Little Angels spent months and a fortune making an album called Spitfire, then lost the title three weeks before release when Britain went to war in the Gulf and the high-street chains would not stock a record named after a fighter plane. So the five lads from Scarborough rushed to London, stood in front of a camera for a cover their singer still says he hates, and put the record out as Young Gods.
It became their first hit album. The 1989 debut Don't Prey for Me had not charted at all; Young Gods went straight in at number 17, threw off four top 40 singles inside six months and moved Little Angels up from the Town & Country Club to the Hammersmith Odeon. It was a concept record spread across four studios, mixed in upstate New York by the men who mixed Appetite for Destruction, and it was the last album the brilliant Michael Lee ever drummed on for them.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Little Angels |
| Album | Young Gods (working title: Spitfire) |
| Release Date | February 1991 (UK) |
| Label | Polydor |
| Producer(s) | James "Jimbo" Barton and Andy Paul |
| Studio(s) | The Manor; Great Linford Manor; The Slaughterhouse; Music Farm. Mixed at Bearsville Studios, New York |
| Genre / Subgenre | Hard rock |
| Track Count | 13 |
| Total Runtime | 57:57 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | No US chart placing |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 17 (chart dated 2 March 1991) |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | Six weeks in the UK top 75 |
| Certifications | None traced |
| Estimated Sales | Not published |
| Key Singles | Boneyard; Product of the Working Class; Young Gods; I Ain't Gonna Cry |
Cultural Context
Operation Desert Storm began on 17 January 1991, and British radio went to war footing with it. Radio 1 ran a temporary 24-hour service of news updates, and the BBC adopted a list of 67 songs deemed unfit for airplay while the fighting lasted, from Kate Bush's "Army Dreamers" to Blondie's "Atomic". It was not a good month to be selling a hard rock album called Spitfire.
British rock itself was in rude health. On 20 January, three days into the air war, Little Angels played Wembley Arena on the rock night of the Great British Music Weekend, on a bill headed by Ozzy Osbourne alongside Magnum and the Quireboys. That was the company they kept: a new wave of British bands who wrote melodic, chorus-first hard rock and saw no reason to apologise for it. Jepson has said his band loved Def Leppard and Boston more than anything heavier, and knew exactly what they were.
The Band's Story Up to This Point
Scarborough schoolmates Toby Jepson, Mark Plunkett and drummer Dave Hopper started out as Zeus in May 1984, with the brothers Bruce John Dickinson on guitar and Jimmy Dickinson on keyboards. They became Mr Thrud in September 1985 and settled on Little Angels while recording the 1987 mini-album Too Posh to Mosh. Their manager, Kevin Nixon, signed them to his own York-based Powerstation Records, then to Polydor on 19 May 1988.
The early Polydor years were expensive lessons. The single "90 in the Shade" was cut with Canadian producer James "Jimbo" Barton, and Jepson later called the session "a disaster". Hopper was replaced on 16 August 1988 by Michael Lee, a teenage powerhouse from Darlington who, Jepson said, "absolutely blew us all away". Sessions for the debut began at Rockfield with Eddie Kramer, stalled, and were finished by Owen Davis with Nixon steering the ship.
Don't Prey for Me appeared in 1989 and missed the UK Albums Chart entirely. The band toured with Marillion and Cinderella, toured America with Yngwie Malmsteen, and then watched Polydor pull the album from US racks to save the push for the next one. The breakthrough came from a re-recording. Nixon heard a hit in "Radical Your Lover", a debut-era song written with Dan Reed, and squeezed a small budget out of Polydor to re-cut it in 24 hours at the Slaughterhouse in Driffield with engineer Stephen Harris. It reached number 34 in 1990, and "She's a Little Angel" followed it to number 21 that August. Audiences jumped, in Jepson's words, from 150 people a night to 400 or 500. The second album now had to turn that momentum into a hit record.
Pre-production and Demos
Jepson wanted a big swing. He has described Young Gods as "a kind of a concept record", and the model was Aerosmith, whose horn-driven Permanent Vacation had already pushed the band towards a brass section, and whose Pump was, he said, "a very important record for us".
