How much longer will we get to see the on-stage magic of history’s greatest children’s entertainers?
It was a Friday morning this past August and The Wiggles were midway through their concert at a jam-packed Bruce Mason Centre, playing the first date on their sold-out tour of New Zealand. Everything was going just as you’d expect and Simon Pryce had just told the crowd they were about to play their beloved 1994 smash hit song The Monkey Dance, when blue Wiggle Anthony Field, the only remaining original Wiggle, the band’s co-founder and spiritual leader, cut in.
“You won’t believe this Simon,” he said, “But I’ve forgotten how to play it.”
At first, it felt like it might be a gag – akin to the famous “Wake up, Jeff” routine, in which original Wiggle Jeff Fatt pretended to fall asleep on stage – but it soon became clear it was not. Field had genuinely forgotten how to play one of the band’s biggest songs.
To be fair to him, The Wiggles’ songbook is ludicrously large. The Monkey Dance was just one of 25 tracks on their 1994 album Yummy Yummy, which was their fourth studio album. They have now recorded 60. For comparison, The Rolling Stones have done 31, Paul McCartney 26 and AC/DC 18.
Nevertheless, it was hard not to be shocked. The Monkey Dance is not just any old filler track from The Wiggles’ back catalogue, but one of the band’s all-time greats and track six on their 2021 greatest hits album, We’re All Fruit Salad! It’s also a very lightly reworked version of a song called Do The Monkey by The Cockroaches – the band he played in with his brothers for several years before The Wiggles were even formed. It’s impossible to know how many times he might have played the song over the past four decades, but it would be a shock if it was under 1000. It was like Dave Dobbyn playing a sold-out gig and having to ask his drummer the chords for Loyal.
It was hard not to wonder if everything was all right with Field, who turned 60 this year. I’d first met him the previous morning and he’d sounded so hoarse I’d asked if he was recovering from a big night out. He’d told me no, this is just how he sounds now, the result of a throat condition that makes talking difficult and singing even harder. He said he hardly sings on stage anymore.
In recent years, he’s had meningitis, thought he might be developing dementia and been diagnosed with Lyme disease. He’s spent decades battling depression so severe he has sometimes thought about suicide. He once described it to Australian television interviewer Anh Do: “You feel like you shouldn’t be on the Earth, basically. You’re a waste of time.”
The Wiggles are still playing to enormous crowds, still selling out shows all over the world, but 30 years is a long time. I asked if it still felt like rock and roll to him.
“Does it feel like that?” he repeated. “No.”
It seemed like he had something else to say but wasn’t sure how to, or wasn’t sure he should. He fumbled for the words:
“I don’t want to get too much … but I’m just going to say … ‘Does it feel like rock and roll to me?’...”
He turned to fellow Wiggle Caterina Mete and said, “Do you reckon it’s Zoloft that keeps me like that?”
“Probably,” she said. “And your personality.”
“Yeah, look,” he said, “I’m on the antidepressant Zoloft, so we could do like a massive gig and I’ll just come back … And then, I don’t know, I think ...”
“That’s your personality as well,” she said. “Like, you never let things go to your head. You’re pretty humble.”
It seemed like he was trying to reconcile two conflicting views about the Zoloft. His doctor has told him he’s on it for life. “I hate hearing that,” he says. “Sometimes I want to feel a bit more.”
He has taken himself off the drug for periods, even though it’s proven a bad idea. Once, he says, he went off it without telling anyone and was “bawling for two months”.
“These guys look out for me,” he said, gesturing at the other Wiggles. “What did I say the other day?” he asked Mete.
“If you see me changing,” she said, “let me know.”
She said they’ve all seen the changes at times: “You either get short or you get really sad.”
Then there are his problems with time. The day before he flew out to New Zealand for this tour, a friend had asked when he was leaving. “Two weeks,” he’d replied.
During our first conversation, when he’d brought up the loss of his niece to SIDS in 1988, he’d said: “That’s when I started studying, probably. “Or did I do the army first? I can’t remember if I did the army ... I joined the army ... Yeah, I was in the army.”
In fact, he’d left the army three years earlier, in 1985, after serving for three years.
