Just imagine. This they loved. Two of their very favourite things, idiot politics and idiot pop, together at once. On December 13 the Spice Girls made the cover of three principle tabloids. The Sun was able to have the most fun with it. The current political climate is perfect for them. They can sit on the fence, laugh at Tori sleaziness and Labour shamelessness the same. VOTE SPICE, the headline went. SPICE GIRLS BACK TORIES offered the Daily Star. The Mirror simply shamelessly ignored the pro-Tory angle and went for PILLOCKED: MAJOR TRASHED BY SPICE GIRLS. The quality papers followed too, with wry, half-mocking editorials, and suddenly - this is where the fuzzy serious/stupid area shows it's bite - the message slipped. No longer were people suddenly enjoying an arch joke about a teen group's politics. Suddenly it was serious. It was: Why did they think this? Did the Tory Spice Girls represent a new, previously undetected youth zeitgeist which saw through Tony Blair as a sham, and which hankered nostalgically for firm-handed Eighties Thatcherism? A new phrase entered the newspaper columns, and the language: "The Spice Vote". Maybe this would be the mysterious electoral block to save John Major.
It seems inevitable, now, that the Spice Girls' politics will be carefully monitered throughout the Spring. They are, madly, a factor. Only a few people seem to find this utterly ludicrous.
"They were talking about us in the House of Commons," says Mel C, shaking her head. "It was ridiculous."
"What," asks Geri, "is the state of Governement if..."
"...they're talking about us?" says Mel B.
"Exactly. If we can have an influence? That's terrible."

DO YOU THINK "THE SPICE VOTE" WILL BE IMPORTANT IN THE IMMINENT GENERAL ELECTION?
Emma: I don't think so. I'm not really into anything like that. We had the big interview and I didn't say anything. I didn't even talk and there was a picture of me outside 10 Downing Street. I don't think I'll vote - am I allowed to say that? Do I think Margaret Thatcher is the original Spice Girl? Not particularly. My mum is.
Victoria: Personally I am a Tory. I was the one who called John Major a boring pillock. It depends on how much they play on it, I suppose. If I'm being totally honest I wouldn't be surprised if it did influence people, especially younger people. Apparently I got asked the other day to go round to John Major's for tea with him and Norma. But he hasn't actually asked me.
Mel B: I don't believe in anything political because I'm an anarchist and I think the way the world's run is crap at the moment. That was bad journalism. It was twisted beyond belief, and that's why it caused such a stir. I'm not a voter.
Mel C: I shouldn't think so. We are all very young girls and half of us haven't got a clue about politics for a start. I don't vote anymore because I don't know enough about politics to vote. I think you should be taught in school about politics. When I voted, I voted Labour. I'm from working-class Liverpool. Can you imagine the stick I got when that was in the paper? My dad really frightened me. He was: you want to watch yourself when you go back to Liverpool. Margaret Thatcher? I think Margaret Thatcher's a complete prick, after what she's done to my hometown.
Geri: I really wish they'd written the whole fucking damn interview. There was a real coalition government among us:an anarchist, a Labour, two Conservative and one that couldn't give a fuck. Mel C was Labour, Victoria and I was Conservative - and even then I'm a little bit Liberal and Greenpeace - and Melanie B's an anarchist and Emma wasn't sure. It was my quote that Margaret Thatcher was a Spice Girl - she was the first advocate of Girl Power. Of course she destroyed a lot of things. Everyone makes mistakes and she did. She fucked up big-time loads of different things, definitely, but what I give her credit for is that she is the first fucking woman. It said in the paper she sent me a Christmas card. It's still stuck in the post.