"We wanted to broaden our horizons and we wanted to make something that would push the envelope a little bit, something that was a real statement."
Toby Jepson, interview with Steven Reid for Fireworks / Sea of Tranquility, 2019
That meant co-writers. Polydor A&R Susan Collins had tried to hire Bryan Adams's songwriting partner Jim Vallance to produce the band back in July 1988; he was too busy, but agreed to co-write when asked again at the end of 1989. On Monday 19 March 1990, Jepson and Bruce Dickinson turned up at Vallance's studio in Vancouver to find him laid low by a heavy cold. The week produced several songs, and one of them, "Back Door Man", opened the album.
"I did my very best to drag my aching carcass through a week of song collaboration. I could barely keep my head up due to headache, congestion and general misery."
Jim Vallance, on his own website
Jepson also wrote with Russ Ballard, who shares credits on "Juvenile Offender" and "Love Is a Gun". The third outside voice was Andy Paul, who co-wrote the title track, "Juvenile Offender", "Sweet Love Sedation" and the closing "Angels' Anthem", and who ended up co-producing the whole record. The rest came from the band, with the five members sharing credits across "Boneyard", "The Wildside of Life", "Product of the Working Class" and "That's My Kinda Life". Jepson wrote "I Ain't Gonna Cry" alone.
Creating the Album
The producer's chair went, remarkably, to Jimbo Barton, the same man behind the "90 in the Shade" session. In the meantime he had engineered and mixed Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime and Empire, and this time he shared the job with Andy Paul, engineering the sessions himself, with Peter Peck assisting.
The logistics were enormous. Drums went down first at The Manor, Virgin's residential studio at Shipton-on-Cherwell outside Oxford. The band then moved to Great Linford Manor in Milton Keynes for overdubs, taking over both the main house and the studio, while the spoken passages and narrative links that tie the concept together were edited in the Coach House studio on the same estate. The sleeve also credits Music Farm and The Slaughterhouse in Great Driffield, the East Yorkshire studio where the band had cut "Radical Your Lover", and Stephen Harris is back as additional engineer.
"It was such a technically difficult record, we'd spent weeks and weeks, we'd started off in the Manor Studios in Oxford doing all the drum tracks and then we'd gone to Great Winford Manor again to the overdubs."
Toby Jepson, Sea of Tranquility, 2019
The mix went to America. Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero had mixed Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction and Tesla's The Great Radio Controversy, and they worked out of Bearsville Studios near Woodstock, the room where Thompson says the pair tag-teamed the mixes for Metallica's ...And Justice for All. George Cowan assisted, and Bob Ludwig mastered the album at Masterdisk in New York. Jepson's verdict on the bill was blunt: "We'd spent months making this album and it had cost a fortune."
The finished record is a big one. Bruce Dickinson adds banjo and classical guitar to his electric parts, Jimmy Dickinson moves between keyboards, piano and organ, and the Big Bad Horns punch through "Young Gods", "The Wildside of Life", "Product of the Working Class" and the closing anthem.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Vocals, acoustic guitar | Toby Jepson | Writer or co-writer on every track |
| Guitars, banjo, classical guitar | Bruce John Dickinson | Co-wrote Back Door Man in Vancouver |
| Keyboards, piano, organ, backing vocals | Jimmy Dickinson | Hammond C3 credited on the US edition |
| Bass, backing vocals | Mark Plunkett | |
| Drums, percussion | Michael Lee | His last Little Angels album |
| Guest musicians | ||
| Horns | The Big Bad Horns | Big Dave Kemp, Frank Mizen, Grant Kirkhope; tracks 3, 5, 6 and the Angels' Anthem |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producers | James "Jimbo" Barton, Andy Paul | Barton also engineered |
| Additional engineer | Stephen Harris | |
| Assistant engineer | Peter Peck | |
| Mixing | Steve Thompson and Michael Barbiero | Bearsville Studios |
| Mix assistant | George Cowan | |
| Mastering | Bob Ludwig | Masterdisk, New York |
| Artwork and management | ||
| Photography | Andy Earl | Front cover |
| Design | Shoot That Tiger! | London design company |
| Devil logo | Charles Cutforth | Credited on the era's singles |
| Management | Kevin Nixon | Song Management Ltd. |
The names that matter most here are the outsiders. AllMusic's biography still credits Thompson and Barbiero as the producers, but the sleeve is clear: they mixed it. The production credit belongs to Barton and Andy Paul, and Paul's fingerprints are on the songwriting too. He stayed in the camp for years, co-writing later singles including "Too Much Too Young", "Soapbox" and "Ten Miles High".
