Dear mum,
Everything's going great in the States. We're dead tired and a bit fed up, but we're zooming up the charts here and we're
even making a film! Only thing is, this funny FACE journalist keeps following us....
Girl Power! Love,
Your Spice Girl.
America. January 29, 1997. The Spice Girls, the pop sensation of our time, sit in a New York hotel room. (Emma, the
youngest and blondest, isn't here. She has spent the morning puking up, and is down the corridor in bed.) They want to go
shopping, but instead they are being interviewed by The Face. Except that, when the Spice Girls are all together,
you don't really interview them. You mostly just linger nearby, very occasionally suggesting a topic of conversation, while
they shout over each other and fall about laughing. Let's listen for a moment...
"Has anyone ever eaten cat food?" asks Geri. (She is the oldest and most ginger. If anyone takes the lead in
day-to-day Spice dealings, it is her. She is also the one most explicitly concerned with the Spice Girls' shouty
post-feminist manifesto, and is the one who actually goes around shouting "Girl Power!" all the time.)
"Oh yeah," confesses Mel C. "I've ate cat food." (Melanie C is the quietest - a very relative concept when it comes to the
Spice Girls - and the Liverpudlian. For this reason, whenever she buys a toothbrush she buys a red one.)
"Have you?" says Mel B. She has been concentrating on her chicken and mash, but suddenly she perks up her ears.
(Melanie B is the blackest, and the one most ready to give the impression that everything is a laugh and that she couldn't
care less. But if you fall for this, you're a fool.)
"I think I've eaten the biscuits," says Geri.
"Oh yeah," nods Mel C, as though she is dealing with mere beginners, "I've eaten dog biscuits."
"Melanie C eats dog biscuits!" shouts Mel B.
"Didn't you used to do dares with your cousin to get each other to eat dog biscuits?" asks Mel C.
"I used to pick chewing gum off the floor," Mel B concedes.
"Melanie told me," Victoria interjects, "she used to actually collect other people's bogeys and chew on them."
"Piss off!" shouts Mel B. "No, I used to have a bogey collection behind my bunk bed. My mum used to make me scrape them
off."
"We've all gone filthy," sighs Geri.
"I was only little," says Mel B. "You've got nowhere else to put them. Everyone does that."
"I did a poo in the bath with my brother and sister," boasts Geri.
These are the Spice Girls. They just can't help it. Geri puts her head in her hands. "Oh God, now I'll get the incestuous..."
"You must be proud of it, or you wouldn't say it, Geri," says Victoria. "So you must want it to be said." (Victoria is the
one who gew up wealthiest, and seems the least drawn into girlie gang behaviour.)
Mel C looks at me.
"Do you want us to talk about something semi-serious?" she wonders aloud.
Maybe. Some of the other questions I have made them answer earlier, alone.
WHAT IS YOUR TALENT? Victoria: I wear the heels and carry a handbag. Looking miserable. Everybody says to me, why don't I ever smile?
I don't like it when I do smile because I get dimples. Sometimes I get a bit annoyed because the others are a bit irrational
- they just think something and do it - whereas I think about all the consequences. I have a lot of input on the writing as well.
Mel B: I'd like to think my talent is giving every person I come into contact with that little bit of zest for
life again. Because life in general is fucking hard. And I hopefully go, "Come on! Who gives a shit about that? Go for it!"
Emma: I've got quite a high voice. I do all the high sort of licks. I also really like to know that the girls are feeling OK. I'm quite caring. If one of us is not right, or one of them is not feeling right then I have to sort it because I don't like it.
Mel C: I'm very determined. I think it can be a bit annoying, but I'm glad I'm like that. I don't think I'm a great singer, but I love it and I think people enjoy my singing because I enjoy it so much. Sometimes I feel like a bit of a spare part. I'm the one in the corner. But I'm the one the paparazzi don't follow. Touch wood. I've lived in my flat since September and I haven't got curtains, and I get out of the bath and forget. We all have our own countries. In Spain they think I'm the bee's knees. In Germany it's "Victoria! Victoria!"
Geri: Creatively I love lyrics. I really do love words. My main thing in the group is I come up with ideas. I think I can talk to anybody, and I always try to understand people. We've all got balls, but I've got quite big balls, basically.
We first met ten days earlier, at the Face photo session. Victoria introduces herself first. She is the one
known as Posh Spice. "I'm not really posh," she says. Her sort of twisted London-y slightly-hoity-toity-but-not drawl reminds me a
little of Justine from Elastica. "She's got hairier armpits," Victoria observes. On her Christmas Carribean holiday she sat
behind Damon and Justine on the plane. None of them said anything, but Damon smiled at her.
