The Wiggles
The Wiggles are an Australian children's music group formed in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in 1991. As of 2022, the group members are Anthony Field, Lachlan Gillespie, Simon Pryce, Tsehay Hawkins, Evie Ferris, John Pearce, Caterina Mete and Lucia Field. The Wiggles were founded in 1991 by Anthony Field, Murray Cook, Jeff Fatt, Greg Page and Phillip Wilcher. Wilcher left the group after their first album. Page retired in 2006 due to ill health and was replaced by understudy Sam Moran, but returned in 2012, replacing Moran. At the end of 2012, Cook, Fatt and Page retired and were replaced by Gillespie, Pryce and Emma Watkins. Cook and Fatt retained their shareholding in the group and all three continued to have input into its creative and production aspects, while engaging in occasional reunion performances. Watkins departed the group in 2021, with the group subsequently adopting an expanded line-up of eight members.
Field and Fatt were members of the Australian pop band the Cockroaches in the 1980s, and Cook was a member of several bands before meeting Field and Page at Macquarie University, where they were studying to become pre-school teachers. In 1991, Field was inspired to create an album of children's music based upon concepts of early childhood education, and he enlisted Cook, Page, and Fatt to assist him. They began touring to promote the album and became so successful, they quit their teaching jobs to perform full-time. The group augmented their act with costumed characters Dorothy the Dinosaur, Henry the Octopus and Wags the Dog, as well as the human character Captain Feathersword, played by Paul Paddick since 1993. Shirley Shawn the Unicorn was later introduced. They originally travelled with a small group of dancers, which later grew into a larger troupe. The group's albums, DVDs and television programs have been produced independently since their inception. The height of their popularity came in the early 2000s, after they broke into the American market.
The group were formally consolidated in 2005. They were listed at the top of Business Review Weeklys top-earning Australian entertainers four years in a row and earned A$45 million in 2009. The Wiggles have enjoyed almost universal approval throughout their history, and their music has been played in pre-schools all over the world. They have earned multiple Gold, Platinum and double Platinum records; have sold 23 million DVDs and 7 million CDs; and have performed, on average, to one million people per year. The band has earned multiple Australasian Performing Right Association and Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards, and they have been inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.
History
1988–1991: Background
and Jeff Fatt were members of the Cockroaches, a Sydney pop band known for their "good-time R&B material" and several singles recorded by independent labels during the 1980s. In 1988, Field's infant niece, who was the daughter of Cockroaches founder and band member Paul Field, died of SIDS, causing the group to disband. Anthony Field enrolled at Macquarie University in Sydney to complete his degree in early childhood education, and later stated that his niece's death "ultimately led to the formation of Wiggles". Murray Cook, also "a mature-aged student", was the guitarist in the pub rock band Bang Shang a Lang before enrolling at Macquarie. Greg Page, who had been a roadie for and sang with the Cockroaches during their final years, had enrolled in Macquarie to study early childhood education on Field's recommendation. Field, Cook, and Page were among approximately 10 men in a program with 200 students.In 1991, while still a student, Field became motivated to use concepts in the field of early childhood education to record an album of music for children. The album was dedicated to Field's niece. A song he wrote for the Cockroaches, "Get Ready to Wiggle", inspired the band's name because they thought that wiggling described the way children dance. Like a university assignment, they produced a folder of essays that explained the educational value of each song on the album. They needed a keyboardist "to bolster the rock'n'roll feel of the project", so Field asked his old bandmate Fatt for his assistance in what they thought would be a temporary project.
The group received songwriting help from John Field, Anthony's brother and former bandmate, and from Phillip Wilcher, who was working with the early childhood music program at Macquarie. After contributing to their first album, hosting the group's first recording sessions in his Sydney home, and appearing in a couple of the group's first videos, Wilcher left the group and went into classical music. The group reworked a few Cockroaches tunes to better fit the genre of children's music; for example, the Cockroaches song "Hot Tamale", written by John Field, was changed to "Hot Potato". Anthony Field gave copies of their album to his young students to test out the effect of the group's music on children; one mother returned it the next day because her child would not stop listening to it.