The horn section had its own afterlife. Trumpeter Grant Kirkhope moved into video games, and in 2023 won an Ivor Novello Award for his Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope score.
The Songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Back Door Man | Jepson, B. J. Dickinson, Vallance | 5:49 | Written in Vancouver, March 1990 | |
| 2 | Boneyard | The band | 5:22 | Yes (UK 33) | Lead single, released before the album |
| 3 | Young Gods (Stand Up, Stand Up) | Jepson, Paul | 4:57 | Yes (UK 34) | Title track; horns |
| 4 | I Ain't Gonna Cry | Jepson | 4:47 | Yes (UK 26) | Highest-charting single from the album |
| 5 | The Wildside of Life | The band | 3:22 | Horns | |
| 6 | Product of the Working Class | The band | 4:37 | Yes (UK 40) | Horns |
| 7 | That's My Kinda Life | The band | 3:14 | ||
| 8 | Juvenile Offender | Jepson, Paul, Ballard | 4:52 | Russ Ballard co-write | |
| 9 | Love Is a Gun | Jepson, Ballard | 4:07 | Dropped from the US edition | |
| 10 | Sweet Love Sedation | The band, Paul, Hopper | 4:00 | ||
| 11 | Smoke in My Eyes | Jepson, B. J. Dickinson, Lee | 3:34 | Dropped from the US edition | |
| 12 | Natural Born Fighter | Jepson | 4:58 | ||
| 13 | Feels Like the World Has Come Undone (featuring the Angels' Anthem) | The band, Paul | 4:18 | Closing suite; horns on the anthem |
"The band" means Jepson, both Dickinsons, Plunkett and Lee. Timings are from the CD; the UK sleeve prints slightly different figures.
"Back Door Man" is no Willie Dixon cover but the Vancouver song, a near six-minute opener. Vallance noted that Jepson has called it his favourite Little Angels track. The clip below is the album version.
"Boneyard" went out first, in January 1991, a full band composition that was still in the set when Little Angels returned at Download in 2012. "Young Gods (Stand Up, Stand Up)" is the title track and the band's statement of intent, co-written by Jepson and Andy Paul, with the Big Bad Horns on board. Jepson told The Rockpit in 2023 that he wrote the lyric to talk about the aspirations you have when you are young, to take on the world and see it. In a band whose whole story was escaping a small seaside town, it was the obvious name for the record once Spitfire was gone.
"I Ain't Gonna Cry" is the one Jepson wrote by himself, and the one that went highest, reaching number 26 in July 1991. It has stayed in his solo acoustic sets ever since. "Product of the Working Class", the second single, is another full-band song with the horns on board.
The two Russ Ballard co-writes sit side by side on side two. "Juvenile Offender" was one of six tracks Polydor put on its US advance sampler, a sign of where the label heard the hits. The album then closes on its most ambitious piece, "Feels Like the World Has Come Undone", which gives way to the horn-led "Angels' Anthem", the finale of Jepson's concept.
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
Little Angels treated B-sides as a second album. Across four singles and their multiple formats, the Young Gods era threw off a stack of non-album originals, most of them produced by Andy Paul with the band and mixed by Paul and Stephen Harris:
- Jump the Gun: on the "Boneyard" picture disc, and later a Japanese bonus track.
- Revival and Take It Off: on the "Product of the Working Class" formats.
- Might Like It Better: on the "Product of the Working Class" CD single.
- Go (As You Please): a Jepson song backing "Young Gods".
