 Many will remember Toby Jepson from his Former band Little Angels, who made top 10 in the UK during the 1980's.
Toby's website is a superbly frank description of what has gone on since they split. Roles in Ridley Scott's Gladiator movie, or in TV drama Band of Brothers, anyone? Alongside constantly recording his own material, Toby has been very busy in a variety of ways, most recently as frontman for American Rockers Fastway, on the European festival circuit. I caught up with him for a chat at Hard Rock Hell to find out exactly what kind of symphony he'll be playing to us in the future, with so many strings to his bow.
Krissy Elliott: Everything that I have been reading that you have been
writing on these super amazing blogs and everything your web presence
is really good.
Toby Jepson: Is it?
KE: Well I think it is. Because it is very Yorkshire and it tells it like it is.
TJ: Well I try to do that.
KE: Well a lot of people’s are crap and yours is good!
TJ: I don’t get enough time to do mine. I’m not at home enough at the
minute to do as many as I want. I have got a laptop but I never get the
fucking thing plugged in and all that.
KE: Yeah but didn’t you get like offered a job this year that kept you really busy all through the summer. Fronting Fastway.
TJ: That’s true yeah. Very true. It took a little bit of my time away.
KE: I bet you were chuffed to death when you got that?
TJ: I was yeah. Very much so.
KE: Has it been really good fun?
TJ: Yeah it has. I mean on a number of levels
really. It’s always exciting to get a phone call from somebody that
says, I’d like to offer you this job. And it’s something that we can
let you do that you are quite good at. You won’t have to apologise for
it and we’ll pay you! That’s quite surprising and always exciting and
actually hasn’t happened to me very often. It was amazing to get the
call. I mean the guy that plays drums in the band, Steve Strange he’s a
hugely successful artist/agent.
KE: Yeah I’ve been hearing about him from other people too.
TJ: He’s a very, very successful guy but he’s a
player, a musician. Me and him go back a long way. He was a musician
first. When Little Angels played in Northern Ireland years ago he
promoted us the first time in the Limelight Club. He was a skinny
little fucker and I got on with him really well. Then I lost touch with
him completely. You know.
KE: As you do.
TJ: I was wandering around backstage at
Shepherd’s Bush Empire in March. We opened for Glenn Hughes with my own
band and he went, you remember me. We exchanged numbers and he told me
then that they were putting Fastway back together with Fast Eddie and
I’d been a Fastway fan, you know. I’d spent an entire summer listening
to that first Fastway record. I was a big fan of Dave King’s and all
that. So to get that call was brilliant.
I mean alright they weren’t the biggest band on the planet or anything
but just used to think, at the time when they came out that they were
unique. Of course with Fast Eddie being in Motorhead and all the rest
of it and that iconic deign that he brought with him. I had always
really, really liked the band so that in itself was a real bonus. Then
I got to meet the guys and they were all fantastic people and you know
lots of big shows. It’s been twelve, thirteen perhaps even fourteen
years since I stood on a really big stage.
 KE: And what’s it like going back? Do you want to be there again?
TJ: Yeah. You can’t take the performer out of the
Yorkshireman. Without a doubt. My first recollections of playing was
all about the gigs. They weren’t about the studio. They were about the
reaction of the crowd. To the sound and all that and that feeling. I
remember doing our first show with the Little Angels at the Stephen
Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, when we were really young, you know, and
because we had come out of sixth form college it was heaving. There was
only about 150 people in this place but it was packed. It was
absolutely heaving! I could believe that sort of energy, that feeling
of energy. So as the band progressed and we got bigger and bigger for
me it all became about being live. That’s all it was, and when I don’t
do it, and when I’m not involved in it, it actually affects me at a
deep level. It really sounds hokum doesn’t it but it’s really true. It
affects me as a person really deeply.
KE: You feel a lacking there?
TJ: A complete apathy. Just empty. I think that
you are either born to be a performer or you’re not, and you either
embrace it or you don’t embrace it. Lots of people that I know in the
music business that are hugely successful people and they don’t like
playing live. I just don’t get that at all because that is the only
reason that I did it.
KE: So the stuff with your band. These EP’s and things that you’ve brought out. Have they been commercially successful?
TJ: They haven’t been a huge commercial success but I never did it for that.
KE: Did you enjoy doing them?
TJ: Yeah. The EP that I did was a way of creating
a situation for myself where I could, if I wanted to, which I did, be
able to go out and play in my own right. Now I never anticipated it to
be any more than me stretching my vocal chords, writing and producing
music that I wanted to write and produce rather than it being
influenced by anybody else. And also an opportunity to go out and play
gigs. I have probably played more shows this year in my own right and
with Fastway than I have done for the last 15 years all told. So yeah
it has been a brilliant year for the live playing. I did it so I can go
and play live. You know, we’ve played in front of 400 people at a local
club and also in front of 50 people. It’s back to the wire. It’s back
to how it was before. But I don’t care.
