NEW ZEALAND (CAP) - When Greg Page returned to the stage this year with his former comrades after five years of grappling with his own personal demons, it was like no time had passed, said the beloved "Yellow Wiggle." "When those lights came up, it all faded away - the addictions, the financial ruin, the hundreds of meaningless sexual trysts," said Page. "All that mattered at that moment was me and my mates and Fruit Salad. "And it was yummier than ever," added Page, clearly grateful to be alive and back in front of his millions of fans. Page's personal difficulties have been well documented, most notably in a 2010 Spin magazine expose that found the beloved performer in an Auckland halfway house, struggling to extricate himself from a world of crystal meth and prostitution. "It turned out I wasn't particularly good at either," noted Page, who apparently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on crystal meth before discovering it was just shaved coconut. As for prostitution, he worked in a Wellington, N.Z. brothel for over a year, but mostly doing accounting. "But word got out, and every so often some joker would come in wearing a pirate outfit and say Arrrr, I wants me a piece of the Yellow Wiggle," he recalled with a shudder. "It got pretty ugly, but the money was good ... and coconut doesn't grow on trees." "He was out of control - I don't think I've ever seen a star of his stature sink so low," said Motley Crue singer Vince Neil, who is alleged to be one of several celebrities in the much rumored but never released Yellow Wiggle Sex Tape (others include former Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the late Bruno Kirby). "Some big stars like Bono just think they're wild, but Greg ..." says Neil, his voice trailing off. "Let's just say I'll never hear the song Di Dicki Do Dum the same way again." Finally clean, sober and with a solid nest egg from money banked while working at the brothel, Page says the call from Blue Wiggle Anthony Field asking him to join their 2012 retirement tour couldn't have come at a better time. "Things got pretty ugly for The Wiggles, what with Greg's problems, and the incident where America's 6-year-olds denounced us en masse," said Field, noting that the latter development led to narcoleptic Purple Wiggle Jeff Fatt falling asleep at the wheel of the Big Red Car and driving off the side of a cliff on Mount Ossa. But now the revitalized group has been playing to sellout crowds, and with three of the Wiggles - Page, Fatt and the one in the red shirt, whose name no one can ever remember - set to retire at the tour's end, the group has scheduled a mammoth last show dubbed "The Last Wiggle" at the Opera House in Sydney, Australia, this coming December. Guest performers at that show are scheduled to include Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Dorothy the Dinosaur and Neil Diamond. "I'm thrilled to be back, but it's time for a new generation of Wiggles," said Page, noting that from what he knows about replacement Wiggles Emma Watkins, Lachlan Gillespie and Simon Pryce, "they'll be much better at crystal meth and prostitution than I was."