If Ya'll wanna read my blog go hear..
http://blog.myspace.com/jenawiggle
http://blog.myspace.com/jenawiggle
Saturday, May 26, 2007
and yahoo photoes is ending soon so I have to find a new website soon so I can keap Shareing with you guys AND putting picks on hear and the stream whet do you all like?? go to my space and tell me couse I will see it faster... THANKS!!!!! If you add me as a freind I can reply faster but you have to tell me who you are (wmb or tv.com name) THANKS!!!!
JENA
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
This is my youtube page
http://www.youtube.com/user/JENBETH5
My Recent Reviews
JENBETH5 has written 3 reviews.
He is a Very talented Person! He is a blue wiggle and preduces ALL the cds!! he can play the bagpipes, tin whistle, guitar, drums, trumpet, violin,
and didgeidoo. WOW!! he is soo awesome But I think the only time I did not like seaing him...
[+] Read Full Review
and didgeidoo. WOW!! he is soo awesome But I think the only time I did not like seaing him...
[+] Read Full Review
He is a Very talented Person! He is a blue wiggle and preduces ALL the cds!! he can play the bagpipes, tin whistle, guitar, drums, trumpet, violin,
and didgeidoo. WOW!! he is soo awesome But I think the only time I did not like seaing him was during the Press confrence he looked SO SAD!! I Hated Waching that! he is now going on tour with sam, murray, and Jeff and I think he will make the wiggles work without Greg... Greg will ALWAYS be a wiggle but Anthony wants to make this work and he WILL make it work!!!
and didgeidoo. WOW!! he is soo awesome But I think the only time I did not like seaing him was during the Press confrence he looked SO SAD!! I Hated Waching that! he is now going on tour with sam, murray, and Jeff and I think he will make the wiggles work without Greg... Greg will ALWAYS be a wiggle but Anthony wants to make this work and he WILL make it work!!!
Posted may 26, 2007 7:59 am pt
Who says Las Vegas is strictly an adult playground? Disney on Ice and the Doodlebops made stops earlier this year. Elmo and the Sesame Street crew are coming in April. And the Wiggles, the colorful preschool kings from Down Under, pop up Tuesday...
[+] Read Full Review
[+] Read Full Review
Who says Las Vegas is strictly an adult playground? Disney on Ice and the Doodlebops made stops earlier this year. Elmo and the Sesame Street crew are coming in April. And the Wiggles, the colorful preschool kings from Down Under, pop up Tuesday at the Thomas & Mack Center . Joining the Wiggles on their "Racing to the Rainbow Live!" tour are Captain Feathersword, Dorothy the Dinosaur, Henry the Octopus, Wags the Dog and the Wiggly Dancers. The Wiggles are one of the top-grossing entertainment groups in the world. The group was founded in 1988 in Sydney, Australia, by Murray Cook, Anthony Field, Jeff Fatt and Greg Page. Page left the group last year for medical reasons and was replaced by Sam Moran. During a recent phone interview from Sydney, Cook - the Red Wiggle - talked about the group's past, present and future. Q. How did the Wiggles begin? It was Anthony's idea (Blue Wiggle). We were teachers. He was into children's music and said let's record an album for children, which we did, and we got it released. We thought it was just a hobby, but it started to sell and we started doing some little shows - preschools, birthday parties and things like that. It just got bigger and bigger, and we decided to give up our teaching and give it a go for a year. It just kept going. What's the goal of the show? Mainly for children to have fun. But with our background in children's education, we know children can learn more when they're having fun. "Can you point your finger and do the twist" is learning about body movement. "Fruit Salad, Yummy, Yummy" is all about eating healthfully, but the way to present it is not, "Don't eat candy," but a more positive spin: Fruit salad is yummy. There are definite elements of education in there, but it's really subtle. To what do you attribute your amazing success? I suppose some of it is just our background. The original Wiggles were early childhood teachers, so we studied about the way children think and how to use music with young children. We knew how to talk to children, not to talk down to them but to talk to them on their level. And the songs are catchy, which the kids are into. And there is a lot of chemistry between the members of the group - with most successful bands, the chemistry between the members comes across. We were all friends before we started. And families respond to that fact that we are genuine about what we do. There are quite a few different elements. How has Greg's leaving affected the group? Has it been a difficult transition? It's been relatively smooth. It's always hard to lose someone whose been with you for 15 years. It's hard for us personally, he's a friend of