KE: Does it make it fresher. Like starting again and all that freedom that comes with being new and just starting out?
TJ: Yes it does. It feels like that because every new start that you
make in music I think always feels like your first step. It’s easy to
maintain something. The Little Angels were easy to maintain because we
knew what we were trying to do and by the time that we got to our
second record and we were about to make the Jam album it was pretty
much cast in stone what we knew we wanted to achieve. So it was like,
well we’ll make this record then we’ll carry on.
So to answer your question, it was never a commercial decision to make
these EP’s. It was just a great way to stay on the road and do gigs.
And do you know what? I have ended up meeting Steve Strange and joining
Fastway because I was out on the road.
I always think that the music business is a place where you have to be
out there doing stuff. No good propping up the bar at your local pub
and talking about what you are going to do.
KE: Yeah, if people don’t see you then they don’t know you are there.
TJ: Exactly.
KE: You’ve been with Fastway the whole summer. Are you going to be
doing more with them after this or is this just a bit of a one off?
TJ: No, no me and Eddie are talking about writing
stuff together. So I think that there will be, touch wood. I think
there is a good chance that there will be another Fastway record. I
don’t know what form it will take. I don’t know. It might even be an
EP. It might even just be an extra couple of tracks on a re-issue or
something. I don’t know. We are talking about doing more gigs next
year. We’ve been invited back to a lot of the festivals that we have
done this year.
KE: Well if you’ve enjoyed it then it’s worth going again isn’t it?
TJ: Oh Yeah. Well we’ve just came back from
Japan. When I say just I mean 2 weeks ago. We went over there and did
Loud Park and it was just fantastic. The reaction to Ed more than
anything else of course, but just the general feeling of classic rock
around the world at the minute is just amazing.
KE: That’s absolutely brilliant. Do you reckon we're are getting a rock revival or is it just nostalgia?
TJ: Nah I reckon we are having a rock revival.
I’m increasingly encouraged by the reaction of young kids you know and
when I say young kids I mean sort of teenagers. I’ve seen kids in the
audience at my shows that are wearing Iron Maiden t-shirts and they
can’t be any older than 14 or 15 years old, and they are wearing Deep
Purple t-shirts.
A friend of mine teaches guitar, Dean Howard, he was in my band. He
teaches kids etc etc. All they want to do is learn Jimi Hendrix riffs.
They don’t want to learn Trivium riffs. They want to play like Hendrix.
It’s obvious what it is. Their dad’s have brought them up on this
stuff. Their dad’s have introduced them to the Little Angels or Fastway
or Motorhead or whatever it will be. So there is a kind of revival
going on without a doubt. I think also that the goalposts have shifted
so completely now that you can go out and play with a massive band like
Heaven & Hell for example, and sell 40,000 tickets at an open air
concert.
KE: Somebody is buying the stuff so something is happening, isn’t it?
 TJ: There is a market and people are interested in it.
KE: Do you find that being a family man has made a difference to how
you can run your career? It must have done? You have your family. So
what’s changed? Obviously you can’t just go off like that now. Do you
think about the way you are going to do things differently?
TJ: I consider my position as a father more important than a rock singer. That’s it!
KE: That’s what I wanted you to say.
TJ: That’s all it is. So extrapolate from there.
I would never put my family at risk. What I do is, my wife and I look
at this as a business and as a prospect. I’m not doing anything
different now than when I met my wife who is a journalist also, she
knows what the score is, but I’m happily married and I have been for 13
or 14 years now. I have 3 little kids and they are everything to me but
at the end of the day this is what I do.
KE: You have to feed your family and you have to do your job as well?
TJ: Absolutely right.
KE: If you’re working in an office, you have to go to work as well.
TJ: It’s just about how you do it and you look
after your family. My family love me for being a rock and roller and if
I wasn’t that I’d be miserable and they’d be miserable. It’s kind of
like that and its great like that.
KE: Do they go on the road with you in the summer?
TJ: They’ve come to a couple of little things. My
own band played at a Chepstow Castle show with Thunder and that was
great. But everywhere else has been in Europe or in clubs where they
couldn’t come and they’re only nine, eight and five.
KE: It gets better.
TJ: They’re all girls.
KE: Whoa, my daughter’s seventeen and she’s the hard one. The two boys
are younger and they’re easier. It must be hard being on the road and
not where they are.
TJ: Exactly. But I’ve got into the whole web casting thing. I’ve got a laptop which I can just about turn on, you know.
KE: Nice one. That’s better than me then.TJ: Exactly. But I’ve got into
the whole web casting thing. I’ve got a laptop which I can just about
turn on, you know.
