Good God, Is It Really 30 Years Of The Spice Girls?

Three decades of coming to terms with a pop music phenomenon.

It’s hard to believe that it has been 30 years since The Spice Girls were first created as an entity and 28 since they were launched onto the public stage. An entire lifetime for some, the best years of their lives for others, all changed forever by a cynically manufactured group that effectively reconstructed the face of pop music. Though hardly the first group to be created by management companies, The Spice Girls set a certain template that has been repeated relentlessly ever since – find four or five people whose desperation for fame can almost be tasted, hype the living shit out of the project through friendly media connections and pitch it as something fresh and edgy to an audience that is just about reaching the age where they might start buying records and are ripe for ‘fandom’. It’s been the way of manufactured pop since ‘pop music’ became a thing, but with The Spice Girls, the process was polished to perfection.

The genius of The Spice Girls project was two-fold. Firstly, give each member a distinct personality. The idea of each member having a nickname that reflected their persona – Sporty, Scary, Baby, Posh and… erm… Ginger (presumably because the more obvious descriptions of Geri Halliwell’s public persona might be less family-friendly) might have been, as the story goes, the entirely original creation of a pop music journalist – but they were adopted with such suspicious speed by the rest of the press and subsequently the world that a cynic might think that it was all part of the plan from the start. Similarly, the idea that the group were representatives of ‘Girl Power’. We might note that just one week before the release of the first Spice Girls single, Shampoo – a band for the delinquent teenage girls that Spice Girls fans would have run a mile from – released a magnificent single called Girl Power, an anarchic and often censored anthem of bad behaviour and anti-social attitudes. Even then, the phrase was lifted from Bikini Kill, who used it as far back as 1991. The slogan – but none of the attitude – was then swept up and used by The Spice Girls relentlessly, as though they had invented the idea. A bit ripe from a collective of drama school graduates and former models that had male managers, producers and songwriters, you might think, but perhaps it was a positive message to a mostly female, mostly adolescent fan base nevertheless – Girl Power over Mean Girls seems like a good idea, encouraging self-belief over petty rivalry.

Whatever the commercial truth behind the Spice Girls mystique might have been, there is no denying that they emerged at just the right time when everyone was tiring of the oafish cock-swinging of Britpop and the market lay open for pure pop that still had the swagger of (ahem) Cool Britannia – the sort of thing that would excite teenage girls with an explosion of colour, dancing and performative feminism and would appeal to the lad’s mags because, well, they were all feisty young women and one of them – Geri Halliwell again – had a back catalogue of nude photos from her days as a glamour model for them to plunder. They were cheeky, but not too cheeky, shouty but never going to say something offensive on live TV. Your gran would love them. Truly, The Spice Girls had something for everyone – safe, bright, media-savvy and with a handful of catchy tunes from the best songwriters in the country. They were a merchandiser’s dream, guaranteed to sell magazines and hastily written books, dolls for the kiddies, sticker collections, make-up and fashion for the teens, posters, badges, T-shirts, the lot. There were also numerous sponsorship deals, the sort of thing that more serious bands would be wary of but which were very lucrative.* The records were probably of secondary concern, but they made a lot of money too.

It’s difficult to fault the whole Spice Girls project in 1996 and 1997, which was pushed at such a pace that you might suspect that all involved knew that it wasn’t going to last. These days, pop stars can go on forever it seems, but in the mid-1990s the lifespan of a pop act aimed at the teen market still seemed very finite – people who were once your most devoted fans might outgrow you in a few years. This perhaps explains the desperation that saw everyone making as much money as they could as quickly as possible. 1997 saw the film Spice World, and if vanity movies for pop groups are not good at the best of times, then surely vanity movies for groups who have only been recording for a year are even worse. Such unseemly haste is not the route to quality – even the Beatles waited two years until they made A Hard Day’s Night and that at least had a great director. Spice World was made by Bob Spiers, a jobbing TV director who was only ever as good as the material allowed, and this film was written by the equally workmanlike Kim Fuller, brother of the band’s manager. No amount of embarrassed celebrity cameos can cover up the sheer desperation that this film exudes at every moment, a shameless cash grab by all involved who clearly thought that this wasn’t going to last long enough to put any real effort in or to worry about what it might have on the lasting reputation of the group.**

And so it came to pass. Bands that are organically formed by friends with a burning desire to be rock ‘n’ roll stars have a hard enough time staying together for more than a few years before egos, personality clashes and ‘musical differences’ prove too much to deal with. For manufactured bands, it’s all the harder. After all, you have a bunch of people who have nothing beyond blind ambition in common with each other and no real love of music is driving them – Indeed, they might not even be into the kind of music that they make. No amount of girl power sloganeering can mask that, especially when there are power struggles as the prospect of going alone and becoming even more famous is dangled in front of you. We’ll call it the Robbie Williams syndrome. In a group like The Spice Girls, put together from a bunch of extremely ambitious performing arts graduates who were reading The Stage in search of their big break, it should be no surprise that this was probably seen as a stepping stone, just another project that had been applied for between auditions for West End musicals and TV shows. No one knew – or could have ever imagined – just how successful the group would be. From the very moment that they made it big, the only question was: who would be the one to jump, and when? The fact that it was Geri Halliwell was no great surprise – always something of a misfit in the group and probably the one most eager for fame at any cost, she presumably saw the finite life of a pop group as something that could be transcended as a solo artist. Not an unreasonable theory really.

