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The Wiggles - Biography
The Wiggles are an Australian children's music group formed in Sydney, New South Wales, in 1991. The current members of the group are Anthony Field, Lachlan Gillespie, Simon Pryce, and Emma Watkins. The original members were Field, Phillip Wilcher, Murray Cook, Greg Page, and Jeff Fatt. Wilcher left the group after their first album. Page retired in 2006 due to ill health and was replaced by understudy Sam Moran, but returned in 2012, replacing Moran. At the end of 2012, Page, Cook, and Fatt retired, and were replaced by Gillespie, Pryce, and Watkins. Although Cook and Fatt retained their shareholding in the group and all three continued to have input into its creative and production aspects.
The Wiggles have written new music each year since their inception; they sequestered themselves for a month each summer and wrote three albums' worth of original children's music based on simple concepts familiar to young children, and using several genres of music and types of instruments. Most of their songs were short and started with the chorus because they felt that young children needed to be presented with a song's topic in their first few lines. They wrote songs individually at first, but eventually wrote as a group, often with John Field, trumpet player Dominic Lindsay, and Paddick.
Fatt, the only member of the original group without a degree in early childhood education, tended to focus on composing music. Fatt told reporter Brian McElhiney, who called the group's songwriting process "a collaborate affair", that they wrote repetitive pop songs or jingles, which were appealing to children. Watkins reported that she was invited to write songs for their albums, even though she was primarily a dancer. John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who appeared in a Wiggles video in 2002, told The New York Times that he was "very impressed" with the group's songwriting, especially with their drum sound.
The Wiggles enjoyed "almost universal approval" throughout their history. Their songs were sung and played in pre-schools all around the world. Between 2000 and 2010, The Wiggles earned 21 Gold records. According to a 2012 news release published to announce the retirement of Cook, Fatt, and Page, they earned several Platinum, Double Platinum and Multi-Platinum records, as well as sold 23 million DVDs and 7 million CDs. They performed, on average, to one million people per year.
