Classic Rock
Little Angels release the “Big Bad & Back EP” on 6 November. It is five tracks and the first new material from the Scarborough band since 1994. The full classic line-up is back: Toby Jepson on vocals, Bruce Dickinson on guitar —the Little Angels one, not the Iron Maiden singer—, Jim Dickinson on keyboards, Mark Plunkett on bass and Mark Richardson on drums.
“This was never in the plan”, they say: “Toby started writing new ideas and while we were rehearsing the set for the tour, we started to jam around this new material, and it just felt great.” And the condition: “We would never make a new record unless we felt we still had something to say… and it turns out we do.”
They recorded at Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire, all five playing at once in a room and with nothing overdubbed. Mike Fraser mixed it; he recorded and mixed Aerosmith’s “Permanent Vacation” and “Pump” at Little Mountain in Vancouver, the studio where the band had mixed “Jam”, the record that took them to number one in Britain. The studio is gone; Fraser isn’t. “We encouraged him to evoke the spirit of those great records that he mixed back in the day”, the band says.
The problem, for Jepson, was the lyrics: “How do you take what Little Angels represented back then and bring it into the modern world with guys that are now in their mid-50s?” The way out: “This wasn’t about youth anymore — of course not; it’s about reflecting on where we had come from, and the kind of people we are now.”
The five tracks are “All For One”, “Hero (That Was Then, This Is Now)”, “Small Town Boys”, “You Want Love” and “Raised To The Ground”; the second already has a lyric video. In November they play sixteen dates across the UK and Ireland, from Dublin on the 9th to London on the 29th: the last tour was in 2012, and the Royal Albert Hall farewell eighteen years before that.
Text by Enric Vilaplana