His inability to accurately locate himself in time was not news to him. He said he never knows where The Wiggles are going or what they’re doing until someone tells him. “I reckon it’s because of these bloody things that keep you in the moment,” he said. He meant the Zoloft.
He was sitting at a table in the green room, backstage at the Bruce Mason Centre, prior to The Wiggles’ opening show of the tour. Although it was only minutes before they were due to start, he was wearing not his famous blue skivvy but a tight T-shirt, reading, “Surely not everybody was Kung Fu Fighting.” From the ends of the sleeves, his 60-year-old biceps bulged spectacularly, easily the equal of any big-lifting 20-something gym bro. When I speculated about the work required to develop such guns, he told me that not only did he not work out but that he also had a terrible diet.
“I’ve got a crazy thing,” he said. “Absolutely crazy. I could show you. Do you want me to show you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll get it.”
He left the room and returned with a frightening-looking bundle of pads, straps and wires connected to a white controller, and a small tube.
He handed me the tube and said: “You’ve got to put this gel on your arms because it burns otherwise.”
He attached velcro cuffs to each of my biceps and pressed a button on the control box. The cuffs immediately began delivering little electric shocks, like I was repeatedly grabbing on to an electric fence. “You’re not going to be able to operate the pen,” he said. That was true. I could barely hold it.
“EMS,” he said. “Muscle stimulation.” I asked if he had bought it from a late-night infomercial. He said, “No, Ali Express.”
I tried to relax into it, but couldn’t. I reached for the controller to turn it down, but the shocks made fine motor control impossible. I laughed. “Do you want to turn it up?” he asked, apparently genuinely. I laughed again. I looked at the unit and saw it was already turned up to level eight. I assumed 10 must be the maximum. I asked what level he uses. He said 80.
“If you did that every day for five days you’d go, ‘S***! I’ve got muscles!’” he said.
Show time was getting nearer and nearer but, if he knew the time, he wasn’t worried about it. I kept suggesting maybe he needed to go and get ready, but he just smiled and carried on talking about EMS. Outside, more than 1000 soon-to-be screaming fans were waiting for him and here he was sitting in T-shirt and jeans, shocking a journalist.
Three minutes before the show was due to start, he finally left to get ready. He said we could talk again any time I wanted, and he’d have plenty of time to talk again after the show, no problem. But of course he didn’t. All his time had been accounted for.
Later this month, a feature-length documentary,
Hot Potato: The Story of The Wiggles, drops on Prime Video, telling the full story of The Wiggles for the first time. It’s an incredible story, both for the unlikeliness of the band’s massive global success and for the way it has maintained that success for so long, through so many changes to both the band and the world around it. The documentary doesn’t try to uncover the reasons for this, and that would be impossible anyway, but through it all, there has been only one constant and that is Anthony Field.
On stage with him at The Bruce Mason Centre was the expanded cast, for which he is largely responsible, having rebuilt the group over the years since the departures of the other original Wiggles, Greg Page, Jeff Fatt and Murray Cook. There are now two Wiggles for every skivvy colour: the other blue Wiggle, Field’s daughter Lucia, alternately plays drums and dances. Mete, Evie Ferris and Tsehay Hawkins dance and sing, Pryce is the MC, Lachy Gillespie dominates on keys and Big Strong John Pearce does big strong stuff.
Field’s changes have meant The Wiggles will survive his inevitable departure, whenever it may come. He has deliberately chosen to remake the band not in his own image. Once four men, three of them white, it now includes four women and a far wider range of ethnicities, including Ethiopia-born Hawkins and the group’s first indigenous Australian, Ferris. There’s also a non-binary character, Shirley Shawn The Unicorn.
The Wiggles are far more diverse than they have ever been and the audience loves it. No one at their show at the Bruce Mason Centre on that Friday morning in August cared that their most famous member didn’t sing much and forgot how to play a song. The band is bigger than Field, because he has made it so. He might struggle to understand time, but that hasn’t stopped him dragging The Wiggles into the future.
Hot Potato: The Story of The Wiggles launches on Prime Video on Tuesday, October 24
