| Aussies jam for the short set
By KEN HOFFMAN Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle Feb. 20, 2002, 10:58PM In my house, there's a race to the stereo. If I get there first, in goes a Beatles tape. If my 4-year-old boy wins, up come the Wiggles, a group of four mates from Australia who sing about a dancing dinosaur named Dorothy and a klutzy pirate who tickles people with his feather sword. The weird thing, my music and my kid's music sound pretty much the same. "We hear that a lot; yeah, we are influenced by a lot of the early '60s stuff when we write our songs," said Greg Page, lead singer of the Wiggles, the world's most popular band with the Chuck E. Cheese crowd. "We love that '60s feel. There were so many great grooves and different styles of music then. That's what's wonderful about doing children's music like we do. We don't have to stick to one style of music. We can do folk, rock, reggae or pop." Page and the Wiggles will pack the H'Town Arena Theatre tonight and Friday with thousands of screaming children probably attending their first concert. It's been that way around the world for almost a decade, ever since Page, Anthony Field and Murray Cook hooked up while studying childhood education at Macquarie University in Sydney. Jeff Fatt, a former member of the Cockroaches rock band, joined the group. And it was Wiggles time. Soon the Wiggles were writing children's songs with positive messages, innocent lyrics and hip melodies, and creating characters like Dorothy the Dinosaur, Wags the Dog, Henry the Octopus and Captain Feathersword. The Wiggles' first CD became a hit, and the group began performing 500 concerts a year. Incredibly, one of every two children in Australia owns either a Wiggles CD or video. Now it's time to unleash Wigglesmania in the United States. "Definitely, we've thought about America and what the reaction might be," Page said. "We wondered if our kind of music would translate to your country. We didn't know if there would be barriers. "But so far the American people, both children and parents, have been very welcoming to us. So far, fantastic." |