Getting with their friends(Photo by Ray Burmiston/Photoshot/Getty Images)
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We imagine in an act of supreme magical thinking that by listening to the music we loved as kids, we will somehow stay young. It’s comforting, after all — until it leads to a rude awakening about the passing of time. Take the fact that the release of the Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was closer to World War One than today. Or the fact that that today marks 25 years since “Wannabe”, the Spice Girls’ first single, was released. Has it really been a whopping quarter of a century since we first saw those scantily clad scamps capering on the staircase of the St Pancras Hotel?
The Spice Girls are exceptional in many ways, but especially because anyone who was over the age of five in 1996 — anyone who regularly spent time in a playground — will have memories of them. “Girl Power” was always going to win over a cohort who saw boys as smelly items who couldn’t be trusted not to put something nasty down your blouse. The pervy old Jim Morrison line “The men don’t know… but the little girls understand” had never been so accurate — or so wholesome.
But you don’t get success on the scale the Spices won unless it’s a family affair. The writer David Sinclair said that “Ginger, Posh, Baby, Sporty and Scary were the most widely recognised group of individuals since John, Paul, George and Ringo”, largely thanks to their ability to excite the young while reassuring the old. It sent “Wannabe” to Number One in 37 countries; Spice, the album it came from, became the best-selling album by a female group in history and was followed by merchandising deals worth more than $500 million by 1998. They have won five Brit Awards, three American Music Awards, four Billboard Music Awards, three MTV Europe Music Awards and, last year, they became the youngest recipients of the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music.
Yet — in the manner of the waiter who once asked George Best “Where did it all go wrong?” as he delivered room-service champagne to the footballer and his Miss World companion, who lay in her underwear on thousands of pounds which Best had won in a casino that night — there’s a certain sort of no-mark male who on hearing the words Spice Girls will sneer “Friendship never ends, eh?”
Certainly one of the girls made a sharp exit two years after their first hit, and their following album as a four-piece, Forever, achieved “disappointing” sales — leading them, at the end of 2000, to begin an “indefinite hiatus” to concentrate on their solo careers. But since then, they have reunited for two tours, both of which were the highest grossing of each year. So, in a way, friendship didn’t end — it just evolved, as friendships must if they want to avoid being boring. The fact that five ordinary girls made all that money from only 130 minutes of recorded material remains a remarkable commercial feat; they were the ultimate Lottery winners of fame.
Pop music is a paradox; it makes an audience of us while being individually experienced, unlike sport where we all see the same thing. Yet the Spice Girls were more like a football team than a band; it was hard to imagine someone sitting alone in their room believing that Posh was talking just to them. They were a communal experience and they seemed to be complimentary parts of a greater entity.
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Subscribe25 years since “Wannabe”? Unbelievable. I don’t think that the Spice Girls would “happen” today (for want of a better word). What with the marauding hordes on social media, they’d have to be bland and boring and say at little as possible in order not to be completely destroyed by a constant sh*tstorm. And the Spice Girls were all about being a bit loud and a bit cheeky and doing and saying things that girls, at that point, weren’t really supposed to do (not least pinching the bottom of the future monarch). It did all feel a bit ground-breaking and liberating in a cheesy, manufactured kind of way.
I was a tad too old for the real craze, but I thought they were fun and entertaining so I bought “Spice” and might even give it a play today to mark the occasion.
Being a Yorkshire lass, my favourite was (and is) Mel B. I’m shy generally, so I kind of admired her outspokenness and wild streak. Now, I like her because she’s a survivor. I also liked her turn as a judge on America’s Got Talent – hurray for taking regional accents across the pond and not being half as annoying as squeaky Heidi Klum. Go Mel!
Such an uplifting article, thanks!
As lockdown finally ends and the summer sport all help wake up our lust for life
Thank you, Ralph!
Wonderful writing. Such a pleasure to read. Thank you.
Thank you, Richard!
” … sometimes they seemed to make up a whole nation; Geri from a Watford council estate, Baby from London, Posh from Hertfordshire, Mel B from Leeds and Mel C from Lancashire.” Do you think this was by accident?
Thoroughly enjoyed this reflective look at a wonderful era. I declare myself cheered up!
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