- Bad Imitation: on the "Young Gods" 12-inch and CD, produced by Eddie Kramer.
- Frantic: a demo dated 9 September 1988, on the "Young Gods" 12-inch.
"Bad Imitation" is the curio: an Eddie Kramer production, surfacing on a 1991 single when the band's ill-fated Rockfield sessions with him were long behind them. "Frantic" dates from 9 September 1988, three weeks after Michael Lee joined. The 12-inch of "Boneyard" also carried "Sweet Love Sedation" from the album and an extended mix of the lead track, and "Product of the Working Class" came with a "Hot Sweat 'n' Groove Mix".
Japan got three of the B-sides as bonus tracks, "Take It Off", "Revival" and "Jump the Gun", on the original Polydor CD, which came with a photo booklet and sticker. America got a different album altogether: the US edition swapped "Love Is a Gun" and "Smoke in My Eyes" for the hits "She's a Little Angel" and "Radical Your Lover".
Album Artwork and Packaging
The cover that was supposed to exist showed the band in costume and props in front of a backdrop of pop-art aeroplanes, a perfect fit for Spitfire. When the title went, so did the artwork. Jepson thinks he may have come up with the replacement idea himself, out of panic, and the band were hurried down to London for a fresh shoot.
The result, photographed by Andy Earl and designed by Shoot That Tiger!, is a night-time street scene. Jepson stands in the centre in a black wide-brimmed hat and long black coat, while his bandmates are scattered around a shuttered shopfront covered in posters: one slouched on a chair at the left, one on a step reading a paper in sunglasses, one perched high up on the right. LITTLE ANGELS runs across the top in red outlined capitals.
"I hate the sleeve to 'Young Gods'. It's an awful photograph, it's a terrible record sleeve but we had no choice, we were literally stuck in this spot between the devil and the deep blue sea."
Toby Jepson, Sea of Tranquility, 2019
The singles were dressed far more lavishly. "Product of the Working Class" came as a gatefold 7-inch and a numbered gatefold 12-inch with six postcards. "Young Gods" had a limited 12-inch box with a stencil, badge and stickers. "I Ain't Gonna Cry" went out as a numbered 12-inch in a round tin, as well as a gatefold picture disc. Charles Cutforth's devil logo appears across the campaign.
Release and Reception
Young Gods reached the shops in February 1991 and entered the UK Albums Chart at number 17 on the chart dated 2 March. That was the peak. It fell to 32, then 54, 52 and 65, and left the top 75 in early April after six weeks. For a band whose debut had never charted, it was a clear arrival.
The music press were broadly warm. Kerrang! scored the album four out of five; AllMusic's later verdict was a cooler two stars. The real measure was the gigs. Jepson remembers the singles as hits that "weren't enormous, but they continued that Top 40 access", and the venues grew accordingly.
America was a different story. Polydor prioritised Little Angels and the Wonder Stuff in the US, but the band struggled to get on MTV and, in Jepson's words, the album "kind of died a death quite quickly" there. Japan took to them instead, and they played city halls there on the back of Young Gods.
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | UK chart entry | Peak | B-sides (across formats) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boneyard | 2 February 1991 | 33 | Fortunate Son; Sweet Love Sedation; Jump the Gun |
| Product of the Working Class | 30 March 1991 | 40 | Revival; Take It Off; Might Like It Better |
| Young Gods | 1 June 1991 | 34 | Go (As You Please); Bad Imitation; Frantic |
| I Ain't Gonna Cry | 20 July 1991 | 26 | Babylon's Burning; Funk 49; Oh Well |
The Official Charts runs were short and sharp: four weeks for "Boneyard", two each for "Product of the Working Class" and "Young Gods", three for "I Ain't Gonna Cry". The lead single itself was issued as "We're All Going Down to the Boneyard".
Nigel Dick directed the clips for "Boneyard" and "Product of the Working Class". Promo videos for "Young Gods" and "I Ain't Gonna Cry" followed, and those two plus "Boneyard" were gathered on the 1991 VHS Big Bad Video. On 18 July 1991 the band played "I Ain't Gonna Cry" on Top of the Pops, introduced by Jakki Brambles, on a show topped by Bryan Adams's "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You". In America, Polydor serviced radio with a promo CD of "Young Gods (Stand Up, Stand Up)".