ours and we miss him on the road and everything and the audience misses him, but there's a lot of goodwill surrounding what we do, with our audience, and they're pretty welcoming. We did a tour in Australia before the end of the year, and a lot of people had signs up saying, "Welcome, Sam." So I think that's really helped him, helped his confidence, and yeah, he's a different singer, a different performer than Greg, but we say there's a bit of a rebirth really, and it's been going along pretty well. What is Greg's problem? The diagnosis is orthostatic intolerance. I believe it means his brain doesn't tell his heart to pump more blood like when he stands up or runs or moves around, so he wasn't getting enough blood going through his body and he would pass out or feel faint. Is it curable? It's not. He's just learned to manage it. He's not doing great. He's up and down. Your home base is Australia. How much time do you spend in the United States? We come to the States about three times a year. We spend about four months a year in the U.S. Are you as popular here as in Australia? I think we're getting to be, here in the U.S. I think we're more popular in Australia just because we've been there for so long. But in terms of numbers, the United States is certainly our biggest country, just because you have 15 times our population. Have children changed in the 15 or 16 years since the Wiggles began? Kids are kids. There is a difference between the older kids in Australia and America. There are definitely some cultural differences. But I think children at the age we are reaching, the preschool age, there are not a lot of differences. I don't think children over the years have changed that much. What about performing in non-English speaking countries? It's difficult when performing for children. You need them to understand what you're saying. So yes, we do mostly go to English-speaking countries. One thing we're trying out is localized versions of the Wiggles. We started it in Taiwan, where we did a Mandarin-speaking Wiggles. Another one will be in South America. I believe it will air pretty soon now. We've been to Asia a few times. In China, the kids didn't know anything about us, but they got up and danced when we played the music. Has the show changed over the years? Our live show has changed. As we've become more successful we've been able to put more money back into the production so it looks better. We can take more people on the road. Everything evolves in different ways. We get ideas for songs or we try something different as we go along. Sometimes we do more dancing, sometimes more playing of instruments. It's always evolving. It's a way of keeping it fresh for us, but it's also important to keep it fresh for the audiences as well. Are you yet playing for children of the children you started performing for 15 years ago? Not quite, but we're pretty close, in Australia certainly. We have a lot of 18- and 19-year-old fans, which makes us feel a little bit old, really. Other than the Wiggles, are you into anything else? No. This is our whole life. We do more than 200 performances a year, and we put out two or three DVDs a year. We're always writing songs and recording, and we do TV as well - we're on the Disney Channel in the States. We're pretty busy. What's in your future? We're always looking for new challenges. A few years ago we did a feature film, something we might like to explore in the future, but mostly we just work on different ideas for the show. We'll keep going for quite a while. We're still young - youngish.
Posted mar 29, 2007 1:06 am pt
Child's play
The Observer
They sing about fruit salad, drive a big red car on stage and are the most popular band in the whole wide world for three-year-olds (and their parents, including Alex James and Jerry Seinfeld)....
[+] Read Full Review
The Observer
They sing about fruit salad, drive a big red car on stage and are the most popular band in the whole wide world for three-year-olds (and their parents, including Alex James and Jerry Seinfeld)....
[+] Read Full Review
Child's play
The Observer
They sing about fruit salad, drive a big red car on stage and are the most popular band in the whole wide world for three-year-olds (and their parents, including Alex James and Jerry Seinfeld). Johnny Davis meets the Wiggles Sunday March 18, 2007
Outside ice hockey season, Philadelphia's Wachovia Spectrum sports arena sometimes puts on rock concerts. Pink Floyd played two nights here on their 1977 Animals tour, a mishap with pain###ers inspiring Roger Waters to write 'Comfortably Numb' about the second. Springsteen blew through to promote his ###s & Dust albm while another American inst-tution were practically the house band; amid the adverts for Dunkin' Donuts, SuperPretzel and Pepsi hangs a sign celebrating their ageless rock: GRATEFUL DEAD - 53 SPECTRUM SELL-OUTS.