This is the way Geri would like it to be told: The very first thing she remembers is being safe in her mother's amniotic fluid, then squeezing through the womb walls. Her first thought on surveying the outside world?
"Girl Power!"
Whatever. When wheeled around the streets of Watford in her pram, baby Geri used to say hello to everybody. ("I was networking already," she sniggers.) She was the youngest of five. Her mother had come over from Spain as an pair. "Basically I was an accident. And they wanted a boy. It's all quite tragic," she says. I come from a very neurotic turbulent family. If you want to get deep and psychological you could say for many reasons I wanted to be heard."
She loved Elvis first, and she loved George Michael for a while ("I thought I'd marry him, but obviously that would be a great challenge..."). She also loved Madonna. She got a lot of abuse at school because she was very short for her age; She was 12 when Madonna's film, Desperately Seeking Susan, came out, and you had to be 15. All of her friends could get away with it, but even though she stuffed her bra with socks and splatted make-up all over, she still didn't look anything like the age. The woman at the ticket counter let her in anyway: "I think she felt sorry for me." Madonna offered some useful lessons. "The way she rose from mediocrity. She wasn't a fantastic dancer or singer, but she just used her intelligence and her energy to create escapism, fantasy through art and expression. She's not that attractive, but she made herself attractive."
Geri worked as a club dancer, and as a video extra. She cleaned. Taught aerobics. Did bar work. Sold fake Tag watches to anyone she met. (She sold some to Aswad in a recording studio.) She was a Turkish gameshow host. She also took her clothes off for a while.
"I made a lot of mistakes," she says. "I learned a lot of lessons." She was asked to do her first modelling for a Spanish newspaper while dancing in Majorca. She wore a silver bikini, and she was thrilled. "I never considered myself pretty enough to go in front of a camera." Soon she had something of a modelling career, nude and otherwise. "I never really felt exploited at the time," she volunteers. "It was fine. I saw it for what it was."
She knew all the old topless photos, maybe 20-odd sessions, would surface. She'd told the others about it. "Half of me thought, 'Oh shit'. The other half of me giggled. I was quite surprised at the fascination, because I thought: what's the big deal? Marilyn Monroe. Sylvester Stallone's been in porno. So's Joanna Lumley. Nearly everybody in the entertainment business has done something. I'm 24 and it's obvious, especially with my background, I haven't gone the clean-cut way. I try to see a positive. Some of the builders who read Page 3, I might be getting their attention and they might start listening to the music. Get some messages out. Talk about safe sex."
I don't think it's safe sex those builders are thinking about...
"No," she concedes. "I don't think so either. But that's OK. The way I see it, if someone gets enjoyment out of looking at my tits then that's fine. It's not hurting anyone. It's fish'n'chips paper the next day."

Asylum studios, Perivale: just before leavong for America, The Spice Girls film the video for "Mama", their number-one single. It is shot in front of hundreds of children. (The video cencept: a kids' TV show.) Between shots I listen to two kids talk. The little girl points nervously at Mel B.
"The Scary Spice isn't black, is she?"
"Yes she is," the little boy next to her asserts.
The girl considers this. "Not that black," she says.
And I think: "Scary Spice" doesn't actually seem like a very funny name when you actually hear someone say it.
The children are taught simple dance routines. Speckled in their midst are occasional parents. I watch one in the second row, sitting cross-legged, shyly echoing most of the hand movements with the youngsters beside her, but skipping the more demonstrative above-the-head flourishes. The unnoticed Spice Girl fan mother has done hand movements like this before. I wonder what she is thinking. Once upon a time she was down there on stage, looking up. Her name is Shirlie. As in Pepsi and... as in Wham!

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE WORD?
Victoria: I quite like "Bollocks". that's quite an impressive word.
Geri: My favourite word probably be [she stutters as she says it] "existentialism". I can's say it and I'm not quite sure what it means.
Mel B: I have been using "higgledy-piggledy" quite a lot... And "hotchpotch" I use. I don't know why. Maybe it's a Leeds thing.
"Candyfloss". Candyfloss is quite.... I don't know. [laughs]
Mel C:Probably "sound". I seem to say it a lot.

