Greg Page is lastly debunking a decades-long hearsay that numerous Australians nonetheless consider about his previous, and it is obtained nothing to do with The Wiggles.
The fable is so widespread that folks even cease him in public generally to ask about it, leaving Page to “set them straight”.
“People think I was in The Cockroaches, but I actually wasn’t,” he tells 9honey Celebrity.
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“Sometimes people go, ‘I saw you and The Cockroaches at the pub way back,’ and I’ll go, ‘Oh yeah’. But then other times, I’ll set them straight and say, ‘Look, I actually wasn’t part of The Cockroaches.'”
The Cockroaches had been an ’80s Aussie pub rock band made up of six core members; brothers Paul, John, and Anthony Field, with Tony Henry, Joseph Hallion and Jeff Fatt.
Though two authentic Wiggles had been within the group, neither of them had been Page.
Rather, Page was an enormous fan of the band throughout his highschool years and really utilized to work with them after he graduated.
“I ended up doing work experience for them and then I got a job with them when I left school and I was going to uni,” he reveals.
“I started out as their roadie [and] I appeared with them onstage on The Midday Show on Channel 9 a couple of times. I filled in for Anthony when he couldn’t make it … but I wasn’t ever officially in The Cockroaches.”
Working as a roadie, Page obtained to know the band members nicely and grew shut with Anthony Field, who inspired Page to check early childhood schooling at Macquarie University.
They met Murray Cook there and with Jeff Fatt, one other member of The Cockroaches, they went on to start out The Wiggles.
“The perception is that The Cockroaches became The Wiggles, which isn’t the case,” Page says.
“There was a strong connection; Anthony’s brother John, who wrote the songs for The Cockroaches, wrote a lot of our songs for The Wiggles.
“The drummer from The Cockroaches performed on quite a lot of our information, Anthony’s brother Paul ended up being our normal supervisor with The Wiggles. There’s quite a lot of connections.”
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The Wiggles is what he is recognized for now and Page nonetheless will get stopped by Aussies of all ages who recognise him as ‘the man within the yellow skivvy’ from their childhood.
He’s solely ever had one detrimental expertise being recognised in public.
“One time in Darwin we [The Wiggles] went to McDonald’s and these teenage boys did not actually know methods to react, in order that they began throwing chips at us,” he laughs.
It’s crazy to think that what was supposed to be a temporary music project in the early 90s has become such a quintessential part of what it means to ‘grow up Aussie’.
So many people told Page, Field, Cook and Fatt that the band “was by no means going to work”, yet kids around the country are still raised on their songs 30 years on.
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The Wiggles: Then and now
“We believed what we had been doing would work, given what we discovered about youngsters and the way they assume and the way they be taught,” Page says now.
“So we caught with it and we had no concept how lengthy it was going to go for, not to mention the truth that as soon as I retired and left the group, anyone else might are available.”
Page formally retired from The Wiggles in November 2006, paving the way in which for Sam Moran to take over because the Yellow Wiggle, adopted by Emma Watkins in 2013.
Now there are eight Wiggles, together with members of the unique lineup and a various group of recent forged members.
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Though Page by no means imagined the band he helped begin with “4 mates” in the ’90s would go through so many different iterations, he couldn’t be more proud of what The Wiggles represents today.
“It was simply 4 mates, that is the way it started,” he laughs.
“Over the years although, we turned conscious that other than Jeff along with his Chinese heritage, there wasn’t a substantial amount of range there, significantly with ladies.
“It wasn’t really on the radar to think about those things … we were four guys from Sydney and we knew nothing, we just did it and it evolved along the way. It’s still evolving today.”
These days he is comfortable to look at The Wiggles develop and evolve from afar whereas he focuses on his personal ardour challenge, Heart of the Nation.
Page established the charity devoted to rising the survival charge from sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) in Australia after struggling a SCA onstage at a reunion live performance in 2020.
“I was incredibly fortunate that I collapsed in public and that there were people around to see me collapse,” he beforehand informed 9honey.
“They put their hands up, they said, ‘Yep, I’m going to try and save this guy’s life’. And they did.”
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