To promote their first album, the Wiggles filmed two music videos with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and created a self-produced, forty-minute-long video version. Finances were limited, so there was no post-production editing of the video project. They used Field's nieces and nephews as additional cast, and hired the band's girlfriends to perform in character costumes. Cook's wife made their first costumes. They used two cameras and visually checked the performance of each song; that way, according to Paul Field, it took them less time to complete a forty-minute video than it took other production companies to complete a three-minute music video.
1991–1993: Early career
The Cockroaches' former manager, Jeremy Fabinyi, became the group's first manager. Using their previous connections, he negotiated with the ABC to help them promote their first recording. The album cost approximately A$4,000 to produce and it sold 100,000 copies in 1991. Anthony Field and Cook got teaching jobs, while Page finished his degree, so they could only perform during school holidays; finding time to do so was, as Field reported, "challenging". Fabinyi advised them to tour in unusual settings throughout Sydney and New South Wales. The Wiggles' debut performance was at a friend's daycare facility in Randwick, New South Wales, for about a dozen children. They played for crowds at shopping centres like Westfield in Sydney and at small pre-school events and parties, and busked at Circular Quay, then moved on to regional tours and shows for playgroup associations, averaging about 300 people in the audience. They were promoted by local playgroups or nursing mothers' associations with whom they split their proceeds. They performed at pre-schools with other ABC children's performers; when 500 people attended these concerts just to see the Wiggles, they started doing their own shows, and according to Field, "Suddenly people started rolling up to performances in astonishing numbers".In 1993, Field, Cook, and Page decided to give up teaching for a year to focus on performing full-time, along with Fatt, to see if they could make a living out of it. As Fatt reported, "it was very much a cottage industry". They used many of the business techniques developed by the Cockroaches, choosing to remain as independent and self-contained as possible. John Field, Mike Conway, who later became the Wiggles' general manager, trumpeter Dominic Lindsay, and Cockroaches saxophonist Daniel Fallon performed with them. Anthony Field, with input from the other members, led most of the production of their music, home video releases, and live shows. Their act was later augmented with supporting characters: the "friendly pirate" Captain Feathersword and the costumed characters Dorothy the Dinosaur, Henry the Octopus, and Wags the Dog. These characters were initially performed by the band members themselves: Field played Captain Feathersword and Wags; Cook played Dorothy; and Fatt played Henry. In 1993, actor Paul Paddick permanently joined the group to play Captain Feathersword; he later became known as "the fifth Wiggle" and was as popular as the regular bandmembers. At first, the group travelled with a small group of dancers hired from a local dance studio to perform with them.
After the production of their second album, the Wiggles, who were called by their first names when they performed, began to wear costumes on stage as Fabinyi suggested and as the Cockroaches had done, and adopted colour-coded shirts: Page in yellow, Cook in red, Fatt in purple, and Field in blue. The coloured shirts also made it easier for their young audience to identify them. As Field reported, the decision to emphasise colour was "a no-brainer, considering our pre-school-age audience". Cook and Fatt already owned shirts in their colours, but Field and Page "met in a Sydney department store and literally raced to see who got the blue shirt".
1993–2004: Australian and international success
Through the rest of the 1990s, the Wiggles maintained a busy recording and touring schedule, becoming as Field reported and despite his strong dislike of touring, "the hardest-working touring act in the country". They released multiple albums and home videos and, depending upon the word of mouth of their audience, performed to increasingly large audiences in Australia and New Zealand despite having to re-introduce themselves to a new audience of children approximately every three years. They produced a new album and video each year and toured to promote them. By late 1993, they "grew bigger than anyone had thought", and hundreds attended their concerts; by 1995 they had set records for music and video sales. In 1997, Twentieth Century Fox produced a feature-length film, The Wiggles Movie, which became the fifth-highest grossing Australian film of 1998, earning over a million-and-a-half dollars.In spite of their early success in Australia, Paul Field reported that the band was unable to produce a television program on the ABC, where they felt they would receive the most exposure to the pre-school market. "Around 1996–1997", they filmed a television pilot for the ABC, but as The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 2002, "the project never got off the ground due to irreconcilable artistic differences". As a result, the Wiggles financed a TV program of 13 episodes themselves and sold it to Disney Channel in Australia and to Channel Seven, where it became a hit. By 1998, the Wiggles were ready to move on to international markets, despite its members' health issues, especially Anthony Field's. The reaction of producers in the UK was less positive than the group would have liked, although they were eventually able to make inroads there, but their real success came in the US. Disney arranged for them to perform at Disneyland in California, where they were discovered by Lyrick Studios, the producers of Barney & Friends. Both Anthony and Paul Field reported that Lyrick, despite their initial misgivings about whether American audiences would accept the band's Australian accents, came to understand the Wiggles and their goals, and after successful tests with American children, enthusiastically promoted them.
