https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2019/10/12/spinal-taps-derek-smalls-has-to-hear-the-political-drumbeat/



By LARRY WILSON | lwilson@scng.com | Pasadena Star News
PUBLISHED: October 12, 2019 at 3:37 pm | UPDATED: October 12, 2019 at 3:37 pm
When our own politics get too much to bear, a Yank can look across the pond for the kind of solace only schadenfreude can provide.

I mean, we have as a “leader” a narcissistic professional liar with bad hair who pretends to be a populist conservative but really makes it up as he goes along, born rich, forever troubled by women — and so do the Brits.

Boris Johnson, prime minister of the United Kingdom, first started making money from lying as a young journalist posted to Brussels, where colleagues say he was too lazy to go out and talk to people, so he just made up quotes from imaginary sources and put them into his news stories.

And he’s in a pickle now, because the most recent person he professionally lied to was Queen Elizabeth II, fibbing about why he “needed” to dissolve Parliament.

I really wanted to check in with an Englishman, just to, you know, gloat, and so was most pleased when the phone rang Wednesday and Derek Smalls was on the line. That’s right: the bassist for Spinal Tap. Straight out of Nilford-on-Null. I asked him where he stood on Brexit — a Leaver, a Stayer?

“I’m not really into politics,” he said. “Not a voter.”

Oh — copy that. Derek was really calling to promote his Lukewarm Water Live! tour, coming to the Wiltern in Los Angeles Nov. 6. Just like their drummers always do, the rest of Spinal Tap have gone missing, and to celebrate his 75th birthday, he’s touring solo with an all-star band and a symphony orchestra playing both Tap numbers and songs from his new album, “Smalls Change (Meditations Upon Ageing),” with the first stop on a West Coast swing right here in L.A. Big guest names on … tap … for the local show, and some more will be beamed in to giant video screens via, as they say, satellite.

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