Greg Page is finally debunking a decades-long rumour that countless Australians still believe about his past, and it’s got nothing to do with The Wiggles.
The myth is so common that people even stop him in public sometimes 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 were 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 original Wiggles were in the group, neither of them were Page.
Rather, Page was a huge fan of the band during his high school years and actually applied 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 got to know the band members well and grew close with Anthony Field, who encouraged Page to study early childhood education at Macquarie University.
They met Murray Cook there and with Jeff Fatt, another member of The Cockroaches, they went on to start 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 played on a lot of our records, Anthony’s brother Paul ended up being our general manager with The Wiggles. There’s a lot of connections.”
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The Wiggles is what he’s known for now and Page still gets stopped by Aussies of all ages who recognise him as ‘the guy in the yellow skivvy’ from their childhood.
He’s only ever had one negative experience being recognised in public.
“One time in Darwin we [The Wiggles] went to McDonald’s and these teenage boys didn’t really know how to react, so they started 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 never 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 were doing would work, given what we learned about children and how they think and how they learn,” Page says now.
“So we stuck with it and we had no idea how long it was going to go for, let alone the fact that once I retired and left the group, somebody else could come in.”
Page officially retired from The Wiggles in November 2006, paving the way for Sam Moran to take over as the Yellow Wiggle, followed by Emma Watkins in 2013.
Now there are eight Wiggles, including members of the original lineup and a diverse group of new cast members.
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Though Page never imagined the band he helped start with “four 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 just four mates, that’s how it began,” he laughs.
“Over the years though, we became aware that apart from Jeff with his Chinese heritage, there wasn’t a great deal of diversity there, particularly with women.
“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’s happy to watch The Wiggles grow and evolve from afar while he focuses on his own passion project, Heart of the Nation.
Page established the charity dedicated to increasing the survival rate from sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) in Australia after suffering a SCA onstage at a reunion concert in 2020.
“I was incredibly fortunate that I collapsed in public and that there were people around to see me collapse,” he previously told 9honey.
“They put their hands up, they said, ‘Yep, I’m going to try and save this guy’s life’. And they did.”