Touring and Live
The Young Gods Tour was relentless. Jepson says the band never stopped from the start of the album cycle through to Jam, and the dates bear him out:
- January 1991: Rock City, Nottingham, then the Wembley Arena all-dayer on 20 January.
- March 1991: a UK run including the Town & Country Club in London on 13 March.
- April 1991: clubs across Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, back to the Marquee on 25 April.
- May 1991: theatres and city halls, ending at the Hammersmith Odeon on 25 May.
- June and July 1991: ZZ Top's Recycler stadium dates in Germany and Switzerland, then Milton Keynes Bowl on 6 July.
- August 1991: American shows, including The Stone in San Francisco.
"On that album we elevated from The Town & Country Club, which we'd managed to sell out prior to that, to Hammersmith! On our second album!"
Toby Jepson, Sea of Tranquility, 2019
The Milton Keynes bill was a who's who: ZZ Top headlining, with Bryan Adams, the Law, Thunder and Little Angels underneath. The Hammersmith show was recorded, and five songs from it became the Live at Hammersmith Odeon EP, issued in Japan in October 1991; live "Young Gods" and "Boneyard" also turned up on the 1992 "Too Much Too Young" CD single. The Town & Country show, which included a cover of "Kids Wanna Rock", finally came out in 2015 as the CD and DVD Access All Areas.
Then came the rupture. Playing in America, the band were in New York when they learned Michael Lee was leaving: he had auditioned for The Cult behind their backs. Everyone flew home on the same plane, and Lee went straight back out to Los Angeles for the audition. He played the Cult's whole Ceremony world tour through 1991 and 1992.
"He was sat at the front of the plane, we were sat at the back or something, you know, it was ridiculous... it hurt us because he was our mate and we'd 'found him' in lots of ways."
Toby Jepson, Sea of Tranquility, 2019
Lee's eventual replacement did not finish the tour. Jepson has been clear that Mark Richardson, a Scarborough lad who had roadied for the band, joined during the demos for Jam and played his first gig with them opening for Bryan Adams on a UK stadium tour.
In TV, Film and Media
The album's screen life is mostly the band's own. Big Bad Video, an 86-minute Polygram VHS from 1991, paired the promo clips with live footage from the Hammersmith Odeon and the Town & Country Club. The 2012 DVD One More for the Road collected the band's promo videos again, and the fan-club audiogram cassette for the 1991/92 "Road Gods" world tour came stitched together with Levi's adverts, the jeans brand having backed the tour. In 2020, Jepson's official YouTube channel posted a short making-of with Bruce Dickinson.
Controversy: The Spitfire Problem
The title had been chosen with care. After months in the studio, the band felt ready to break through, and Spitfire summed up the mood.
"The idea of Spitfire was to literally spit fire, we felt we were energetic and powerful and we'd got to this point and we'd started to break through."
Toby Jepson, Sea of Tranquility, 2019
Then came the Gulf War. Jepson remembers the call that Radio 1 would not play the single, and that Woolworths, WH Smith, HMV and Virgin were refusing to stock an album called Spitfire. It was around three weeks before release. Promo cassettes had already gone out under the old name, and the "Boneyard" single shipped promoting "the forthcoming album Spitfire". The record was renamed after its title track and released as Young Gods.
Covers, Samples and Tributes
The traffic on this album runs outward: the Young Gods singles are where Little Angels showed their record collections. Each B-side cover was cut with Andy Paul and the band producing:
- Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son", backing "Boneyard".
- The Ruts' "Babylon's Burning", from The Crack, on "I Ain't Gonna Cry".
- The James Gang's "Funk 49", co-written by Joe Walsh.
- Fleetwood Mac's "Oh Well", Peter Green's 1969 song.
