Music For The Pre-Ironic

By Belinda Luscombe Sunday, Feb. 10, 2002
    • Security has to be tight at a Wiggles concert. Fans will literally crawl through the crowd to the stage. Others get so mesmerized, they wet their pants. And then there are the ugly confrontations when the concert is over. None of it fazes the band's four musicians. When you have been the focus of toddler adoration for 10 years, you have pretty much seen it all.

    In their native Australia, the Wiggles are more popular than Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman combined. Anthony Field, Jeff Fatt, Greg Page and Murray Cook are huge stars, millionaires and marketing Midases. Now they have American ankle biters in their sights. They have sold more than 1.5 million videos and CDs in the U.S., and their newest release, Wiggly, Wiggly World, was Amazon.com's best-selling family video even before it was out. The Disney Channel has started playing their songs between shows every morning. And their second U.S. tour begins next week.

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    Field, 38, started the Wiggles a few years after he left the platinum-selling rock band the Cockroaches in 1988. He, Cook, 41, and Page, 30, recorded a few children's songs for fun while in college together. They were three of just a handful of men studying preschool education, which they chose because teaching toddlers wouldn't require them to stick to a curriculum.

    Wiggles stage shows and videos (there are now 10 in the U.S.) don't seem to abide by the rules of entertainment either. Their dancing seems corny, their costumes loud and their sidekicks (including Dorothy the Dinosaur, Wags the Dog and Captain Feathersword the Friendly Pirate) oafish. The way Fatt, 48, keeps falling asleep is just annoying. But Field attributes the group's success to its embrace of toddler notions of entertainment. "The language is very simple," he says. "The songs are unapologetically repetitive. Kids love to shout, 'Wake up, Jeff!' It empowers them."

    The band takes a similar approach to its music. "As an adult you'd always be tempted to say, 'We're not going to put in that chord because that's too easy; let's put in a minor fifth or something,'" says Field. "We say, 'No, let's keep it that easy.'" The resultant happy tunes stick to young (and, alas, older) brains like toffee.

    They also seem to travel well. A woman in Brazil made a recording of Wiggles songs in Portuguese and sold 650,000 CDs. A man in Germany is trying to put together a group with the same name, outfits, philosophy and playlist, but in German. The Wiggles are looking into creating an Asian version of the band.

    But even if the group never gets to be as big as Barney--with whom, until recently, it toured just to play during intermission--Field says no one in the band will mind. The Wiggles perform more than 300 shows a year and want to keep doing so, even though Cook and Page now have children of their own. "I'm never bored," says Field. "Kids are so uninhibited. I'll do it forever if my body can still wiggle."