Mel C has got a scar on her head from when she bashed herself on a chair as a young kid. The social services came round, thinking that her parents had beaten her up. She remembers the cats. She used to talk to them, and that was when, if she was feeling greedy, she would eat their cat food as well. "My mum used to find me in the garage eating the cat food." (Whiskas? "My favourite, yeah.)
Mel C's parents met in the Cavern in Liverpool. He used to fit and repair elevators for Otis, the elevator company. She was always a singer ans still is. Mel C's mother can still be found singing in clubs fronting a band called T Junction, singing songs by Tina Turner, Bryan Adams, that kind of thing. Her parents split up when she was young. "I think I was a bit too upset to talk about it," she remembers, "and a bit confused."
Mel C used to have this thing where she thought that the only person living a normal life was her. It was all about her. And everyone else, they weren't real people. They were just watching her. All the time. When she was alone in her bedroom, the whole world was watching her. When other people got home they didn't watch telly, they watched Melanie.
"But I've sort of got over that," she says.
She always wanted to be a pop star. "I thought I would change completely as a person. You'd never get any spots, silly things like that. I would never be unhappy again." Silly silly. "And then your song goes to fucking number one and you're miserable. We all have moods together and we were in Japan and really down.
The other day Mel C got a marriage proposal. He was 12.

The Spice Girls arrive in New York during the last week of January. They are here to Do Promotion. This is the sort of thing which happens: tonight the Spice Girls are to spend the evening being driven around New York on a bus, accompanied by about 20 radio station competition winners, some of whom only have the vaguest idea who the Spice Girls are. Along the way, they will make various stops - one at a restaurant for hemp-based appetisers, at the Great American Backrub for head massages, at another restaurant for drag-queen-delivered main courses. Occasionally one of the Spice Girls will speak live on the phone with the radio station, Z-100, who have arranged all of this, but very little of what is happening will ever be explained over the air.
The Spice Girls are tired, and they are passing around illnesses. Two of them have already had flu on this trip. Now it is Victoria's turn. I suspect tonight's contrived hi-jinks wouldn't be much up her street anyway. "It's not the number ones she says deadpan. "This is the highlight."
Emma joins us. Down the bus, one of the competition winners screams at some minor pleasure. Emma sighs. "Everything's over-exaggerated over here." She shares some reservations about her public image. "I don't want to be a cutie. I want to be a sexy bitch. I want to be a hot sexy bitch."
You never like being a cutie?
"I like it sometimes. I can get away with murder."
"I'm going through hell this evening," says Victoria. "Flu on a party bus full of Yanks. Nightmare on wheels." Someone hands her the mobile phone. Suddenly she is live on Z-199. "I'm doing very well!" she hollers in full the-Spice-Girls-are-up-for-it voice. "I can't believe you're not at this party!" she tells the DJ at the studio. "You're missing a fantastic night!"
Interview completed, she smiles wearily at me. "See the sincerity?" she says. "Maybe I'll get the lead part in a film after all."
Someone passes around a book. George Orwell's Down And Out In Paris And London. It's Geri's.
In the back corner, Mel B is offering some psychotherapy to a sad boy. It's slow going.
"What have you got to be sad about?"
"It's complicated."
"Why are things complicated?"
"I don't know."
"Why are things complicated for you?"
"They just are."
"It's because you make them complicated," she tells him. He goes to the bathroom. "I'm being a therapist - I love it," she tells me. "He's a teacher and he's all stressed out. He's finished with his girlfriend and he thinks that's the end of the world." He returns.
"You're too logical, you are," she tells him. She is sitting up on the back of the seat, her feet on the cushions.
"Why are you sitting up there?" he says.
She jumps down next to him. "So I'll sit down if it makes you afraid."
"No, it's..." He can't finish this sentance. The nervous teacher has a rather different agenda - to hell with his girlfriend - for this conversation. But Mel B will not be distracted. She has worked out that he really wants to be in the theatre, and picks apart his arguments for doing nothing, one by one. "Why don't you start drama classes on Saturdays?" she says, impatiently.
Emma asks me if I've had one of the massages.
They're just for pop stars, I say.
"I'm not a pop star," she says.
Victoria nods. "We were discussing it the other day. 'Pop star'. 'Famous person'. 'Celebrity'. We decided we wanted to be a 'household name'. Like Ajax. We want to be a Fairy Liquid or an Ajax."
Mel B now has a larger male harem. "You're not drinking anymore," she tells one. "I don't want you yucking all over the bus." She is sitting on a bench. The men are standing in the aisle, lined up in front of her. "Look," she chortles. "A whole row of knobs. Which will I kick the first?"
Z-100 play "Wannabe" and it echoes through the coach. You'd have thought they'd be sick of it. But Geri and Mel B jump up, and bounce and bend and holler in the gangway, sining along to every single word.

