A life less wiggly

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This was published 21 years ago

A life less wiggly

Thirty years ago, at the age of 14, Phillip Wilcher was the youngest published classical composer in Australia. The wunderkind pianist's piece was suitably called Daybreak and, as a result of this success, Franz Holford, the editor of the music publisher J. Albert & Sons, took the Sydney teenager under his wing as a student.

It was a professional relationship that would stretch seven years and prime Wilcher for work with other distinguished classical mentors such as Miriam Hyde, the 90-year-old composer honoured last month with an ABC concert of her own. "These are the people who have guided and shaped my life in music," says Wilcher proudly.

His work ranges from romantic to impressionistic to contemporary, even folk-inspired. Australian classical radio announcers such as Mike Smith, Julie Simonds and Clive Robertson play his work.

A blessed career indeed. But there has been one major hiccup, and it involved a messy segue from classical to children's music, with a bunch of guys renowned for their skivvies, fixed smiles and relationship with a dinosaur named Dorothy.

Phillip Wilcher has another side generally unknown to classical music fans. He is the forgotten fifth Wiggle, once a member of the phenomenally successful Australian children's group.

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The prolific pianist no longer talks to fellow Wiggles Anthony, Jeff, Murray and Greg, but occasionally he gets an official reminder of their days together: the last was a royalty cheque in the mail, for $5.67.

Back in those meagre earliest days, 1991-92, the Wiggles wore multicoloured shirts, rather than the streamlined single-coloured individual skivvies that spark pre-school frenzy from Newcastle to New York today.

The Wiggles, of course, have gone on to become the seventh-highest paid entertainers in Australia, according to BRW magazine: packing concerts out overseas, signing a deal with Disney, spawning a franchise in Taiwan with plans to go global. In 2001, they were paid an estimated $14 million, about

$4 million more than Kylie Minogue.

But riches and pop fame have not been Wilcher's reward. He is single, 44, and lives in Concord, in Sydney's west.

In the cut-throat world of kiddie singalongs, where extroversion is everything, the retiring Wilcher found himself dumped. He has spoken little of the split and remains philosophical about being pushed off board.

The story of both the Wiggles and Wilcher's involvement in the group began at Macquarie University. In 1991, Wilcher was working with the early childhood music program when Anthony Field, creator of the Wiggles concept, who was studying childhood development, approached him.

In a move a little like Paul McCartney's phone call to Pete Best to join the Beatles, it would prove a temporary offer for a relationship that was soon to collapse. Field invited Wilcher to join the band. The five band members can be seen on the Wiggles 1991 debut CD, the eponymous The Wiggles.

Wilcher was more than along for the ride, however: he wrote many of the songs on that first CD. "I contributed the most musically to the debut album," he says.

After appearing in a couple of videos as a band member, Wilcher's Wiggles story then gets messy. Wilcher says he made it known in September 1991 that he no longer wanted to appear with the band, but says he had a verbal agreement to continue working with the group on its second CD. A behind-the-scenes Wiggle, if you like.

In 1992, Wilcher went to the United States for a short trip, but when he returned, found the band had recorded the second CD without his knowledge. Field told Wilcher his services were no longer required, says Wilcher. A spokeswoman for the Wiggles, Dianna O'Neill, says Wilcher wrote the band a letter of resignation. "There's no story," she says. "There was no fight, no fallout. He was just not so much into children's music, he was more into classical music."

In the intervening years, Wilcher's involvement with the group has been virtually erased: in the late '90s, the debut CD was re-recorded and renamed, with all of Wilcher's compositions removed. The original CD is now something of a collectors' item, but for Wilcher it's a reminder of an uncomfortable experience.

Don't expect bitter words from him, however. "Anger?" he says. "No. More a feeling these days of bemusement. The sole reason for any undertaking, hopefully, is to know thyself. Leonard Bernstein once said that composing music for him was better than orange juice in the morning. He's right."

This is how the shy and sensitive and self-deprecating composer views his musical career. Sunny side up. He takes pride in his classical pedigree, but he still takes note of children's music.

In fact, he pointedly praises

the Wiggles' biggest rival for children's affections, the group Hi-5. "[They] successfully explore the essential components that come together to make music: pitch, rhythm, beat, dynamics, timbre, and they combine this with rhyme and movement," he says.

"Commercial? Yes. But educational, also. This all seems to me to happen gently and they seem so at one with their audience of young folk - there's no distance between them. They also seem to me to know the subtle difference between childlike and childish."

Wilcher has put together a printed collection of musical pieces and poems entitled A Musical Offering, which one suspects has a cathartic value. "It comprises those works I had written for the second Wiggles album," he says, "had I been included." Ouch.

But then, the dapper Wilcher always looked more comfortable in a tuxedo than a sweatshirt. His career has often been an eclectic mix of classical and flim-flam: he was invited to play three times by the Liberace Foundation in Las Vegas; he has put to music the words of poet and librettist Jack Larson (who, incidentally, played Jimmy Olsen in the old black and white Superman series); and he still spends the best part of his days composing.

Where does he get his inspiration? "I set myself goals," he says. "I will usually write something once a week and it will invariably be something I feel I need to write for myself, in order to improve - in order to know myself that little bit more.

"But something is always at work somewhere. It's a matter of externalising an obscurity. That is probably where the journey begins. Composing music also sets a value on my time. It even stems the flow of time momentarily, in some way."

Knowing himself inside and out clearly did not sit well with the commercial imperatives of a children's singing group. Was he too soul-searching to be a member of the Wiggles? Too shy in presentation?

"Perhaps reclusive is a better word," he says. "I am comfortable and strong with what I know."

Wilcher has found a comfortable musical soulmate in fellow pianist Jeanell Carrigan. She has recorded three CDs of his piano works, and will record a fourth later this year.

"The CDs mean much to me, but no more than does she," says Wilcher. "We are on the same wavelength and there have been times when her interpretations of my music were so exact it stopped me in my tracks.

"When I first listened to her recording of my Kumoi Prelude and the Chinoiserie Suite, it was so right in every way it frightened me. She actually made me fall in love with my own Cafe Bijou. Before I heard her play it, I was not convinced of its worth. I thought it simply a near-miss. She changed that."

And as for that elusive Wiggles CD, complete with Phillip Wilcher and former friends on the cover in loud shirts, Wilcher recently picked up a copy in a Cash Converters. The price: $7.

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