Child's play
They sing about fruit salad, drive a big red car on stage and are the most popular band in the whole wide world for three-year-olds (and their parents, including Alex James and Jerry Seinfeld). Johnny Davis meets the Wiggles Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer Outside ice hockey season, Philadelphia's Wachovia Spectrum sports arena sometimes puts on rock concerts. Pink Floyd played two nights here on their 1977 Animals tour, a mishap with pain###ers inspiring Roger Waters to write 'Comfortably Numb' about the second. Springsteen blew through to promote his ###s & Dust albm while another American inst-tution were practically the house band; amid the adverts for Dunkin' Donuts, SuperPretzel and Pepsi hangs a sign celebrating their ageless rock: GRATEFUL DEAD - 53 SPECTRUM SELL-OUTS. This afternoon, for the first of four consecutive sell-outs, the world's number one pre-school band will launch into a show greeted every bit as rapturously as any by rock's grizzly greats. 'We want everyone to have a safe and fun Wiggles experience,' thunders a voice, over a PA system on loan from Metallica. 'Are you ready to Wiggle?' The band enters stage right driving the Big Red Car - an outsized, electric-powered take on the VW Beetle - and introduce themselves. 'Hi everyone, we're the Wiggles! I'm Greg! ... I'm Murray! ... I'm Jeff! ... and I'm Anthony!' As usual, the Australians are dressed in primary-coloured T-shirts. They wave, beam and give the audience the big thumbs-up. The catchy eight-bar pop of 'Toot Toot Chugga Chugga Big Red Car' fills the arena as they lead the singalong: Murray playing his guitar on the back seat with Jeff, Greg at the wheel and Anthony in the pasenger seat, tucking into a bowl of fruit salad. 'Toot toot, chugga chugga, big red car,' they sing. 'We'll travel near, and we'll travel far. Toot toot, chugga chugga, big red car. We're going to drive the whole day long.' The song ends abruptly - no Wiggles song lasts more than a couple of minutes - and they bounce out of the vehicle. 'It's great to be in Philadelphia,' announces Anthony. 'We drove all the way from Australia, in the Big Red Car.' Then it's straight into the next number. 'Walking is great fun,' says Greg, via his mouthpiece. 'But when you go out walking, you want to make sure you are very careful.' During 'Look Both Ways', giant screens show the Wiggles following basic, choreographed moves to illustrate road safety; actions mirrored by the agog audience, a rolling tide of three- and four-year-olds waving foyer-fresh Wiggles merchandise. It's a pattern replicated with no respite over the next 70 minutes, through 'The Monkey Dance', 'Hot Potato', and the Wiggles' very own 'Born to Run' - 'Fruit Salad'. There are appearances by costumed mascots Dorothy the Dinosaur, Wags the Dog and Henry the Octopus, plus 'friendly pirate' Captain Feathersword, notorious throughout the seven seas for his sword made of feathers. Several thousand children and, judging by the number up and dancing, many of their parents have the time of their lives. 'He watches their DVDs from morning to night,' says Dawn Smyth of four-year-old Jake, after the show. Dawn and Jake drove down from New York this morning. 'He loves the music, he loves the wiggling, he loves the adventure. They're way more educational than cartoons.' To say that the Wiggles are the world's most successful children's entertainers is to ~ them with the faintest of praise. In the year ending June 2006, the former schoolteachers, rock band members and owners of 100 per cent of the Wiggles brand amased £23m from their catalogue of CDs, DVDs, TV shows, toys, apparel, furniture, books and a touring itinerary that finds them playing two shows a day, 200 days a year. They recently completed 12 shows at New York's Madison Square Garden, a run which prompted Coldplay's Chris Martin to say: 'We played a few nights there that sold out really fast. So we were like, "OK. We're really the big boys." Then we got told the Wiggles had sold it out for a week, playing three times a day.' In the US, the Wiggles have sold more than 12 million DVDs with t-tles like Wiggledancing, Wiggly Play Time and Hoop-Dee-Doo! It's a Wiggly Party (Britney Spears's last albm, by comparison, shifted one million). According to Twentieth Century Fox, in Australia one in every two children owns a Wiggles CD or DVD. Australia's Business Review Weekly aserts that last year the Wiggles earned more than Nicole Kidman and Kylie Minogue, and more than Russell Crowe and AC/DC combined. In 2005, that country's biggest export was steel. In 2006, it was the Wiggles. In January this year, Bindi Irwin, eight-year-old daughter of former Crocodile Hunter Steve, performed with the Wiggles alongside Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette and Olivia Newton-John on a tour promoting Australia to America, t-tled G'Day USA. 'We got a plaque,' Murray Cook (46, the red Wiggle) told me when we first met at the Australian High Commission in London last June, when the Wiggles had been named Exporter of the Year. 'It's pretty amazing.' 'To beat AC/DC is mind-blowing,' agreed Anthony Field (43, blue). 'They've got the same tour manager as us. He filmed Feathersword doing a version of his quack quack song ["Captain Feathersword Fell Asleep on His Pirate Ship (Quack Quack)"] and sent it over. Instead of "You Shook Me All Night Long", he sang "You Quacked Me All Night Long".' AC/DC are in good company: the list of the Wiggles' famous fans is impressive. Robert De Niro, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Sarah Jessica Parker have brought their offspring along to shows, while a minor sporting brouhaha erupted when Shaquille O'Neal was apparently too injured to play basketball for Miami Heat but fit enough to join the Wiggles onstage for 'Hot Potato' ('Hot potato/ Cold spaghetti/ Mashed banana'). 