A conversation about the media and sex.
"I find it frustrating sometimes, and we've had a lot recently, where things just get reverted round to sex all the time," says Mel C.
"I don't mind that," says Mel B.
"And a lot of innuendos and stuff," Mel C continues. "And that frustrates me, because we're not about sex. It might be come into the equation. It'd be naive to think..."
"But everyone does sex!" shouts Mel B. "Sex is the world!"
"I mean, when people treat us like a product, and we sell sex," argues Mel C. "And we don't sell sex. We write music. Sex is a part of it, I know, but I don't like it when people see sex..."
"The other day," Geri interrupts, "when we had to do all these phone interviews..."
"Yeah," nods Mel B. "That was annoying, because they were all men."
"...normally one might be a little risque and then the other is a big kiddie thing, and there's a real variety," Geri continues, "but the other day we did 15 different radio stations, real middle America, and they were all obsessed with sex. And after a while the joke was wearing thin. I was really surprised, because in America it's all very under the carpet. But I think that explains it: it's when you're not having sex you talk about it all the time, don't you?"

Emma modelled from the age of three. But she didn't call it modelling. She called it "Smiles". You can see why.
Her first job was for a Mothercare catalogue. She was on TV extolling Polly Pocket toys, travelcards and Mentadent P toothpaste (she had to pretend to brush her teeth on an aeroplane). And in Switzerland she was known as the girl who ate strawberries.
Her father was a milkman. Still is. She used to go on the rounds sometimes, sitting on the shelf next to him, helping out. Collecting the tips at Christmas. Her parents split up when she was 11. "Everyone says, 'It was the worst time of my life', but it wasn't, really," she says. She was into her dance and drama, and she would sit in her bedroom for hours, recording her own radio shows. (She offers me a little flavour: "...and now we've got the weather! ...now we've got Bananarama!...")
When she was 14, her parents had to withdraw her from stage school. No more money. "It just sort of went all wrong. It was awful." She had to go to a normal school.It felt so odd. Then, three weeks later, her old stage school offered a scholarship. Life's been like that. Smiles. Whenever she's on a stage, or in a TV studio, the mouth muscles start working. She can't help it. "Whenever I hear one of our songs I do still get goose-pimples."
What if you're really pissed off?
"It might not be a big one. It might be one of these (she demonstrates a less full smile). It won't be a (she gives the full teeth-forward toothpaste-selling beam)."
She's scared of big things. Anything, you know... big. Like, if she sees an aeroplane on the ground she can't look at it. Maybe it comes from when she saw a huge King Kong on the side of a building in Oxford Street when she was a kid. And she'll never forget when she read that book about Myra Hindley. Particularly that one scene where one of the boys was struggling and he tried to pick up a lampshade to wack on Ian Brady's head. "I just remember that feeling that poor boy must have been feeling," she says. "Fucking hell. Do you know what I mean?" It's the sheer cruelty she can't believe. "I don't think I'd like to get in the same room as her but I'd like to see her, because I think she must have very cold eyes. I wonder if she has."
I ask: do you think she likes the Spice Girls?
Emma starts visibly. "Fucking hell! Oh my God! I've never thought of that. That is very scary. I think if she did it would be creepy. God, that's really made me shiver." She shouts out into the ether at Myra Hindley: "Don't like the Spice Girls!" She looks spooked out. "I don't want her to," she says. But that is one of the many things the Spice Girls don't get to choose.