These character nicknames have been one the Spice Girls' genius moves. Posh Spice. Ginger Spice (Geri). Sporty Spice
(Mel C). Scary Spice (Mel B). Baby Spice (Emma). The perfect way to deliver the concept - five girls with different
attributes who join together to make a greater whole. It was the smart, memorable way of setting in concrete everything that
they were trying to be: Spice is the variety of life. Like most of the best pop music masterstrokes, it was not planned. The
names were actually created at a Top of the Pops magazine editorial meeting. They thought of the name "Scary Spice" and
the rest readily followed.
"My mum went, 'You're not scary'," says Mel B. "I said, 'Yes I am'."
"My mum was over the moon with my one," says Victoria. "She said, 'Oh, jolly good...'"
Before she could even talk Victoria used to leap around her Hertfordshire lounge like a nutcase, wearing headphones
which weren't plugged in, dancing away on the orange carpet with her father to Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke". Her parents met
when her father sang in a British Sixties cover band called The Sonics. The Sonics never quite made it - "their manager
committed suicide," Victoria endearingly relates, "so it all kind of went a bit Pete Tong from there, you see" - but her
father moved into the world of electrical wholesaling. Made a lot of money. "He could sell snow to the eskimos as far as I'm
concerned," his daughter says. These are the children of the Eighties. Victoria liked Leroy from Fame, and Rudolph Nureyev, but most of all she was in
love with Matt Goss. She decided she was going to marry him, have his children. She even had the stars'n'stripes jeans. (She stuck her Bros pictures in a scrapbook, but she wasn't allowed them on the walls. "Blu-Tac stains," she explains. "I just thought he was really sexy," she says. "He reminded me of a baby duck just broken out of an egg." "I Owe You Nothing",
that was her favourite. The way he did that half-asthmatic, half sexual "oooh-arrgghhh" grunt. At one Bros concert she sat in front
of Luke's girlfriend, Shirley Lewis, and she liked Luke enough as well to keep thinking "you cow" and wanting to smash her head in.
She saw Shirley Lewis the other day, singing back-up on the same show as the Spice Girls. She wanted to explain, but she didn't.
Victoria didn't have an easy time at school. She never had many friends. A lot of it seemed to stem from her father's car.
It can be difficult when your dad delivers you to school in the Rolls-Royce. The children always used to plead for him to take
them in the clapped-out old van, but sometimes he was on the way to a meeting and it had to be the Rolls, and even though
they would ask to be dropped off at the end of the street.... word gets around. She used to hate it. "If I was going to school
now I wouldn't give a monkeys," she says. (But that's easy to say, now she's a Spice Girl.)
Her classmates also used to take the piss out of her nose. So she kept her head down, worked, and went to dancing classes
in the evening. You wouldn't find her behind the bike sheds. "I used to turn a blind eye to it," she says, "because I was never invited.
I was probably one of the most unpopular kids you'd ever know at school." She'd cry in the toilets; she'd cry to her parents.
"You look back now and think: I'd love to be stuck in that room with all those kids that said all those things about me."
She's met some of them since she's been a Spice Girl. They've come up to her in Tesco's, pushing prams - the ones who teased
Victoria and made her cry - and they've reminisced about those happy shared school days. Asked for an autograph.
It isn't normally like this. Pop stars appear. Sometimes they sell shedfuls of records. Sometimes they find their
picture in the papers. But not like this. The Spice Girls' success is of a different order to anything we have had for a
very long time. They represent rather more than themselves. With uncomfortable speed, they have become part of the fabric of our world, of our language, and the way we talk and think about ourselves. They have a huge - and in some ways, for which they
themselves are not necessarily responsible, appalling - resonance. (Compare, as we must, with the current boy-band heroes
Boyzone. They're really successful too, but when we think of Boyzone we think of - at very best - Boyzone. When we think of the
Spice Girls,right now, however ludicrous this is, we seem to think of just about everything else that matters.)
They are talked about in Parliament. They are fought over by our leaders and our would-be leaders. They are the
currently favoured metaphor for any kind of high-spiritedness, or feisty femininity (turn on the radio right now: it's the
celebrating female Wrexham supporters returning home on their cioach from West Ham, talking on Radio Five Live to David
Mellor, being referred to, quite naturally and without explanation, as "spice girls"), or any kind of trashiness, or any
kind of independance, or any kind of wink-wink-guys sexuality, or any kind of gang-flavoured jubilation, or even simply as a
metaphor for unfettered popularity itself.
Reasons? You can search on several levels. Maybe they do fill a vacuum for free-hearted, independant, joyful female
role-models. Maybe their attitudes have set off an earthquake in the fault-lines of a guilty, paranoid, patriarchal society.
