What really happened
Here is a partial list of things the Spice Girls did in 1997: released the best-performing album of 1997 in the
United States (Spice); wore the famous union jack dress to the Brit Awards (Geri); shook hands with the
Queen (also Geri); arrived at Cannes by speedboat to announce plans for a Spice Girls movie (Spice World);
recorded Spice World (the album) on the set of Spice World (the movie), so that Spice World (the movie)
could have a soundtrack (the album); angered Maori leaders by performing the haka in Indonesia; travelled
to South Africa to meet Nelson Mandela, who described the meeting as “one of the greatest moments in my
life”; squeezed and cuddled and petted 13-year-old Prince Harry at the same event, causing him to blush
furiously (two months after the funeral of his mother, Princess Diana); published a book; appeared in
Istanbul for their first live concert (a Pepsi production); turned 21 (Emma); released Spice World (the
album); fired their manager (Simon Fuller, whom they have since rehired and who will produce an
upcoming animated film featuring their music and voices); attended premieres of Spice World (the movie) in
London, Paris, Rotterdam, Madrid, Dusseldorf and Brussels; shot the music video for “Who Do You Think
You Are”; shot the music video for “Spice Up Your Life”; shot the music video for “Mama”; kicked off the
annual British Legion Poppy Appeal to commemorate war dead; collectively earned an estimated £300m
through merchandise sales.
The pervading sense is that the Spice Girls were all they were marketed to be: feisty, mischievous and
bonded as tightly as covalent atoms
Thanks to the digitisation of 1990s print media, if members of the Spice Girls generation are so inclined,
they can now acquire within seconds all the Google-able context missing from their recollections. They can
read that the five women learned to sing and dance together over the course of a year living, unpaid, in a
home owned by a father-and-son management team; that the father and son’s strategy of dangling the
promise of a contract without actually producing one failed badly, prompting the women to abscond with
their demos one evening and subsequently sign to the record label of their choosing; that the group was
originally called “Touch” and then “Spice”, “girls” being incorporated later because people in the industry
tended to refer to them, with a whiff of derision, as “the ‘Spice’ girls” (it had the added benefit of
distinguishing them from a US rapper already using “Spice”); that their signature nicknames were imposed
by a British music journalist who, Melanie Brown later said, “couldn’t be bothered to remember all our
names”; that the members co-wrote all their songs; that Melanie Chisolm invited Liam Gallagher of Oasis
to physically fight her at the 1997 Brit Awards, while the Spice Girls collected their trophy for “Best British
Single”; that Gwyneth Paltrow and Winona Ryder once dressed up as the Spice Girls and filmed their own
version of the “2 Become 1” music video in Ryder’s apartment; that the Spice Girls were vehemently
opposed to the United Kingdom adopting the euro as its currency (“The Euro-bureaucrats are destroying
every bit of national identity,” said Victoria Beckham, then Victoria Adams); that, at the height of their
influence, the academic consensus was that the Spice Girls were mock-feminists who had dangerously and
lucratively misappropriated the Riot Grrrl “girl power” ethos for personal gain; that the media consensus
was that they were all charm and no talent (and, by 1998, no charm); that they were the subjects of some of
the first vitriolic hate pages on the web, where users graphically fantasised about torturing and murdering
them; that the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood described their marketing as “child molestation”; that
the music producer Phil Spector, currently in prison for murder, compared them unfavourably to a “porno
film”; that Thom Yorke of Radiohead labeled them “the Antichrist”; that, at the time she left the group in
1998, Geri Horner (then Geri “Ginger” Halliwell) was living in a poky cottage at the back of a Hertfordshire
dairy farm, where, in her own words, she spent her weekends “crying”.