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Wiggles got start as Cockroaches
Date published: 8/22/2006
By MARTIN F. KOHN DETROIT FREE PRESS One day in 1990 Jeff Fatt got a phone call. It was Anthony Field, his old mate from the Australian rock band the Cockroaches. After the band broke up in the late '80s, Anthony went to college to become a preschool teacher. Now, he was combining his musical talent with his talent for teaching and was about to record an album for children with a couple of classmates from the preschool teaching program at Macquarie University in Sydney. Anthony asked Jeff if he could come down to the studio and play on a few songs. "I wasn't doing all that much," Jeff recalls. "I think I was renovating my house." Jeff asked Anthony how much time he'd have to spend in the studio "and he said, 'Aw, just come down and when you're finished, you're finished.'" He's still not finished. Jeff, Anthony and the two classmates, Greg Page and Murray Cook, completed the album and stayed together as a band. Album and band bear the same name. The Wiggles. If, in the past 15 years, you have known--or have been--a little kid, you know the Wiggles. Through their concerts, recordings, videos and television, the Wiggles are perhaps the most popular children's singers around. The guys are in their 40s now. Anthony, Greg and Murray are married and have two children each. Jeff is single, but don't get the idea that he's living the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. "We're all nonsmokers," he says, "and those smoky hotel rooms into the late hours of the night was actually very against the grain of what I enjoyed. As you get older you also welcome a day job rather than a night job, so I'm absolutely loving it." Nonetheless, the bouncy tunes of the Wiggles have some rockin' roots. "It was all good-time stuff and not that far removed from what the Wiggles music is," Jeff says. "We adapted a few songs from the Cockroaches' song repertoire and made some of them into Wiggles songs, changing the lyrics, of course." Wiggles' songs arise from "a big brainstorming situation" involving Jeff, Anthony, Murray and Greg, as well as John Field (Anthony's brother and a former Cockroach) and the Wiggles musical director, Dominique Lindsay.
Date published: 8/22/2006
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