'Shaquille's manager came to the side of the stage and said to Murray, "Shaq wants on,"' recalled Anthony. 'He was already wearing his red skivvie [T-shirt], he's that much of a fan. Every sports station in America ran the story.' Another evening, the band were unnerved to look into the audience and see Metallica's James Hetfield glaring back. 'He was doing the horns,' Anthony said. 'All the way through, the heavy metal sign.' Where adults are fans, children are fanatical. As well as being short and almost insufferably catchy, Wiggles songs are custom-built to be kiddie catnip. As three-quarters of the group met studying early-childhood education, everything the Wiggles do is geared towards understanding how very young children think. They know they love copying repet-tive actions, dancing, and enjoy being given tasks to do. Wiggles songs focus on activities such as eating, pointing and getting dressed. 'You've got to hold children's attention,' said Murray. 'On our TV show, we do lots of talking down the camera. You're involving them. They respond a bit more than they might do with Pixar movies, for example. We're not disparaging that. But it is different.' Even if resistance is surely futile, in the UK the Wiggles are so far not quite as thunderously successful as they are elsewhere on the planet. Consequently, on the London leg of their last UK tour they made do with just the four shows at the Hammersmith Apollo. Before showtime, amid the disembodied heads of dinosaur Dorothy and dog Wags, a man known as Doctor Damage put Anthony through his paces. Bald, buff and possessed of a stare that could buckle wood, Damage trains the Australian cricket XI. He's also Team Wiggles' resident fitness #. Even for those performers not wearing a 30lb -animal head, the Wiggles' twice daily, all-singing, all-dancing show is physically punishing. 'This one is the spine extender,' Damage barked, as Anthony did chin-ups on the Apollo's lighting ladder. 'A 43-year-old man should not be doing this,' Anthony grunted. At the end of one matinee, Rolf Harris joined the Wiggles onstage for 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport' and presented them with a platinum disc for sales of the It's a Wiggly Wiggly World DVD. Backstage, Harris held court. 'I've been rushing about like a blue-faced baboon,' he explained. What's Rolf's take on the Wiggles' success? 'They relate to the kids. They do the songs and the kids do the actions. It's so nice to see children have decent role models.' He thinks about this. 'But it's an Australian att-tude. Which is, "I can do anything." Do it. And succeed.' Together they conspired to offer an alternative to nursery rhymes: new songs pre-school clases might find fun. Recruiting Jeff Fatt, and with the help of Anthony's brother, John, they rewrote the Cockroaches' songbook to focus on singing, dancing and fruit salad. One Cockroaches' song, 'Get Ready to Wiggle', already seemed to encapsulate how toddlers danced. In 1991, that was the name they adapted for their first CD. Since Murray had noted that children respond better to puppets than teachers, when they performed at shopping centres they added costumed characters Dorothy the Dinosaur and Captain Feathersword. In 1993, the Wiggles made a 13-episode TV show which they sold to Disney. Then they struck a deal with a company that was taken over by Hit Entertainment, overseers of Bob the Builder and Barney and Friends. A support slot with Barney followed and the Wiggles were off, releasing nine DVDs in three years. The Wiggles' success is resolutely old school. They put their faith in human interaction; in singing and dancing. Plus, they're sk i l led songwriters. In their vast songbook it's possible to detect more than an echo of White Albm Lennon, of Motown and of the bubblegum of the Monkees or the 1910 Fruitgum Company. 'I wrote "Fruit Salad",' says Anthony. 'I got the "yummy, yummy" from "Yummy, yummy, yummy/ I've got love in my tummy" [the 1967 Ohio Express hit "Yummy Yummy Yummy"].' 'They're really good songs,' said Blur's Alex James, whose three sons are devotees. 'There's something slightly indie about them. I've spent more on the Wiggles than on the Smiths or New Order. I went to America and they had, like, 20 DVDs and CDs. Which is a bargain for an extra hour in bed for the past two years. They're just cool.' 'It's not like, "Oh, we'd rather be singing great rock songs but instead we've got to sing 'Hot potato, mashed banana',"' tutted Greg. 'It's not something we do because we couldn't succeed at something else. It comes from a genuine love of children and entertaining.' 'This is so much more fun than being in a rock band,' said Anthony. 'It's more creative. ' After today's final performance, there's a problem. The Philadelphia Phillies baseball team have invited the group to throw the first pitch in a match against the Washington Nationals (in US tradition, celebrities of all stripes often open games). The stadium is 10 minutes drive away and the arena has laid on a golf buggy as transport, but not everyone will fit. Anthony has the solution: 'We'll take the Big Red Car.' So it comes to pas that, having been complicit in the notion that the Wiggles travel the world in a giant electric car, thousands of children leaving today's show with their parents get an extra treat. They get to see the Wiggles waving and smiling as they drive the Big Red Car out of the stadium and onto the freeway. You can't help but think any Englishman condemned to dress like he was in Star Trek while singing 'Crunchy Munchy Honey Cakes' 400 times a year would crack and punch Wags the Dog. Yet three Wiggles are happily married with young families. 