Maybe. I think two of the most interesting reasons lie within the media itself.
The first is a consequence of it's demographic make-up. The British mainstream media is dominated by the values of
middle-aged British men., who both want to be young again themselves, and want to show themselves as professionally young at
heart. The Spice Girls fit perfectly. Part of the over-fascination with the Spice Girls is as one more example in the
familiar, pathetic tradition of middle-aged men embarassing themselves over flirty faux-teenage girls. (Calm down,
you want to shout, but they never listen.)
The second is the way the Spice Girls have flourished in that fuzzy area between serious and stupid which Nineties
British Culture has taken as it's playground. Fooling around in these shadowlands - between kitsch and high art, between
sincerity and irony, between acclaim and disdain, between sarcasm and desperation - used to seem rather daring and
postmodern, but more and more those who operate in this area use it as a way to be lazy and abdicate all tough moral and
aesthetic decisions. The "quality" press is particularly guilty here. For it, the Spice Girls are simultaneously a pathetic
joke (obviously they're fake and manufactured, obviously it's just stupid teen nonsense anyway, obviously their naive
political opinions don't matter a fig, obviously we don't care about them, and anyway no pop music these days is worth
anything, not like we used to listen to Leonard Cohen while we tried to seduce pretty brunette students... oh, sorry, I
wanderd off there) and quite generally their latest saviour (every editor and section editor seems to be under constant
pressure to make their newspaper sexier, more relevant to women and younger, so the Spice Girls offer a magical triple
whammy). Which is why, whatever they are saying, they make sure to print their Spice pictures large and often.
For the tabloids, where such hypocrisies are the bread and butter of life, everything is cosier and more beautiful.
Laughing at people and taking them too seriously at the same time; praising people to the heavens while picking apart their private
hells - they know how to do all of this with loathsome glee. They can be more genuine in their enthusiasm (no pompous
aesthetic sensibilities to overcome) and simultaneously less awkward in treating the Spice Girls as a joke (because almost
everything is). Put it this way. There is a certain sort of man - and perhaps they are strangely over-represented in the
land of tabloid - who likes nothing more than patronising someone young and female, while simultaneously staring at their
cleavage and wondering if tyere's any chance of a quick shag for those men, these are fine times indeed.
Let us, by way of example, try to pick apart The Political Incident. The Specatator apparently asked it's writer,
Simon Sebag Montefiore (crazy name, crazy guy... zzzzzz), to interview whoever the latest pop things were about
politics. Great idea. Smartly, he suggests the Spice Girls. What is there to lose? It's funny if they play along;
hilarious if they don't.
Their representatives agree. It's a good way of showing that the latest teensters do have a few sharp opinions
in their heads. It's another way of spreading the base of their press coverage. And they were flattered by the notion that
the Spice Girls were to be featured in the big Spectator Christmas issue interview in the slot usually reserved for
a chat with the Prime Minister or a party leader.
"We knew it was a political magazine," says Mel C. "I didn't actually know it was a Conservative paper."
"We just thought it would be another angle," says Geri. "It'd be something fun to do."
The interview takes place on December 1, backstage at the Smash Hits Awards. It lasts about an hour. They sit around Montefiore in
a circle. The press officer listens in. The interviewer takes notes, rather than tape-records. He soon homes on Geri and Victoria,
who are giving him better, sassier opinions - and, shazam!, with a right-wing bias - than he could have expexted.
He writes up the encounter, cleverly as both piss-take and clear reportage. Nicely deadpan. it is a great game. SPICE GIRLS
BACK SCEPTICS ON EUROPE, the headline goes. "Opposition to labour on tax, rejection of single currency. Important interview by
Simon Sebag Montefiore," it continues. He takes his fun from purposefully over-interpreting their opinions - "The Spice Girls
take a Burkean view of the growth of our landed aristocracy... The Spice philosophy combines Thatcherite econonmics,
Buddhist tolerance, and feudalistic neo-Plantagenet paternalism" - and hugely enjoys that the only Spice Girl to show any recognition
of the name Sir James Goldsmith (Victoria) does so by asking, "Is he anything to do with Jemima Goldsmith?" Geri announces
that "Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology - Girl Power". Victoria says, "as for Major, he's a boring pillock".
Some of the Spice Girls - particularly the two mels - were miffed at the way their views were only faintly represented in the finished article,
but no one denies that most of the quotes which were printed were accurate (The one big blunder: Geri's name was printed as
"Gerri" throughout.) An extract was printed in the Daily Telegraph on December 12. That's where the tabloids first read it.
The next day, all hell broke loose.
Interview continued here
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