| Wach auf, Jeff!
The Wiggles ... cloning their act The phenomenal success of the Wiggles in Australia, England and America is about to be translated. John Macdonald reports. See die Wiggles in Germany next year and you'll see the group kids beg to see in Australia - same songs, same sound, same movements, same costumes. But you won't see the same Wiggles. They'll be Germans, chosen after exhaustive auditions and performing the Wiggles' songs and routines under licence in German. The Wiggles' manager, Paul Field, calls it the template for other clones in other languages, if it's successful. He likens it to Cameron Mackintosh representatives approving a local production of Les Miserables. "We've spent an absolute fortune on trademarks and copyrights," he said. "You don't want people ripping off what you created. We're saying, 'Here's our music and characters. You develop this'." The Wiggles - Greg Page, Anthony Field, Murray Cook and Jeff Fatt - have sold more music videos in Australia (almost 3 million) than anyone else in any genre. They have sold more than 1 million albums. In the US, after being on the market barely one year, their video sales are approaching 2 million. They will headline their own month-long tour of the US in November and will perform in the next Macy's Thanksgiving Parade in New York. Business Review Weekly listed them as having a $10 million turnover for the last financial year. Their income from merchandising is 20 per cent of that. The lead singer, Greg Page, says he has doubts about the German innovation. "The thing about the Wiggles is that it evolved, it wasn't formulated," he says. "There you've got four guys who don't know each other. You wouldn't have that fun if you weren't with people you liked." Murray Cook concurred. "If it becomes too consuming, we're not going to compromise what we have here." What they have now is year-round sellout concerts in Australia and New Zealand - often three a day - and two months in the US and one in Britain. Despite the seeming simplicity of their approach, they have been canny enough to keep control of their image. Some earlier videos they released have been withdrawn and reissued, with the hairstyles and clothing they developed later. Their manager, Paul Field (brother of Anthony), says they learnt from the rock industry to have control of their careers. They have paid for their own developments, so now feel they have creative and financial independence. "In the rock and roll game you're ripped off at every corner, you're nearly the lowest in the food chain. The Beatles, the Stones, Elvis ... They were incredibly successful but didn't have control of what they created." Anthony Field said he was told of a Brazilian woman who had performed the Wiggles' songs in Portuguese and had managed to sell half a million videos of her performance. Yet, he says he is unconcerned by the abuse of copyright. "The point is the songs work in another language." It's a long way from when Anthony Field approached fellow Macquarie University early education students Page and Cook, and Fatt, a fellow survivor of the pop group the Cockroaches, to form the Wiggles in 1991. "All I wanted to do was put out a good music CD. There was no five-year plan," he says. "I was an early childhood teacher with a rock background. All I wanted to do was combine early psychology and music ... There was no [early childhood music] market. It wasn't as if we wanted to make a fortune." When they started the only work available was birthday parties, he recalls. "We went to a lady in Double Bay, an agent, to see if she could book some shows. She said, 'How can I make any money out of four guys singing kids' songs? You guys won't make a living out of it'.'' |
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