FEATURE:
Viva Forever
IN THIS PHOTO: Geri Halliwell (‘Ginger Spice’), Mel C (‘Sporty Spice’), Victoria Adams (‘Posh Spice’), Mel B (‘Scary Spice’) and Emma Bunton (‘Baby Spice’)
Thirty Years of the Spice Girls
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I am writing this feature…
IN THIS PHOTO: Spice Girls shot for Vogue in 1997/PHOTO CREDIT: Mario Testino
as, in March, it will be thirty years since Spice Girls formed. Technically, March 1994 was the month when audtions were taking place for the group. The final five of (then) Victoria Adams, Mel C, Mel B, Emma Bunton and Geri Halliwell were formed shortly after. It was a moment that changed Pop music forever. Some argue that, as a manufactured group and one whose messages of Girl Power might have been hollow or commercial, they have inspired legions of fans and were a hugely important part of Pop culture. Not only reserved to the 1990s, their impact and importance extends far beyond that. I would argue against people who say that there was a hollowness or lack of meaning behind the brand of Girl Power and feminism. That it was designed to sell records rather than inspire minds. Also, anyone who says that the group have not inspired in the way girlbands like Little Mix or Destiny’s Child did, I would direct people to some of the biggest Pop artists of today where we can hear and feel the optimism and influence of Spice Girls.
I guess, as we look back thirty years since they were formed, the world and face of music has changed. No longer this optimistic time of change that we saw in the mid-'90s, would an album like Spice – the Spice Girls’ 1996 debut album - resonate and have the same success?! Even if it is hard to think back nearly thirty years and compare music of then to today and whether Spice Girls have aged in that respect, the fact is that we talk about them and they are still hugely popular. I know that, soon, there will be announced around the anniversary. I think it has been teased something is coming. Whether they will be appearing at this year’s Glastonbury or there is an anniversary tour or event planned, I am not sure. Apart from a line of commemorative stamps, there has been nothing official announced. I do feel that something Glastonbury-related might come…
I will come to articles that unpick and dissect the legacy of Spice Girls. How, years after they split, their impact is seen. Releasing two of the most important Pop albums of the 1990s – Spice and 1997’s Spiceworld -, there is also the strength and inspiration they gave to fans around the world. Also, there is the way they made a huge impression on British culture. I am going to move on soon. First, in 2021, Bustle mentioned a documentary series that aired twenty-five years after Spice Girls’ debut album arrived:
“Twenty-five years after their monumental debut, one of the biggest bands the world has ever seen is the focus of Channel 4’s latest documentary series Spice Girls: How Girl Power Changed Britain.
The show’s first episode centres on the group’s formation back in the mid ‘90s. But, how were the Spice Girls actually put together?
As the BBC reports, the Spice Girls originally formed back in early 1994, when Geraldine Halliwell, Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Emma Bunton, and Victoria Adams responded to an advert featured in The Stage magazine.
In March 1994, the father-and-son management team, Bob and Chris Herbert, oversaw 400 hopefuls at London's Dancework Studios and split them into groups of ten. The aspiring singers were asked to learn a dance routine to Eternal’s “Stay” and to perform a solo song.
During this part of the audition, Mel B opted to perform the Whitney Houston classic “The Greatest Love Of All,” while Mel C and Victoria belted out The Pointer Sisters' “I'm So Excited” and “Mein Herr” from Cabaret, respectively.
The following month, just ten girls were asked back for a second audition, including Geri, who had missed the first round of auditions after getting sunburnt during a holiday to Spain. As Metro reports, the remaining hopefuls were then whittled down to five, including 17-year-old Michelle Stephenson.
However, it was later decided that Stephenson wasn’t a good fit for the band, and she was promptly replaced by Emma Bunton. Reflecting on her brief Spice Girls stint, Stephenson previously told the Mirror, “at the time I left the group I knew I was doing the right thing. It wasn’t my kind of music and they were not living the lifestyle I wanted.” In the Channel 4 documentary she also revealed she had been told by a member of the band’s management team that she appeared too old in comparison to the other girls.