'We're pretty boring,' said Murray. 'Our rider is just water.' 'We've got an espresso machine,' added Anthony. Perhaps they think of the cash. As one dad in the London audience put it: 'They're having the last laugh. For a few million I'd dress up as whatever you wanted.' Merchandising to children is its own Hot Potato. Feathersword swords (£6), Dorothy tails (£6), Wiggles mugs (£10), Feathersword hats (£12), various DVDs (£14) and Wiggly Guitars (£26) are just some of the items on sale before shows (afterwards, they've all but sold out). Not everyone's happy. 'Six quid for a balloon is too much,' complains Kate Hickman, at a London show with her family. 'It's disgusting. It cost us 80 quid to get in in the first place, and another 20 quid for balloons.' (They're good quality balloons, but still.) 'My feeling is, we should try and make this a brand, not just a band,' says Mike Conway, the group's business affairs manager. 'The Wiggly Guitar is one of the top-selling toys in America but the philosophy we have is: what would you feel comfortable allowing your child to have? We don't do confectionery. We don't do soft drinks.' Indeed, as anyone who has tried to extricate 'Fruit Salad' from their brains will attest, the message is asuredly one of healthy eating. But that doesn't mean there's not still money to be made. In America, Yoplait printed up 1.5 million yoghurt cartons featuring the band's faces. Motts, the food behemoth, has followed with 500,000 juice products. 'But it's important we're not driven by consumer products,' says Mike, continuing the dairy theme: 'That's just the cream at the end.' You might think the Wiggles can't carry on forever. You'd be wrong. In 2006 they launched a global franchise with a Taiwanese Wiggles and a Latin American Wiggles, new primary-coloured foursomes for the Mandarin and Spanish-speaking markets. (One Spanish Wiggle is female. Murray: 'Really, for early childhood, it's a bit more appropriate.') A Japanese Wiggles is on the way. Meanwhile, Dorothy the Dinosaur's off on a solo tour, targeting 'remote territories'. And the band recently opened Wiggles World, in Australia's biggest theme park. 'Like the Stones, the Wiggles have got plenty of years left in them,' said Conway. 'Children don't see a grey hair or two. But a theme park is a sustainable solution. It makes it permanent.' And if that doesn't cement their legacy, they have proposed doing what the Pet Shop Boys once suggested: hand the coloured skivvies down to younger subst-tutes. Then, last November, it really happened. Following months of on-off illness, Greg was diagnosed with orthostatic intolerance - a blood pressure anomaly that means standing upright makes him nauseous and fatigued. He could no longer perform as a Wiggle. In a sober video posted on the Wiggles website, Greg - atypically wearing a regular black top - symbolically handed over his yellow skivvy to Sam Moran, his understudy. 'I'll miss being part of the Wiggles very much, but this is the right decision because it will allow me to focus on managing my health,' he explained. Moran undertook his first US tour with the group this year. 'Kids accept change much better than adults do,' Sam told me earler this month. 'The way we're going to deal with it is not pretend that I'm Greg, by any means. We start the show with Greg's farewell video and use it to explain to the children that just as children get sick, the Wiggles get sick, too.' He said that, so far, there have been no tears before bedtime to report. 'Well, some of the younger ones don't really understand it. Because I'm roughly the same height as Greg. They say "Greg, have you had a haircut?"' The real Greg, meanwhile, is 'still up and down. But he seems to be managing. At least he knows what his illness is now.' And Greg will continue to get royalties from the back catalogue. Sam's already started writing songs. Meanwhile, there are three US tours, three new DVDs and a new TV show to film this year. Seemingly nothing can halt the Big Red Car as it drives the Wiggles inexorably onward to world domination. Well, almost nothing. There is one pressing snag with the Taiwanese Wiggles. 'Culturally, they don't have an equivalent for mashed banana,' said Murray. 'We're going to have to find some new lyrics to "Hot Potato".'
The Observer
They sing about fruit salad, drive a big red car on stage and are the most popular band in the whole wide world for three-year-olds (and their parents, including Alex James and Jerry Seinfeld). Johnny Davis meets the Wiggles Sunday March 18, 2007
Outside ice hockey season, Philadelphia's Wachovia Spectrum sports arena sometimes puts on rock concerts. Pink Floyd played two nights here on their 1977 Animals tour, a mishap with pain###ers inspiring Roger Waters to write 'Comfortably Numb' about the second. Springsteen blew through to promote his ###s & Dust albm while another American inst-tution were practically the house band; amid the adverts for Dunkin' Donuts, SuperPretzel and Pepsi hangs a sign celebrating their ageless rock: GRATEFUL DEAD - 53 SPECTRUM SELL-OUTS.
