The first line in the chorus of Mr Clicketty Cane, Peter Combe’s most famous song, is so beloved that the song itself has been renamed for it: “Wash your face in orange juice.” When the Australian kids’ entertainer performs this song for children, he asks them to sing back to him. And they do, with the solemn seriousness of a child who has been given a job to do by an adult they don’t know.
But with every new silly instruction (and this hasn’t changed in the 40 years he has been singing it), they get gigglier. Even the 10- and 11-year-olds – the hardest people to win over in any room, according to Combe, because by then they’ve learned what it means to be cool.
“Clean your teeth with bubble gum,” he sings, then: “Fix the fence with sticky tape / Brush your hair with a toothbrush / Fry an egg on a slippery dip.”
By the time Combe’s telling them to “belly flop in a pizza”, even the 10- and 11-year-olds are smiling and shouting and bouncing along with the six-year-olds, the room united in a delighted, anarchic screech. Belly flop in a pizza?
“Kids just wait for that line. It’s the one song I never, ever have to teach. It seems to be known by every child in the country,” Combe says. He calls the song his American Pie; at the thousands of shows he has played at schools, festivals and libraries across Australia, he always plays it last. If he skips it, people complain.
“I’m glad it is not eight minutes long, otherwise I’d be insane by now,” he adds. “It’s lovely that kids love it to bits. That still gets to me. I’d love to give it a two-year rest, but I can’t. I just can’t.”
A few years ago, Combe, who has built a second career in performing for the adults who listened to him as children, was booked to play a show at a university in Melbourne. All the twentysomethings streamed into the quadrangle with their newspaper hats and toffee apples, and sang all the lyrics that had survived somewhere in the back of their brains. And when Combe got to Mr Clicketty Cane and “belly flop in a pizza”, one student stepped forth and took off his shirt.
“He laid an enormous pizza on the ground and simply belly flopped into it,” says Combe. “He got an enormous cheer, of course.”
He tells this story with the ease of someone who has not only told it many times, but relived it in his mind again and again with astonished delight. “I think silliness is very underrated,” he tells me later. “It’s a wonderful thing to be silly. I’ve spent so much of my life laughing.”
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Combe is about to turn 77. I remember him, as many millennial Australians would, as he was in the video for his 1987 hit Toffee Apple, which seemed to always be on the ABC; or the various times he turned up at one of my schools and put on a raucous show in the library. He’s just greyer now; his bulging blue eyes, so good for pulling faces, haven’t changed at all. He still runs five times a week.
“Probably stating the bleeding obvious, but I do have less energy,” he says. “I’m in self-denial.”
Combe was a children’s singer-songwriter a good decade BWE (Before Wiggles Era); his first kids’ album, Songs for Little Kids, came out in 1982. This was when children’s music was just nursery rhymes; record labels didn’t believe children could appreciate music. But Combe built a cottage industry selling Songs for Little Kids – recorded himself – to his friends, then their friends, then friends of friends of friends: “I sold hundreds of them, entirely by word of mouth. And I could tell almost straight away that this was going to happen.”
(“This”, meaning a 40-year career.)
“All false modesty aside, I was a pioneer,” Combe adds. “Literally no one was doing it. I had no interest in singing nursery rhymes. I remember thinking, there are authors all over the world who write new stories for children – why don’t people write them new songs?”
Combe has recorded 18 albums, won three Arias and sold more than 1m albums and DVDs. There are the boppy classics – Newspaper Mama, Toffee Apple, Spaghetti Bolognaise – but he has also done Christmas albums and lullabies.
“There’s a misconception that children just react to fast, dancey, up-tempo stuff. They do, but they also like the soft songs as well,” he says. “You should never underestimate a child. You don’t know what they’re thinking.”
He has always been focused on the music; even when he sold out Sydney Opera House (twice), Combe went out with his “rickety little keyboard” and not much else. “No production values, whatsoever!” he laughs. And he’s indifferent to the noise around the music, like merchandise: “The Wiggles have endless merch and I think a lot of it is just junk,” he says. “I’d much rather spend the time on what matters, which is the music.”