Despite being put together by the Herberts, the band would later deny they were a manufactured group, instead claiming that they had met through auditions and even lived together before forming Spice Girls. While some members of the band, including Victoria and Geri, knew each other before the Spice Girls audition phase, the rest of the band members were not introduced until later. A source at their label Virgin told The Guardian in 1996: “They definitely met through an ad. I don't know why they're not being upfront about it.”
In 1995, following months of rehearsals Scary, Sporty, Ginger, Posh, and Baby Spice decided to cut ties with Bob and Chris Herbert, forcing Geri to devise a plan to retrieve their original recordings of the band’s future hits “Wannabe” and “2 Become 1”.
“I don't know how [Geri] actually managed to get it — everything was so Bonnie and Clyde... She had it hidden in her knickers,” Victoria recalled in her autobiography Learning to Fly.
From there, the group went on to sign with famed music manager Simon Fuller and eventually landed a record deal with Virgin Records. In 1996, the band’s debut single “Wannabe” became an overnight hit, shifting 73,000 copies during its first week and later reaching the number one spot on the UK charts, the BBC reports”.
I am interested in the formation of the Spice Girls. The fact it was thirty years ago this March and how, in the two or three years after that formation, they dominated the Pop landscape and were worldwide names. It is vital that this is marked, whether you are a fan of the group or not. Regardless of feelings around their place in music history, they were obviously very important and a phenomenon. I definitely like their music and was able to connect with their messages and sound – even if, perhaps, I was not the intended demographic. I think that the Spice Girls’ music was very much for everyone. There has been discussion and debate about their legacy this many years on. The New Yorker highlighted the boundless optimism of the Spice Girls. How, now, can artists project this convincingly?! Maybe the most dated thig is not the music they made: it is the fact the world has changed immeasurably in ways that cannot be reclaimed:
“In 1996, there was plenty of room on the pop charts for whimsy; the most popular song of the year was a bouncy remix of “Macarena.” In a few years, the Zeitgeist would bend back toward wounded male earnestness—Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open,” 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite”—but, for a brief moment, every time “Wannabe” came on the radio, life resembled a teen-age slumber party, where some intrepid attendee had pinched a bottle of peach schnapps, and there was a very long list of lame adults to prank call.
Though “Wannabe” had all the markings of a one-off hit, “Spice” generated three Top Five singles in the U.S., and the Spice Girls became a global phenomenon, preaching girl power—a vague marketing notion, even then—and a boundless, unquestioning jocularity. In 1997, the group released a second album, “Spiceworld.” It set a record for the fastest-selling album by a girl group, with seven million copies shipped in the first two weeks. The band travelled to South Africa to perform a charity concert, and met with Nelson Mandela. “You know, these are my heroes,” Mandela told a scrum of reporters. “It’s one of the greatest moments in my life.”
“Spiceworld” is now twenty-five years old. On the occasion of its anniversary, the album is being reissued with bonus tracks, B-sides, and live recordings from the band’s 1997-98 tour, all culled from the Virgin Records archive. The record includes both a demo and a remix of “Step to Me,” which was originally obtainable only by twisting twenty pink soda tabs off promotional cans of Pepsi and trading them in for a CD single, and something called “Spice Girls Party Mix,” a fifteen-minute medley of the group’s up-tempo hits, somehow made even more up-tempo. (I found it difficult to listen to without wanting to submerge my head in ice water, simply for the quiet.) The live material is more vibrant, though it might leave a listener craving lights, costumes, and dancing; the Spice Girls still work best as a multisensory presentation.
“Spiceworld” does not attempt to transcend “Spice” but, rather, to expand upon it in a lateral way. As recording technology has evolved, pop production has become more impermeable, and fingerprints tend to be erased or smoothed over. “Spiceworld” is the sort of pop record that doesn’t really get made anymore: sentimental, infinitely palatable, but also plainly imperfect, with wobbly vocals and canned backing tracks. None of these songs are especially adventurous. (The most stylistically ambitious moment on “Spiceworld” is the weepy breakup ballad “Viva Forever,” which includes a bit of flamenco-esque guitar.) The Girls’ limitations are still central to the record’s appeal.
