earlier stuff, actually. There's a couple of songs we have on the pending setlist that have never been played live! The 2012 tour was a kind of greatest hits package, it was us getting back together and us putting our arms around each other and saying goodbye to a friend. This tour is going to be different – we've got three albums plus the ‘Big Bad' Ep and ‘Too Posh to Mosh, Too Good to Last,' – what are we going to do with it? We will be re-inventing some songs and looking at how to present some of the older songs from way back in the day too. It will be quite a surprise!
Some the songs, like ‘Boneyard,' ‘That's My Kinda Life' and ‘Do You Wanna Riot' are really heavy on your vocals. How is the voice these days and what have you done over the years to protect yourself from the kind of degradation that singers like Jon Bon Jovi and Vince Neil have suffered from?
Well, I stopped smoking. That was key. I didn't smoke for very long but I did for a while and that's absolutely terrible for your vocals. I've looked after my voice, I've taken precautions out on the road and I try to make sure that I am always as healthy as I can be. I've stopped screaming, which is a big part of it.
Male voices do deepen as you get older and so we've dropped the keys a little bit so that it suits my vocals more now. Weirdly, when I did the Dio Disciples tour I was told to learn all these Dio songs and when I got out to L.A. for the rehearsals they had dropped the keys by a full step and I said to the guys that the songs were now much easier to sing and they said that even Ronnie needed them dropping because he couldn't sing them in the same way as he used to back in the 70s and 80s. I was, like, even Ronnie James Dio, one of the world's greatest rock singers of all time, had to make changes and concessions to age. Why wouldn't that be the case?
You learn to use the tools that you have at every different stage of life. I do a lot of warm ups, I'm the fittest I've ever been right now – running 15km a week, I'm in the gym three days a week and I feel very fit and able. We can't ignore that fact that we are older people.
Which Little Angel has aged the best?
(laughing) Weeeeellllllllll, I couldn't possibly say! Do you know what? Honestly, everyone has done great! We met up for a photo session just before Christmas and I was thrilled by just how much effort everyone had made. None of us are trying to be 21 any more. None of us have had facelifts, none of us have had botox. Not interested. And yeah, I got the photographs back and looked at myself and went, ‘You look like a 58 year old bloke,' but why wouldn't I because I am! You need to lean into it rather than fight against or deny it. We won't be standing still and staring at our shoes on this tour, I can tell you, we feel like teenagers again and can't wait to get up on that stage in November.
I'm going to finish with the million dollar question and I'm just going to say two words. New music?
(laughing) I knew you were going to ask me about this! Ok, well look, I'm not going to beat around the bush. It's very likely but we don't know quite what it looks like yet. We've got some pretty broad plans and are talking to some people…….. Here's the thing……those three records stand as a testament to our past. I couldn't possibly write a song like ‘Young Gods' or ‘Too Much Too Young' anymore. We've got to try and figure out, and it's a mountain to climb in a lot of ways, how to take the tropes and the sound that people expect from Little Angels and make it meaningful in 2026. How do we re-transfer that concept of us and who we are – those five kids from Yorkshire – and put it into a modern context that sounds authentic to the Little Angles? It's a challenge.
I think we can do it. I've been writing songs for Wayward Sons for ten years now and I don't write songs for Wayward Sons, I write Toby Jepson songs. They could have been Little Angels songs. That's the way it's going to be. Once we find out how to make it work I think you will see some new music from us but I don't quite know when that will be or what it will be like. There has been some discussion about us re-inventing or re-recording some old songs as a start so watch this space is all I can say to that right now!
Grab your tickets to see Little Angels back out on tour across the UK this November at the link right here.