TJ: So I can download all the skype things.
KE: So you’ve been doing the skyping thing so that they can see dad and talk to dad. That’s brilliant.
TJ: Yeah, but it obviously doesn’t make up for
the lack of seeing them, but at the end of the day it’s better than
nothing. The great thing about the music business is that if you do get
it right, I can go away and work for two weeks. Do some shows, do
rehearsals, do what ever I do and do some recording and be home for
three weeks and do nothing but get up and take them to school, picking
them up, pottering about, you know, all that stuff.
KE: Exactly. It’s getting a balance. Cooking for the wife and that. Its
real life, isn’t it and real life happens to rock stars too.
TJ: Exactly. Absolutely.
KE: Final question. This whole thing about the internet. You obviously
seem quite with the internet, with your Skype. This whole free
downloading and everything like this; it’s coming up about music. I was
chatting to Twisted Sister earlier and JJ says he reckons CDs are dead
and in about five years there will be no CDs, its all going to be web
based. What do you think?
TJ: I’m not so sure about that. I think that there is enough evidence
to suggest that people still like to collect things. For instance, can
you see a classic rock fan who is in his forties now and has been into
rock all their lives downloading stuff from a website of their
favourite band and not have the sleeve to look at and read the lyrics
and carry around with them?
KE: I still find it bad not buying vinyl.
TJ: Yeah. I work with an independent distributor
for my stuff that goes through Universal, and they distribute it to the
high street. The guy who runs that company, Townsend Records does
everyone from the Artic Monkeys through to Simply Red and Thunder and
me and they say that they have seen a huge resurgence of vinyl which is
interesting. A lot of young kids are going ‘actually I really like the
idea of owning this plastic thing and artwork’.
KE: It used to be big business, but when it’s tiny, it doesn’t have the impact.
TJ: Exactly. I know what JJ is saying but I think that that is too much
of a wide stroke to say that. Personally, I think that a lot more music
will be given away for nothing. It may sound strange, but I think that
they will end up being promotional tools for bands to go out and play.
I think that’s what it will really be, because a lot of these deals
being done at the moment in the industry are what they call ‘360 deals’
where they own everything to do with the band. I’m not certain that
that will last either, because really what it really comes down to it
what is the artist getting out of that. Not very much. Everything is
owned by one person.
KE: No freedom though.
TJ: No. What will happen I suspect is that they
will find a balance, find a way of encouraging people to buy music
electronically but also the physical ownership of things will remain.
They said that the death of the book was going to happen when the
internet happened, but it’s made the actual buying of the book, the
hard copy has erupted. There’s more books sold now than there has ever
been before in the history of the world. People like to own shit.
KE: They do. They want things to put in their houses; they don’t just want the screen.
TJ: I have an Ipod, I love my Ipod, but you know
everything on there is off a record I own. I haven’t downloaded any
thing. I would buy it and put it on and put it back. I use my Ipod on
the road and when I’m at home I put my CDs on.
KE: I’m like that. My daughter’s Ipod is full of stuff that she’s
downloaded and I don’t think she owns any of it. I think what JJ was
saying that the younger ones and their culture, the culture of getting
things quickly like this and tiring of it and getting the next thing, I
think he was getting at that and it was making things difficult.
TJ: I think that’s true and I would say that
without a doubt the internet and downloading music and electronic music
is probably going to be the biggest format. But a very smart friend of
mine in the music business involved with releases, he’s works for Vital
Distribution, he said to me ‘the thing is there is nothing cool
whatsoever about a kid having an Ipod with music on it because there is
nothing to own, it’s just crackling noise, it’s just numbers, he can’t
take it to school hidden under his arm and show it to his mates. You
don’t want to give your earphones to someone to have a listen, you
don’t want their earwax on your earphones. You can take a record or CD
and look at it and pass it around and all the stuff that comes with
it’. You know, I think human beings are inherently hunters and
gatherers, we want stuff, we want to own it.
KE: Comparing it down, so that there’s no stuff left, only one box
where everything is electronic it’s not going to be. What are you
listening to at the minute on your Ipod?
TJ: On my Ipod at the minute I’ve got, to tell
you the truth it doesn’t change that much. I’m not that impressed with
the stuff that’s coming out at the moment, I’m very much a
traditionalist really, my passion is songs, so a lot of people I listen
to, I’ve got The Beatles on my Ipod, the latest Foo Fighters record
which I’m just getting into.
KE: Everyone is going on about this.
TJ: I really like that. I’ve got loads of stuff; I’ve just got back
into Lenny Kravitz. I’ve rediscovered his first record again. I do like
that about the Ipod, you can mix and match and put it on shuffle and
it’ll bring up a track you haven’t thought about for a long time.
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