Walking Disaster

Walking Disaster is a riveting story of excess lived in the limelight, told with candour, humility, and a thoughtful introspection rarely found in rock memoirs.

An unlikely rock and roll success story, Derek is an unassuming, intelligent, sensitive, and insightful creative who is most at home in Sum 41's ecosystem, bringing their high-energy shows to crowds around the globe on marathon tours that typically last a year or more. He isn't the fame-seeking type, but he has had to contend with an unexpected degree of tabloid and paparazzi attention throughout his career due to two high-profile relationships, one with Paris Hilton and the other, his four-year marriage to pop singer Avril Lavigne.

His life prior to the band is just as compelling. Raised in a single-parent household under difficult circumstances, Whibley found solace and an avenue for his musical gifts in punk rock. Deryck's father abandoned him and his mother just after he was born, after which his mother remarried. His stepfather, who worked in construction and dealt drugs, was violent and abusive. When Deryck's mother eventually fled with her son and filed for divorce, they were forced to live at a campsite in Western Canada for a year, hiding from his stepfather who had vowed to kill them both.

Introspective and revealing, in Walking Disaster Derek discusses the evolution of his music, fame, his own story of cheating death, as well as the radical societal changes that have taken place since he began his career – culminating in a phenomenal rock and roll story and artfully capturing the nineties and noughties era.