A Beatles cover, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", followed on "Too Much Too Young" in 1992. The album's own songs have mostly lived on in Jepson's hands: "I Ain't Gonna Cry" and "Young Gods" are staples of his solo acoustic shows, and acoustic takes of "Young Gods", "Juvenile Offender" and "Love Is a Gun" appear on his 2024 Little Angels Live Rarities collection.
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
| Year | Edition | What's different |
|---|---|---|
| 1991 | Japan CD, Polydor | Take It Off, Revival, Jump the Gun; photo booklet, sticker |
| 1991 | US CD, Polydor | She's a Little Angel and Radical Your Lover replace two tracks |
| 2009 | Bad Reputation remaster | Adds Go (As You Please), Bad Imitation, Babylon's Burning, Funk 49, Oh Well |
| 2022 | Japan limited reissue, Universal | The Japanese 16-track running order |
The 2009 edition, on the French label Bad Reputation, gathers three of the four cover versions in one place. The 1994 compilation Little of the Past, which reached number 20, collected all four of the album's singles. There has been no anniversary box, but Jepson has been emptying his own archive: Little Angels Rarities Vol. 2, a signed CD limited to 1,000 copies in March 2025, includes "Boneyard" and "Ain't Gonna Cry" alongside spoken narratives about each song.
Legacy and Influence
Young Gods built the platform for everything that followed. Two years later, Jam entered the UK Albums Chart at number one in February 1993. Richardson was in the band by then, though Elvis Costello's drummer Pete Thomas played on the album itself. Jepson has said that "To go in at number 1 in week 1 was just extraordinary", but the band split in 1994 after a farewell show at the Royal Albert Hall.
Michael Lee went on to drum for Robert Plant and for Page and Plant. He died in November 2008, aged 39, and it was his funeral that brought the old band back into the same room. That led to a reunion at Download in 2012, with "Boneyard" and "Young Gods" in the set, a December UK tour and a farewell at the 2013 Isle of Wight Festival. In February 2026 the band announced the Big, Bad & Back tour for November with the Jam line-up of Jepson, the Dickinsons, Plunkett and Richardson, plus the Big Bad Horns, and Thunder's Luke Morley as special guest.
The members scattered widely in between. Richardson drummed for Skunk Anansie and Feeder; Plunkett managed Boyzone and Ronan Keating; Bruce Dickinson became managing director of BIMM Brighton; Jimmy Dickinson earned a PhD and leads a course at Bath Spa University; Jepson sang for Gun and Fastway and now fronts Wayward Sons.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The Spitfire tape | A five-track Polydor advance cassette titled Spitfire, with Back Door Man, Boneyard, Young Gods, Juvenile Offender and That's My Kinda Life, survives from before the rename. |
| Too late to cancel | Jim Vallance tried to call off the March 1990 writing week because of his cold, but Jepson and Bruce Dickinson were already on their British Airways flight to Canada. |
| A ghost writer | Former drummer Dave Hopper, replaced in 1988, still shares the writing credit on Sweet Love Sedation. |
| The drummer who failed his audition | Mark Richardson tried out to replace Michael Lee and was not picked, then sat in at rehearsals as a stand-in until the band asked him to join. |
| Moments of glory | Jepson names Don't Pray for Me, Kicking Up Dust and Young Gods as the songs still talked about as the band's "moments of glory". |
| Kemp's squeeze-box | Big Bad Horns saxophonist Dave Kemp later toured with Jepson's solo acoustic shows, playing saxophone and squeeze-box. |
| From horns to Bond | Trumpeter Grant Kirkhope went on to co-compose GoldenEye 007, the Nintendo 64 Bond game, with Graeme Norgate and Robin Beanland, and to score Banjo-Kazooie. |
| Thunder, then and now | Thunder shared ZZ Top's Milton Keynes Bowl bill with Little Angels in July 1991; 35 years later Thunder's Luke Morley is the reunion tour's special guest. |
The Podcast
The Riffology podcast covered Young Gods in episode 49, from the Scarborough origins and the Spitfire saga to the singles run and the New York flight home that cost the band their drummer. It is available on all the major podcast platforms and here on Riffology.
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