Nelson Mandela and Prince Charles shake
hands, flanked by the Spice Girls, in Pretoria in
1997 (AFP/Getty)Yet when one reads contemporary accounts of first-hand interactions with the group, the pervading sense is
that the Spice Girls were all they were marketed to be: feisty, mischievous and bonded as tightly as covalent
atoms. Their impression is of fast-talking strong personalities who delighted in returning rapid-fire volleys
of questions to the dazed journalists sent to interview them; the kind of livewires who, for no reason, in the
middle of a Rolling Stone interview, attempt the magician’s trick of neatly pulling a tablecloth off a table
laden with china and glassware and food – unsuccessfully. Their demonstrations of girl power seemed
almost nuclear. The experience of interacting with them may have been best characterised by Spice World
screenwriter Jamie Curtis who, speaking to The Telegraph this year, recalled simply that the Spice Girls
“were terrifying. Particularly if you were a man. If you walked into a room and it was just the five of them
you would literally turn around and try and get out as quickly as possible.”
The real live women
Today, the Spice Girls relish their status as legacy artists. In Dublin in May, as the Croke Park soccer
stadium filled, a pre-show playlist administered shocks of nostalgia to the audience as relentlessly as a
Milgram study participant. (The crowd applauded “C’est La Vie” by the Irish girl group B*witched as
thunderously as if it had not been an audio recording.) The entrance of the band itself was presaged by the
appearance onstage of four groups of back-up dancers, each representing a Spice Girl (or, at least, one of the
four on tour). Baby’s dancers wore bubble gum pink and lavender fuzzy jackets. Sporty’s dancers warmed
up in blue Lycra athletic gear. Scary’s prowled menacingly in leopard print, leather and chains. Ginger’s,
clad red in British military-themed outfits, strutted around the stage vogueing, which is not a dance move
particularly associated with Ginger Spice and therefore adroitly embodied the nebulosity of “Ginger” as an
archetypal persona.
While the slightness of the Spice Girls discography revealed itself over the course of the two and a half-hour
show, it’s difficult to imagine the hits could have been received with greater enthusiasm 20 years earlier. As
big a draw as the songs, for the crowd, was the chance to watch the Spice Girls interact with each other in
person, and here especially they delivered: they hugged, adjusted one another’s costumes and teased each
other mercilessly – after Melanie Chisolm (Sporty) described an attempt at an Irish accent by Melanie
Brown (Scary) as “a bit racist”, an insouciant Brown immediately quipped: “I’m allowed to be racist; I’m
black.” When, in a final costume change, the members revealed themselves to be wearing glammed up
versions of their outfits from the 1997 “Wannabe” music video, it was as predictable and joyful as a victory
lap.