During his 21 years as a touring member of The Wiggles, Murray Cook established himself as one of the most successful independent artists in Australian history, making him the ideal candidate to close out the first ever Indie-Con in Adelaide.
Here are a few valuable talking points from his closing keynote and conversation.
“Right from the start we were fiercely protective of our music and our control of it, and a lot of that came from our past experiences, especially Anthony and the cockroaches – they had success, but he really felt like he didn’t have control. We were really conscious of keeping control. We really believed in what we were doing.”
“We had a lot of resistance from ABC TV initially to do a TV series even though we’d sold bucket loads of videos. There was one producer who suggested we change the look of The Wiggles and do something where we didn’t look at the camera or anything like, and we kind of went along with it again out better judgement and the results were pretty horrible. We just canned it – we said, ‘Look, we’d rather not be on TV than have that go out there.’ We took a pretty big lesson from that and vowed not to do it again.”
“The business of music is in a state of flux – a lot of the old models aren’t working and there’s probably new models coming out, but we don’t know what they’ll be. I think it is still an exciting time. Technology has almost killed the old model, but for those of us working independently, we’re not so tied to those models; technology can be our friend and in a lot of ways it’s returned the power of music to transform and uplift to its rightful owner.”
“[Independence] frees up the creative process, and any independent musician here knows that. I remember a story back in the ‘80s, Mental As Anything had had quite a few hits and they hadn’t had a hit for a little while and Noiseworks were really big, and someone at the record company said, ‘I think you should sound a bit more like Noiseworks.’”
“Just a sidebar – we had stalkers in America. We used to check into hotels under fake names. It was insane! It never happened here. Maybe because the [US] population is so big there are more loonies.”
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