Child's play
They sing about fruit salad, drive a big red car on stage and are the most popular band in the whole wide world for three-year-olds (and their parents, including Alex James and Jerry Seinfeld). Johnny Davis meets the Wiggles Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer Outside ice hockey season, Philadelphia's Wachovia Spectrum sports arena sometimes puts on rock concerts. Pink Floyd played two nights here on their 1977 Animals tour, a mishap with pain###ers inspiring Roger Waters to write 'Comfortably Numb' about the second. Springsteen blew through to promote his ###s & Dust albm while another American inst-tution were practically the house band; amid the adverts for Dunkin' Donuts, SuperPretzel and Pepsi hangs a sign celebrating their ageless rock: GRATEFUL DEAD - 53 SPECTRUM SELL-OUTS. This afternoon, for the first of four consecutive sell-outs, the world's number one pre-school band will launch into a show greeted every bit as rapturously as any by rock's grizzly greats. 'We want everyone to have a safe and fun Wiggles experience,' thunders a voice, over a PA system on loan from Metallica. 'Are you ready to Wiggle?' The band enters stage right driving the Big Red Car - an outsized, electric-powered take on the VW Beetle - and introduce themselves. 'Hi everyone, we're the Wiggles! I'm Greg! ... I'm Murray! ... I'm Jeff! ... and I'm Anthony!' As usual, the Australians are dressed in primary-coloured T-shirts. They wave, beam and give the audience the big thumbs-up. The catchy eight-bar pop of 'Toot Toot Chugga Chugga Big Red Car' fills the arena as they lead the singalong: Murray playing his guitar on the back seat with Jeff, Greg at the wheel and Anthony in the pasenger seat, tucking into a bowl of fruit salad. 'Toot toot, chugga chugga, big red car,' they sing. 'We'll travel near, and we'll travel far. Toot toot, chugga chugga, big red car. We're going to drive the whole day long.' The song ends abruptly - no Wiggles song lasts more than a couple of minutes - and they bounce out of the vehicle. 'It's great to be in Philadelphia,' announces Anthony. 'We drove all the way from Australia, in the Big Red Car.' Then it's straight into the next number. 'Walking is great fun,' says Greg, via his mouthpiece. 'But when you go out walking, you want to make sure you are very careful.' During 'Look Both Ways', giant screens show the Wiggles following basic, choreographed moves to illustrate road safety; actions mirrored by the agog audience, a rolling tide of three- and four-year-olds waving foyer-fresh Wiggles merchandise. It's a pattern replicated with no respite over the next 70 minutes, through 'The Monkey Dance', 'Hot Potato', and the Wiggles' very own 'Born to Run' - 'Fruit Salad'. There are appearances by costumed mascots Dorothy the Dinosaur, Wags the Dog and Henry the Octopus, plus 'friendly pirate' Captain Feathersword, notorious throughout the seven seas for his sword made of feathers. Several thousand children and, judging by the number up and dancing, many of their parents have the time of their lives. 'He watches their DVDs from morning to night,' says Dawn Smyth of four-year-old Jake, after the show. Dawn and Jake drove down from New York this morning. 'He loves the music, he loves the wiggling, he loves the adventure. They're way more educational than cartoons.' To say that the Wiggles are the world's most successful children's entertainers is to ~ them with the faintest of praise. In the year ending June 2006, the former schoolteachers, rock band members and owners of 100 per cent of the Wiggles brand amased £23m from their catalogue of CDs, DVDs, TV shows, toys, apparel, furniture, books and a touring itinerary that finds them playing two shows a day, 200 days a year. They recently completed 12 shows at New York's Madison Square Garden, a run which prompted Coldplay's Chris Martin to say: 'We played a few nights there that sold out really fast. So we were like, "OK. We're really the big boys." Then we got told the Wiggles had sold it out for a week, playing three times a day.' In the US, the Wiggles have sold more than 12 million DVDs with t-tles like Wiggledancing, Wiggly Play Time and Hoop-Dee-Doo! It's a Wiggly Party (Britney Spears's last albm, by comparison, shifted one million). According to Twentieth Century Fox, in Australia one in every two children owns a Wiggles CD or DVD. Australia's Business Review Weekly aserts that last year the Wiggles earned more than Nicole Kidman and Kylie Minogue, and more than Russell Crowe and AC/DC combined. In 2005, that country's biggest export was steel. In 2006, it was the Wiggles. In January this year, Bindi Irwin, eight-year-old daughter of former Crocodile Hunter Steve, performed with the Wiggles alongside Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette and Olivia Newton-John on a tour promoting Australia to America, t-tled G'Day USA. 'We got a plaque,' Murray Cook (46, the red Wiggle) told me when we first met at the Australian High Commission in London last June, when the Wiggles had been named Exporter of the Year. 'It's pretty amazing.' 'To beat AC/DC is mind-blowing,' agreed Anthony Field (43, blue). 