From the start, the Spice Girls’ mission was to spread a kind of anodyne, generalized positivity; in 1997, this may have seemed like a timeless goal, but, twenty-five years later, it’s probably what makes “Spiceworld” feel the most dated. Naïveté of this sort is almost impossible to access now, in an era in which we are constantly reminded of suffering, both planetary and human.
The idea that optimism can undo despair is sweet, and maybe sometimes true, but it no longer feels like a very helpful message. Perhaps the group knew this then. As you watch the video, it’s easy to presume that the Girls are about to transform the streets with their upbeat attitudes, but the ship keeps simply drifting overhead”.
I am going to wrap up soon. Before that, I want to take quite a bit from an extensive feature from The New York Times. Over twenty-five years on from their debut, if some dismissed the five-piece as Pop confection, it is clear their legacy is being re-written. Changing every year. With the possibility (though not confirmed) of something special for their thirtieth – at least a one-off date?! -, it is clear one cannot predict or write off a group that left their mark on the music industry:
“To be sure, criticism of the Spice Girls — most notably, that they were a superficial, manufactured, disposable pop confection — was not unique to them. Many pop acts, including the Beatles, the Monkees and Abba, initially encountered the same derision. But from the beginning of their ascent to superstardom, the fact that the five Girls — Victoria Adams (now Beckham), a.k.a. Posh Spice; Melanie Brown, a.k.a. Scary Spice; Emma Bunton, a.k.a. Baby Spice; Melanie Chisholm, a.k.a. Sporty Spice; and Geri Halliwell (now Horner), a.k.a. Ginger Spice — were outspoken young women seemed to bring an added layer of skepticism.
“They probably inspired me to pick up a hairbrush when I was like five and sing into it,” the British pop star Charli XCX, who remixed “Wannabe” for her 2019 single “Spicy,” has said of the group.
At their peak, the Spice Girls were a global sensation, and they remain, to this day, the most successful girl group of all time: Their first single, “Wannabe,” released in 1996, was a No. 1 hit in 37 countries, and their debut album, “Spice,” is still one of the best-selling albums by any female group. And even the Girls themselves are still coming to terms with just how much their brief stint at the apex of pop music affected a generation of fans and other artists.
The group’s extravagant self-expression, coupled with a straightforward message of empowerment, resonated with girls, who saw themselves reflected in the band members’ various personas, spawning a generation of fans who identified as a Sporty or Scary or Posh.
“That’s kind of the beauty of the Spice Girls,” Ora said. “Each of them had their own voice and something different to offer.” (Those nicknames, by the way, were not coined by the group but imposed on them by a journalist at the British magazine Top of the Pops. The Girls, true to form, embraced the names.)
The group’s theatrics and self-aware sense of kitsch also sparked an enthusiastic following among members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, which initially took the band by surprise, Chisholm said. “In our heads, it was like, right, we’ve got to do this for the girls! And then we very quickly realized that a huge part of this community was behind us as well,” she recalled. “I think it’s because people can feel lonely if they’re in an environment where they can’t fully be themselves, and the Spice Girls gave them something to belong to.” The band has since become a popular source of inspiration for drag acts and several of the Girls have appeared as guest judges on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
“There is a real culture here in the U.K. that they really like to drag people down. We celebrate success to a point, and then it’s time to attack — kind of, ‘Don’t get above your station,’” Chisholm said. “But we always felt that the numbers don’t lie. We were breaking records.”
Another frequent target of criticism was the group’s message of “girl power,” which was promoted not just in their music but also through their many marketing deals with brands like Pepsi and Chupa Chups lollipops. Activists raised concerns that the band was exploiting feminism for commercial ends. Many commentators were “very conscious of how feminism and pro-women sentiment was manipulated and weaponized, particularly by the media,” said Andi Zeisler, who co-founded the feminist pop culture magazine Bitch in 1996, the same year the Spice Girls made their debut.
Against a backdrop of the punk riot grrrl movement and the women-centric Lilith Fair — both of which used music as a platform to advocate specifically feminist political and social changes — “the Spice Girls perhaps felt like a step back,” Zeisler said.
