When the Wiggles first started touring the US, there was one question they were asked again and again.
“People were coming up and saying, ‘Oh, so you’re friends of Dorothy?’” veteran Wiggle Anthony Field says. “I didn’t even know the other meaning – I went, ‘Yeah, we are!’”
Field (the OG blue Wiggle) thought Americans were referring to Dorothy, the affable green and yellow dinosaur and longtime fixture of the Wiggles’ songs and live shows. They were, of course, really making a sly reference to the queer code slang term for a gay man. But when Field eventually figured this out, it gave him an idea for a song.
On Friday, when Australia’s best-known children’s entertainers release their 63rd album (yes, really), audiences will finally get to hear Friends of Dorothy. It’s a collaboration with Orville Peck, the modern country songwriter known for his face masks, cowboy hats – and being an out-and-proud gay man.
The Wiggles nervously took the idea for Friends of Dorothy to Peck on Zoom. To their delight, Peck, who has a young nephew who loves the band, jumped at the chance.
“Orville was so happy to do it,” Field says. “And he’s a friend of Dorothy’s as well!”
Peck isn’t the only contemporary collaborator the Wiggles have snagged for their next album. Wiggle Up, Giddy Up is a 17-track country album rhinestone studded with the genre’s biggest contemporary names – Dasha, Lainey Wilson, Jackson Dean and Morgan Evans among them. There’s an appearance from the late Slim Dusty (who collaborated with the band on a song back in 2000) and two songs featuring none other than Dolly Parton, including a reimagining of 9-5, titled Counting 1-5 (“Well, I just wiggled my way out into the Wiggles’ world!” Parton says in a press quote, best read in her voice).
It’s a list of names that reflects both the Wiggles’ celebrity stature and their desire to make “music for the preschoolers, which is, of course, our audience – but then we can put things out that older people can enjoy, and get the joke of”, as Field says.
This is a new approach for the Wiggles, who first formed in 1991 and operated as a four-piece, Field, Murray Cook, Jeff Fatt and Greg Page delighting tiny listeners with simple, catchy songs such as Hot Potato and Fruit Salad for the next two decades. But in 2012 when some of the founding members began eyeing retirement, instead of winding up the band, Field opted to bring in a next generation of performers and create the Wiggles 2.0.
The Wiggles, which has since had its lineup refreshed more than once, is currently a team of eight skivvy wearers, including fresh blood like 19-year-old Tsehay Hawkins and 21-year-old Lucia Field, Anthony’s daughter.
Field describes the decision to restaff the group as “selfish” – he simply didn’t want to retire.
“I call myself the last of the V8s. And the reason I’ve stuck around is because I love it,” he says. “I don’t know what else I’d do [with my time], to be honest with you.”
The new Wiggles still play 400 to 500 shows per year (a feat achieved by cramming up to four gigs into a single day) but have also expanded in more modern directions. They have a big presence on YouTube and TikTok, where they have recently gone viral thanks to the bombastic dance moves of Wiggles supporting cast member the Tree of Wisdom (played by Anthony’s nephew, Dominic Field). Dorothy the Dinosaur is now a DJ who remixes the original Wiggles classics. And in 2022 they topped the Triple J Hottest 100 with their joy-inducing cover of Tame Impala’s Elephant.
That surprise hit “set off a domino effect” in the Wiggles’ new direction, paving the way for their contemporary country album, says Lucia Field, speaking on a Zoom call alongside fellow newer generation cast members Hawkins and Lachlan Gillespie. “It got the ball rolling for a lot of things.”
Elephant has been viewed more than 6m times, helping them become the most streamed local artist on Spotify in Australia for the last two years. As Hawkins puts it, their starry collaborators on Wiggle Up, Giddy Up “says it all” about the reach the Wiggles now have.
Of all those big names, Field is most excited about snagging Parton for the album; at 61, he admits he wasn’t familiar with some of the younger collaborators but left it to his younger colleagues to write most of the songs, not wanting his “old-school” tastes to ruin their contemporary feel. And while Field has long considered himself the creative director of the Wiggles, he knows where to delegate: “As far as TikTok, I don’t understand that – I stay right out of it.”
What Field looked for in his next generation of Wiggles was talent, diversity and the sort of personality that can match the joy kids bring to shows. Many of the newer members started as supporting cast members (Gillespie, for instance, played Captain Feathersword for years before being asked to don the purple skivvy) or back-up “Wiggly dancers”.
Nepo-Wiggle Lucia Field admittedly had an easier path to the group, having appeared in Wiggles videos since she was two months old. Becoming a Wiggle has changed her relationship with her dad – and the band. Today, she thinks it’s an “absolutely fantastic” inheritance. But growing up, she never told anyone she had a Wiggle for a parent and would make her dad park the car around the corner and walk in by himself to any school event, embarrassed at the prospect of being seen with him.
“I don’t know if she thought I was going to come in singing Big Red Car, but I really wasn’t,” laughs the elder Field.
For his part, Field has found there are perks to sharing a band with your daughter: Lucia tells him what time to get up every morning on tour, “keeps him honest” and introduced him to Orville Peck. But while Field is a lifelong country and western fan, and the gen Z Wiggles are acutely aware that country is “cool” right now, the idea for Wiggle Up, Giddy Up actually came from the band’s CEO – because yes, they have one.
“Apart from being children’s entertainment and music, it is still a business,” Field says. “I’m a preschool teacher. I’m glad I’m not running the business side of things because we wouldn’t be working.”
Field says the Wiggles has always had someone in a CEO-type role – a necessary job for a band that has sold about 30m albums, and was formally consolidated in 2005 (founding members such as Field reportedly own stakes in the Wiggles, while newer recruits are paid a salary). Certainly, the Wiggles are big business – they reigned as Australia’s highest-earning performers for four years in a row in the noughties, the era when the Wiggles were so huge in the US they played 13 sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden.
They had the Disney Channel to thank for their US fortunes – the channel played them four times a day, putting the Wiggles in front of 85 million subscribers. But when Wiggles management agreed to a deal that put Wiggles-themed areas in Six Flags, a rival theme park to Disney, the gravy train came to an end. “I don’t think Disney liked that,” Field says. Disney took them off the channel and the band lost its audience base in the US.
Apart from those glory days, Field says, this is “the biggest era we’ve ever had … it’s really good times now for the Wiggles.”
Their YouTube presence is helping the band claw back that all-important American audience, as is, Hawkins adds, the ever-popular Tree of Wisdom, who has his own dance album on the way. All their new US collaborators, too, are no doubt part of the play to regain Yankee listeners.
So with that title and Peck on board, is Friends of Dorothy the first Wiggles’ gay anthem?
“It could be taken like that,” Field says. “But there’s other ways you can look at it as well, as long as you have a good laugh, because that’s what we’re here for. Wiggles are for everyone. And we are just friends of Dorothy.”
Wiggle Up, Giddy Up! is out now