'They've got the same tour manager as us. He filmed Feathersword doing a version of his quack quack song ["Captain Feathersword Fell Asleep on His Pirate Ship (Quack Quack)"] and sent it over. Instead of "You Shook Me All Night Long", he sang "You Quacked Me All Night Long".' AC/DC are in good company: the list of the Wiggles' famous fans is impressive. Robert De Niro, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Sarah Jessica Parker have brought their offspring along to shows, while a minor sporting brouhaha erupted when Shaquille O'Neal was apparently too injured to play basketball for Miami Heat but fit enough to join the Wiggles onstage for 'Hot Potato' ('Hot potato/ Cold spaghetti/ Mashed banana'). 'Shaquille's manager came to the side of the stage and said to Murray, "Shaq wants on,"' recalled Anthony. 'He was already wearing his red skivvie [T-shirt], he's that much of a fan. Every sports station in America ran the story.' Another evening, the band were unnerved to look into the audience and see Metallica's James Hetfield glaring back. 'He was doing the horns,' Anthony said. 'All the way through, the heavy metal sign.' Where adults are fans, children are fanatical. As well as being short and almost insufferably catchy, Wiggles songs are custom-built to be kiddie catnip. As three-quarters of the group met studying early-childhood education, everything the Wiggles do is geared towards understanding how very young children think. They know they love copying repet-tive actions, dancing, and enjoy being given tasks to do. Wiggles songs focus on activities such as eating, pointing and getting dressed. 'You've got to hold children's attention,' said Murray. 'On our TV show, we do lots of talking down the camera. You're involving them. They respond a bit more than they might do with Pixar movies, for example. We're not disparaging that. But it is different.' Even if resistance is surely futile, in the UK the Wiggles are so far not quite as thunderously successful as they are elsewhere on the planet. Consequently, on the London leg of their last UK tour they made do with just the four shows at the Hammersmith Apollo. Before showtime, amid the disembodied heads of dinosaur Dorothy and dog Wags, a man known as Doctor Damage put Anthony through his paces. Bald, buff and possessed of a stare that could buckle wood, Damage trains the Australian cricket XI. He's also Team Wiggles' resident fitness #. Even for those performers not wearing a 30lb -animal head, the Wiggles' twice daily, all-singing, all-dancing show is physically punishing. 'This one is the spine extender,' Damage barked, as Anthony did chin-ups on the Apollo's lighting ladder. 'A 43-year-old man should not be doing this,' Anthony grunted. At the end of one matinee, Rolf Harris joined the Wiggles onstage for 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport' and presented them with a platinum disc for sales of the It's a Wiggly Wiggly World DVD. Backstage, Harris held court. 'I've been rushing about like a blue-faced baboon,' he explained. What's Rolf's take on the Wiggles' success? 'They relate to the kids. They do the songs and the kids do the actions. It's so nice to see children have decent role models.' He thinks about this. 'But it's an Australian att-tude. Which is, "I can do anything." Do it. And succeed.' Together they conspired to offer an alternative to nursery rhymes: new songs pre-school clases might find fun. Recruiting Jeff Fatt, and with the help of Anthony's brother, John, they rewrote the Cockroaches' songbook to focus on singing, dancing and fruit salad. One Cockroaches' song, 'Get Ready to Wiggle', already seemed to encapsulate how toddlers danced. In 1991, that was the name they adapted for their first CD. Since Murray had noted that children respond better to puppets than teachers, when they performed at shopping centres they added costumed characters Dorothy the Dinosaur and Captain Feathersword. In 1993, the Wiggles made a 13-episode TV show which they sold to Disney. Then they struck a deal with a company that was taken over by Hit Entertainment, overseers of Bob the Builder and Barney and Friends. A support slot with Barney followed and the Wiggles were off, releasing nine DVDs in three years. The Wiggles' success is resolutely old school. They put their faith in human interaction; in singing and dancing. Plus, they're sk i l led songwriters. In their vast songbook it's possible to detect more than an echo of White Albm Lennon, of Motown and of the bubblegum of the Monkees or the 1910 Fruitgum Company. 'I wrote "Fruit Salad",' says Anthony. 'I got the "yummy, yummy" from "Yummy, yummy, yummy/ I've got love in my tummy" [the 1967 Ohio Express hit "Yummy Yummy Yummy"].' 'They're really good songs,' said Blur's Alex James, whose three sons are devotees. 'There's something slightly indie about them. I've spent more on the Wiggles than on the Smiths or New Order. I went to America and they had, like, 20 DVDs and CDs. Which is a bargain for an extra hour in bed for the past two years. They're just cool.' 'It's not like, "Oh, we'd rather be singing great rock songs but instead we've got to sing 'Hot potato, mashed banana',"' tutted Greg. 'It's not something we do because we couldn't succeed at something else. It comes from a genuine love of children and entertaining.' 'This is so much more fun than being in a rock band,' said Anthony. 