Think of an iconic bass player – Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, Hooky from New Order, Lemmy from Motörhead – and you’d be foolish to ignore the low-frequency rumblings of Spın̈al Tap bassist Derek Smalls. Born in the lesser-known town of Nilford on the River Null in the West Midlands, Smalls was raised by his father, Donald “Duff” Smalls (who ran a telephone sanitisation business) after his mother, Dorothy, left home to join travelling all-girls’ jazz band The Hotten Totties.
At 17, Smalls enrolled at the London School of Design (“Mainly because of the letters”), where he first became interested in playing music, joining the all-white Jamaican band Skaface. (“I never even tried to play the guitar, because it had too many strings,” Smalls said.) In 1967, he spotted a notice on a lamppost in Soho: “Bass player wanted” after original Tap bassist Ronnie Pudding left for a solo career after debut single Gimme Some Money failed to chart.
In 1984, the band appeared in one of the most loved documentaries of all time: This Is Spın̈al Tap: A Rockumentary by Martin Di Bergi. Smalls described it as “a hatchet job”. “There were plenty of nights when we found our way to the stage, but of course they didn’t show you that,” he says. Luckily, Spın̈al Tap found their way to the Pyramid stage to play Glastonbury in 2009.
So what else is there to know about Derek Albion Smalls? For pleasure, he smokes a pipe. For loyalty, he supports Shrewsbury Town and West Ham. He’s renowned among botanists for patenting the Death by Midnight, an entirely black rose. He stuck a courgette wrapped in tinfoil down his Spandex (which resulted in an embarrassing incident passing through a metal detector at Chicago Airport during Tap’s 1982’s Tap Into America tour). In 2018, Smalls released his first proper solo album, Smalls Change. (His first non-commercial solo album, It’s a Smalls World, released in the 70s, has since been deleted.) “As a bass player, first with Spın̈al Tap and now solo, I’m used to seeing life from the bottom,” he wrote in the Guardian in 2018.
With a Spın̈al Tap sequel featuring the original lineup very much in the works, and new solo single Must Crush Barbie – which he’d very much like to talk about – out now, Smalls is all ears and facial hair to take on your questions.
Please get them over by midday on Thursday 21 September and we’ll print his answers in Film & Music on Friday 29 September.
