Happy kids make for happy Wiggles

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, April 21, 2005

Toward the end of 1990, three friends asked Jeff Fatt for help with a university project.

The friends, Anthony Field, Murray Cook and Greg Page, were all studying early childhood education at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and were writing music for a children’s album as their project.

Field and Fatt had played together in a pop band called the Cockroaches, which enjoyed several hit singles in Australia during the 1980s.

Fatt remembers thinking the project was no big deal.

“I didn’t think too much of it, other than I was doing something to my house,” he recalled. “I asked them how long it was going to take.”

It’s turned out to be 14 years and counting.

Naming themselves the Wiggles after the way young children dance to music, the four took their finished tape to ABC Music, Australia’s national broadcasting company. ABC liked what it heard and released the self-titled album in 1991. It wasn’t long before this university project made Field, Cook and Page – now joined by Fatt – re-think their plans to go into teaching.

Today, the Wiggles are a household name in Australia. And they’re getting known in the United States as well. They return to the Everett Events Center with two shows Sunday.

The group has a show airing on the Disney Playhouse cable channel and travels to these shores several times each year to bring their live show to venues across the country. A new live DVD-CD, “Live Hot Potatoes,” which features the group singing some of their favorite songs in concert in Australia, has recently been released in the United States as well.

Fatt said the early-childhood studies of Field, Cook and Page helped the group know how to communicate with preschoolers and how to write the kinds of catchy songs that would register with children.

“We understood what specific things children could relate to,” Fatt said. “And you don’t really need the flashy costumes or anything like that. Childrens’ imaginations really take it the rest of the way.

“Whatever we do, we always ask … ‘What’s in it for the children?’That’s the bottom line.”

There is an element of education within the Wiggles show, but Fatt said learning happens almost by default in the process of making the songs and dancing fun for children.

“I think with preschoolers, there are a lot of experiences in the world that they haven’t had yet,” he said, “so pretty well everything is education for them, I guess.”

Michael V. Martina / The Herald

Murray Cook of the Wiggles introduces a song at the group’s previous visit to Everett last May.