Derek was born 1 April “hundreds of years before the dawn of history,” having to endure growing up as an “April Fool’s Baby.” His father, Donald “Duff” Smalls, raised Derek after his mother, Dorothy, left home to join a traveling all-girls jazz band, The Hotten Totties. At age 17, Derek enrolled in the London School of Design, primarily, as he later explained it, “because of the initials.” Like many art-school students of the period, he was more interested in music and soon found himself a member of the all-white Jamaican band Skaface. “I never even tried to play the guitar, because it had too many strings and they were too small. Bass felt just right,” he told Ska News. Walking one day in 1967 through the then-tatty Soho district of London, Derek spotted a Bass Player Wanted notice on one of the neighborhood’s lampposts. It turns out Ronnie Pudding had just left the band Spinal Tap for a solo career after their first single, “Gimme Some Money,” had failed to chart. In 2019, Smalls parlayed his celebrity in the Low Countries of Europe in a position as Brand Ambassador for BruegelCoin, a Dutch-based crypto coin. He made personal appearances outside branches of traditional banks and did TV and press interviews promoting the cryptocurrency. In 2022, BruegelCoin collapsed in a wave of lawsuits. Derek, who had been paid in the novel currency, was out of luck…