The Wiggles used many of the same promotion techniques in the US that they had used in Australia, and chose to keep their concerts simple and maintain the same values that were successful in Australia. The Wiggles performed during the intermission of Barney Live stage shows, which The New York Times likened to "getting the warm-up slot for the Stones" in the pre-school entertainment world. In 2000, when video sales took off in the US, Lyrick began to distribute Wiggles videos and advertised them by including Wiggles shorts as trailers in their Barney videos, which, as Anthony Field stated, "pushed us over the edge". At first, the group's videos were distributed in boutique stores such as FAO Schwarz and Zany Brainy, and on-line. According to Paul Field, they entered the mass media market when their videos became top-sellers at Amazon.com, and their first two videos, Yummy Yummy and Wiggle Time, landed in the top ten at Amazon.com. Stores such as Wal-Mart began to take notice, and began to sell Wiggles videos. The band released nine DVDs in the next three years to keep up with the demand.
As they had done in Australia, the Wiggles chose to tour, but start off small, with simple props and sets instead of hiring a touring company. Some of their first appearances in America were at Blockbuster Video parking lots in 1999 to small audiences—as Fatt said, "a dozen people". They performed at small venues such as church halls and 500-seat theatres in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and upgraded to larger venues as ticket sales increased. Anthony Field reported that one week they would perform to 8,000 in Sydney and to 20 people the following week at a parking lot in a small town in the US. One time, they performed for a dozen people at the Mall of America in Minnesota, but half of the audience were hired by Lyrick. Eventually, they moved to larger arenas such as the Beacon Theatre and Madison Square Garden. They performed at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, for six weeks. Their audiences began to increase, and they toured Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the US, and the UK.
The Wiggles' popularity in the US increased "in the shell-shocked weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York City in 2001", when the group performed there, even when other acts cancelled their tours, a decision that earned them loyalty and respect. According to Cook, the press proclaimed that they were braver than many Australian sports teams that had cancelled their appearances. Paul Field stated, "New York has really embraced them. It was a kind of watershed". Strong sales of the Wiggles videos eventually caught the attention of Disney Channel in the US, who was impressed by their "strong pro-social message". In January 2002, Disney began showing Wiggles video clips between their programs. By June of that year, the popularity of the clips prompted Disney Channel to add both of the Wiggles' television series to their schedule and showed full episodes multiple times per day. Anthony Field reported that despite their "modest production values", the shows were popular with pre-schoolers.
Beginning in 2002, the Wiggles filmed four series worth of television programs exclusively with the ABC. The network called them "the most successful property that the ABC has represented in the pre-school genre". By the end of 2002, according to Field, "we knew we were involved in something extraordinary in the US". Their concert schedule in North America doubled, seemingly overnight; they began performing up to 520 shows per year all over the world. They also began to produce other stage shows in places the Wiggles themselves were unable to visit, in Australia, the UK, and US, that featured their characters, a host, and a few dancers. The Age called this time period the group's "high point"; they earned A$45 million a year in revenues, and had several licensing deals and an international distribution agreement with Disney.
Despite their success, Anthony Field almost left the group in 2004, shortly after his marriage and the birth of his first child, due to his serious medical issues, which were worsened by the Wiggles' demanding tour schedule. After meeting chiropractor James Stoxen in Chicago, Field improved his health to the point that he was able to continue. He began to hire teams of chiropractors for himself, his fellow bandmembers, and cast members in every city they performed, which he credited with making it possible for them to fulfill their touring requirements.