But the notion that the Girls’ message was, by virtue of being broadcast commercially, inherently hollow now seems shortsighted. “I think it’s possible to say, on the one hand, the Spice Girls and girl power were this very contrived marketing technique. And that’s true,” Zeisler explained. “But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t very real for the Girls themselves, or for the audience. I grew up with feminism as an irredeemably dirty word. No one wanted to be associated with it. So just the optics of having a group of women talking about feminism in a different language, making it accessible — that’s really important.”
In 2012, the organizers of the London Olympics crafted the opening and closing ceremonies to celebrate the best of British culture. There were odes to James Bond, the queen and Mary Poppins, but perhaps no act drew more cheers, and tears, from the crowds than the members of the Spice Girls — all five of them — reunited atop a fleet of tricked-out black cabs as the stadium sang along raucously to their greatest hits.
Nearly three decades after their peak, critics have started to reconsider the ways in which the Spice Girls reshaped the pop-music landscape, in Britain and beyond.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing the Spice Girls achieved, however, was their empowerment of a generation of fans. These listeners first encountered them as children and responded positively to the band and what they represented — five women who remained true to what they wanted and how they were going to get it and had a lot of fun together along the way.
In an industry teeming with stories of artists — particularly young female ones — being manipulated or taken advantage of, the Spice Girls can now be remembered as a rare example of an all-female band that took a strong hand in charting its own success. “A lot of times, it’s the management that holds all the cards, makes all the money, decides what happens, and the artist that goes away shortchanged if not totally screwed over,” Sinclair said. The Spice Girls, he noted, “actually kept a grip on everything, from Day 1.”
Chisholm and the band have embraced their status as role models, both for women and for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. “It’s so humbling to have the opportunity to give people strength to just be who they are. That should be everybody’s human right,” Chisholm said. “Maybe we’re misfits, maybe we’re oddballs — we’re all different. But we come together, and our unity is our strength.”
When, in 2019, the Spice Girls (minus Beckham) reunited for a tour, Adele — the fangirl whose childhood wall was once plastered with Spice Girls posters — visited them on the day of their final performance, at Wembley Stadium.
“We went into the bar to see our friends and family after the show,” Chisholm recalled. “Adele had gotten everybody ready, and they all started singing ‘Wannabe’ when we walked in. She was leading the chorus!”
It was a powerful, full-circle moment for the band, she said.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS: Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times; PHOTOS: Getty Images
“There’s so much talent out there, and if the Spice Girls had any part in inspiring and empowering these brilliant artists, then that is only a good thing,” said Chisholm, who is now a solo artist, with a self-titled album out now and a memoir coming later this year.
For Ora, the band’s girl-power message has always been “about standing up and advocating for the women around you, because, at the end of the day, we have to look out for each other,” she said. “Who better to teach us that lesson than the Spice Girls?”.
Apart from the fact that Spice Girls’ formation in 1994 is worthy of celebration this year (nearer to March), I don’t think that it is longing for the past or rose-tinted nostalgia. One might say that the world in which they ruled and conquered was a lot more optimistic. A music scene where Britpop and associated, peripheral Pop was built on this notion of something temporary, things are very different now. I would argue that their music and influence is relevant now. Not that they necessarily invented the idea of Girl Power of this confidence in girls and young women. Now, female artists are exploring and espousing this in different ways.
Not through slogans or as explicitly, it is incorporated in their music and mindset. If there are few direct comparisons to Spice Girls in the modern-day girlband market, there are plenty of other artists who carry the influence of Spice Girls with them. At a bleak and troubled time, there is a case to say that the music of Spice Girl is as needed and necessary as ever. Any sort of reunion, rather than recapturing a bygone moment, would be a triumphant moment. Something to get people excited about. Whether you are a diehard fan, do not listen to their music or something in the middle, the Spice Girls were phenomenal. They inspired a way of teen Pop and influenced artists like Little Mix, Dua Lipa and Charli XCX. Some massive modern-day Pop queens can be traced back to Spice Girls. In March, it is thirty years since this five-piece came together (or at least the process was started); unsure of what was coming and how their career would turn out. I would say that their DNA, messages, music and influence…
LIVES on today.