Years ago, a woman came up to him after a show in Melbourne and told him that one of his songs, Music of the Day, had saved her life.
“It stopped her from taking her own life. You could say that was a boost to ego,” Combe reflects. “But it was more an extraordinary example of the power of music.”
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In 2003, when 100,000 people took to Adelaide’s streets to march against John Howard’s plan to send Australian troops to Iraq, some may have been surprised to see Mr Clicketty Cane at the front, singing Joni Mitchell’s anti-war anthem The Fiddle and the Drum. (Beginning as it does: “And so once again / My dear Johnny, my dear friend … ”)
But Combe came of age during the Vietnam war and was educated by the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen and Mitchell. “Musicians with a real sense of justice, social responsibility,” he says. “I was very affected by it. It’s part of my DNA.
“So when something like Gaza is happening, it’s very hard to ignore it,” he adds. “Children are being slaughtered, on a daily basis, for almost two years. Our ability to ignore it astounds me. You can talk to any NGO, they all say the same thing – it’s a genocide. How can we turn a blind eye?”
Combe has written songs about Iraq (“an appalling thing – I can’t bear Howard being deified now, it makes me sick”) and David Hicks, the Adelaide man who was imprisoned for six years in Guantánamo Bay: “I felt very strongly about this young guy who’d made a mistake and ended up in Guantánamo Bay.”
He has never hesitated about speaking up for what he believes in, and he doesn’t when it comes to Gaza. “The Israelis cut off their water, electricity, food. So why are we surprised when children are starving to death? To behave that badly and for there to be this massive silence – it’s just eerie. [Israel says] we have the right to defend ourselves. Do any of us have the right to obliterate an entire people? Obviously not.”
It is a rare children’s entertainer who will comment on politics; the parents tend to get wobbly about it, perhaps from fear the topic will worry their children – or from some underlying belief that children’s entertainers are apolitical, asexual, unserious beings who have never held an adult thought. “But I think I have an obligation to say something on Gaza,” Combe says. “You like to think that your values come through in your music – I hope people aren’t surprised I feel the way I do. If they aren’t, I am pleased.”
Childhood is a precious state; he dislikes anything, such as war, that makes kids grow up too fast. “I think it’s quite sad and unhealthy to not value childhood immensely. It’s a wonderful part of your life,” he says. “I was lucky to have an incredibly good childhood and I’ve never stopped thanking my parents for that. It is the greatest gift you can give your children.”
What set his childhood apart, he thinks, was that he felt deeply loved – not just that he was loved, he stresses, but that he knew he was. “And that’s a big deal,” he says.
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Relistening to Combe as an adult, it is striking how sophisticated his songs are. Take Newspaper Mama, which he wrote in 90 minutes: an 80s pop hit reminiscent of Huey Lewis or Peter Gabriel.
“I love the idea of introducing children to sophistication in music,” he says. “I’m a control freak in the studio because it should always be done well. If I get a string quartet, I want a really classy one. I want a terrific studio and a great engineer. I don’t ever cut corners, because I think children don’t deserve to have their corners cut.”
People often ask him if children are different to perform for in 2025 than they were when he started, he says. (I discretely cross this question off my pad.)
“And the answer is, not really,” he says. “The only real difference I’ve noticed is a subtle sense of surprise that I’m not on a screen. I’m not on an iPad or their phone – I’m actually there. And that’s a revelation.”
The kids have not changed, but the music industry has. Mr Clicketty Cane has been streamed more than 10m times on Spotify, though “that gets you bugger all”, he snorts: “The sales per play on Spotify are so minuscule, it is 0.00-something – it’s nothing like CD sales were.”
But Combe is all about the music; he still feels a thrill when he stands before a noisy, wriggling crowd, waiting to win over those 10- and 11-year-olds.
“Children are wonderful critics because they’re very intolerant. They haven’t learned being polite. If they don’t like it, they’ll talk, they’ll get up,” he says, then laughs. “Adults will just sit there being bored!”
• Peter Combe is performing two shows of Wash Your Kids in Orange Juice! as part of the Melbourne fringe festival on 19 October.