The problem that Geri had – and that all the other members would face as the project invariably collapsed within the traditional 2 – 3 year time frame – was that The Spice Girls had become a global phenomenon. Boy band predecessors like Take That and the big names of Brit Pop were effectively nobodies outside the UK but The Spice Girls were huge. As the members of globally successful bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and others had found to ego-crushing cost years earlier, you might be in the biggest band in the world but as a solo artist, you are far less interesting. You’re not quite back at square one, but you’re certainly not able to rack up the same record sales or sell out the same venues that your band could. There might be odd exceptions to the rule, but only The Beatles (and then, really only Paul McCartney) maintained the same level of success as solo artists as they had as a band… and for all the hype, The Spice Girls were not The Beatles.

After the group disbanded – ending in a whimper rather than a bang – the various members dabbled with varied music careers that perhaps hinted at the fact that the five of them had little in common musically to begin with before their musical careers fizzled out. As individuals, they were less interesting – the whole girl gang persona, however manufactured it might have been, was what made The Spice Girls so engaging for so many. Only Melanie C has maintained any ongoing recording career while Victoria Beckham (as she now is), always the one who seemed to be buried in the sound mix and perhaps the least entertaining of the lot, has achieved considerable success outside the music industry thanks to a celebrity power-couple marriage and a new career as fashion designer – a job where success often depends on a famous name. The rest all seem to be judges on talent shows and general ‘celebrities’, dabbling in this or that but not really making an impact in anything. Not that they have to worry – none of the Spice Girls are struggling for money and if they were, they could always reunite for a tour, as they did in 2007 and 2018. We should never underestimate the middle-aged thirst for reliving one’s youth, and many male pop bands more forgettable and throwaway than The Spice Girls have successfully reunited as increasingly grizzled old men, playing bigger shows than they ever did in their heyday and going through the motions for an ageing fan base who look at them through the rose-tinted eyes of teenage nostalgia. The Spice Girls reunions – lacking whichever member (i.e. Beckham) is ‘too busy’ to take part – have had more creative credibility than many we could name and the fact that they can still push the whole ‘girl power’, “friendship never ends” schtick after all this time says a lot about their impact on a certain generation and the need to relive a simpler, happier time.

Oddly, there has not (yet) been a 30th-anniversary reunion announced – perhaps because the date of the anniversary is a bit hit-and-miss. Do we count it from the day the group were put together or the release of the first single, two years later? It seems that most efforts to mark this momentous cultural experience are going for 2024 as the celebration date – perhaps 2026 seems too far away and too uncertain for anyone to wait. So we have a set of Royal Mail stamps released on January 11th (putting the group alongside Iron Maiden, Queen, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and others as officially part of the British cultural zeitgeist) and the forthcoming exhibition of Spice Girls merch from the collection of Liz West – “the foremost collector of Spice Girls memorabilia and merchandise in the World” – at the British Music Experience in Liverpool from February 7th to September 8th. Given the sheer weight of Spice Girls tat that existed – perhaps less than licensed by KISS, but produced over a much shorter time period – this might well be a fascinating study of what life was like for adolescent girls (West began her collection aged 11) and how pop was commodified in the second half of the 1990s.

I won’t lie – back in the day, I found The Spice Girls an omnipresent annoyance, taking objection to their manufactured image as both girl gang and the ‘something for everyone’ individual personas that felt contrived and cynical. Unless you were there, it’s hard to understand just how much they were being pushed, everywhere, all the time. 30 years on, I can take a more sanguine view of things. A couple of the records are actually pretty good, even if a surprising number of the singles are, in retrospect, extraordinarily bland ballads that rather belie the group image. Compared to the boy bands and pop idols that followed, they at least had personalities, even if they were carefully crafted. They seemed fun, and fun is something that seems to have been stripped from the pop music world, replaced by heavy-handed sloganeering and aimless swagger. And God knows, they were a relief from the Neanderthal world of Britpop and its equally manufactured rivalries. I’ll take The Spice Girls over Blur or Oasis any day.

In the end, The Spice Girls have absolutely earned the right for anniversary celebrations. The group’s career might have been the result of hype but they must have had something beyond that – other bands who were big names once are now effectively forgotten. The Spice Girls had a clear impact on the lives of their fans that has lasted long after their sell-by date was up. Good for them.

DAVID FLINT

* There were plenty of unofficial cash-ins, spoofs and copycats as well, from TVX’s Viceworld – a soft porn satire featuring vague lookalikes – and Spice Exposed, a hurried cash-in that pulled together what little nude video footage there was of Geri with a bunch of interviews from former associates – and was perhaps the most outrageous pop star sex scam since Madonna’s underground film A Certain Sacrifice was sold as an porn movie – through to ‘unauthorised’ documentaries, tribute bands and drag acts that can still be enjoyed today.

** Notably, efforts to turn the Spice Girls story into drama have all failed so far – the 2012 West End show Viva Forever, which followed the trend of scratching together a paper-thin narrative around the familiar hits of a popular band, failed to impress anyone and eventually closed after seven months, losing £5 million. Perhaps the animated film, announced in 2019 but still unfilmed, might do better.

Like what we do? Support us and help us do more!