'It's more creative. ' After today's final performance, there's a problem. The Philadelphia Phillies baseball team have invited the group to throw the first pitch in a match against the Washington Nationals (in US tradition, celebrities of all stripes often open games). The stadium is 10 minutes drive away and the arena has laid on a golf buggy as transport, but not everyone will fit. Anthony has the solution: 'We'll take the Big Red Car.' So it comes to pas that, having been complicit in the notion that the Wiggles travel the world in a giant electric car, thousands of children leaving today's show with their parents get an extra treat. They get to see the Wiggles waving and smiling as they drive the Big Red Car out of the stadium and onto the freeway. You can't help but think any Englishman condemned to dress like he was in Star Trek while singing 'Crunchy Munchy Honey Cakes' 400 times a year would crack and punch Wags the Dog. Yet three Wiggles are happily married with young families. 'We're pretty boring,' said Murray. 'Our rider is just water.' 'We've got an espresso machine,' added Anthony. Perhaps they think of the cash. As one dad in the London audience put it: 'They're having the last laugh. For a few million I'd dress up as whatever you wanted.' Merchandising to children is its own Hot Potato. Feathersword swords (£6), Dorothy tails (£6), Wiggles mugs (£10), Feathersword hats (£12), various DVDs (£14) and Wiggly Guitars (£26) are just some of the items on sale before shows (afterwards, they've all but sold out). Not everyone's happy. 'Six quid for a balloon is too much,' complains Kate Hickman, at a London show with her family. 'It's disgusting. It cost us 80 quid to get in in the first place, and another 20 quid for balloons.' (They're good quality balloons, but still.) 'My feeling is, we should try and make this a brand, not just a band,' says Mike Conway, the group's business affairs manager. 'The Wiggly Guitar is one of the top-selling toys in America but the philosophy we have is: what would you feel comfortable allowing your child to have? We don't do confectionery. We don't do soft drinks.' Indeed, as anyone who has tried to extricate 'Fruit Salad' from their brains will attest, the message is asuredly one of healthy eating. But that doesn't mean there's not still money to be made. In America, Yoplait printed up 1.5 million yoghurt cartons featuring the band's faces. Motts, the food behemoth, has followed with 500,000 juice products. 'But it's important we're not driven by consumer products,' says Mike, continuing the dairy theme: 'That's just the cream at the end.' You might think the Wiggles can't carry on forever. You'd be wrong. In 2006 they launched a global franchise with a Taiwanese Wiggles and a Latin American Wiggles, new primary-coloured foursomes for the Mandarin and Spanish-speaking markets. (One Spanish Wiggle is female. Murray: 'Really, for early childhood, it's a bit more appropriate.') A Japanese Wiggles is on the way. Meanwhile, Dorothy the Dinosaur's off on a solo tour, targeting 'remote territories'. And the band recently opened Wiggles World, in Australia's biggest theme park. 'Like the Stones, the Wiggles have got plenty of years left in them,' said Conway. 'Children don't see a grey hair or two. But a theme park is a sustainable solution. It makes it permanent.' And if that doesn't cement their legacy, they have proposed doing what the Pet Shop Boys once suggested: hand the coloured skivvies down to younger subst-tutes. Then, last November, it really happened. Following months of on-off illness, Greg was diagnosed with orthostatic intolerance - a blood pressure anomaly that means standing upright makes him nauseous and fatigued. He could no longer perform as a Wiggle. In a sober video posted on the Wiggles website, Greg - atypically wearing a regular black top - symbolically handed over his yellow skivvy to Sam Moran, his understudy. 'I'll miss being part of the Wiggles very much, but this is the right decision because it will allow me to focus on managing my health,' he explained. Moran undertook his first US tour with the group this year. 'Kids accept change much better than adults do,' Sam told me earler this month. 'The way we're going to deal with it is not pretend that I'm Greg, by any means. We start the show with Greg's farewell video and use it to explain to the children that just as children get sick, the Wiggles get sick, too.' He said that, so far, there have been no tears before bedtime to report. 'Well, some of the younger ones don't really understand it. Because I'm roughly the same height as Greg. They say "Greg, have you had a haircut?"' The real Greg, meanwhile, is 'still up and down. But he seems to be managing. At least he knows what his illness is now.' And Greg will continue to get royalties from the back catalogue. Sam's already started writing songs. Meanwhile, there are three US tours, three new DVDs and a new TV show to film this year. Seemingly nothing can halt the Big Red Car as it drives the Wiggles inexorably onward to world domination. Well, almost nothing. There is one pressing snag with the Taiwanese Wiggles. 'Culturally, they don't have an equivalent for mashed banana,' said Murray. 'We're going to have to find some new lyrics to "Hot Potato".'
Posted mar 21, 2007 12:52 am pt