There is a Spice Girl movie in the works. The first draft has been written, and they will film it later in the year.
"I don't think we should talk about it," says Geri. "I think we should save that."
"Cindy Crawford wanted to play me," says Victoria, "but I said no."
"Winnie Mandela wanted to be me," says Mel B. They fall about.
"Fergie wanted to be me," says Geri.
They have also signed up with Pepsi. For £1 million each, according to the Sun.
"We fucking wish," says Mel C.
"They're only a few million out," says Victoria.
Do any of you prefer Coca-Cola?
"I don't think we can say that," says Mel B. But they do, anyway. "I don't really like fizzy drinks," she says. "I like Pellegrino. I like fizzy water."
"I don't like fizzy drinks," says Mel C.
"I can honestly say," says Victoria, who is drinking a Diet Pepsi as we speak, "I can taste the difference and I do actually prefer Pepsi."
"Emma's a Coca-Cola girl, isn't she?" says Mel C.
I turn to Geri: What do you prefer to drink?
Afterwards, when the hysteria hs faded, Geri will answer with a typical mixture of fact ("I do drink Coke. Either one") and front ("whover's got the biggest cheque book"). But right now, Mel B interrupts. She chooses to speak for Geri on this one.
"Sperm," she says.

"Everybody who has written about me has never got me right," says mel B. "They either go on the sex thing - loud, boisterous, outspoken - or they go, oh she's non-materialistic, quite spiritual and yet she's driving a so-and-so flash car. So What? They never quite get the balance right. So you better get it right." A stern pointer: "I'll tell you what people have described me as, which I've been described as about four times and it pisses me off: 'A charming naivete.' You don't fucking know what you're talking about! What does that word mean? What are you implying?" Precisely because she is not stupid, she knows perfectly well what they're implying: "I hate that."
Mel B's parents met in Leeds. Her father had just come over from the Caribbean. Nevis. He was black and she was white, and there was a bit of an uproar, but they got married. "My surname's brown," Mel B says, "and I thought when I was really young that I was called Brown because I am brown because I am brown. I wasn't black and I wasn't white. And I couldn't understand why so-and-so wasn't called White..."
Those early days: Mel B got into serious shit when she tied her sister to the banister and brought all her mates round to laugh... On her own, she used to think things like where we'd be born if we weren't born on earth, or if the whole planet was wiped out. She'd write it all down in her little book. "Mumbo-jumbo stuff," her mother would say when she read it. "I've always been a deep thinker," Mel B explains. "I don't know what triggered it off. But then again, I'm loud, so that doesn't quite go with it. I'm loud and spontaneous and a bit if a twat sometimes so that doesn't really go with being a deep thinker."
Mel B visited her father's family in Nevis over New Year. They don't know about the Spice Girls there yet. "I said to my grandma 'Girl power!' She just kind of looked at me funny..."

Some gratuitous talk of royalty...
It gets sillier. According to the Sun, Emma is Prince William's preffered pin-up (WHAT WILLS ROYALLY ROYALLY WANTS), displacing Pamela Anderson in the prime site on the wall of his room at Eton College.
"It was quite weird, actually," Emma says. "I was quite gobsmacked. Especially taking down Pam and putting me up. I was hold on a minute - it's not real.'" She considers this. "But he's not the most gorgeous person in the world, is he?" One of those smiles. "The girls were going: 'Can't you get us invited round for tea?'"
What would you say to him?
"Probably 'Hi, sexy'. Something like that, to shock him a little bit."
It has been reported that the Spice Girls are Fergie's current favourites.
"I like Fergie," says Mel B.
"I like Fergie," says Geri.
"I like Lady Di," says Victoria, pointedly.
"I don't think what Fergie does is quite right," says Mel C. "She is on every programme, isn't she?"
"She's a professional holiday-maker, isn't she?" carps Victoria.
"She's just probably taking the piss," reasons Mel B, "like we do."
"I really respect Lady Di a lot," says Victoria. "I think she's really been dragged through it, and she is a real lady. I feel very sorry for her."
"Well," says Mel B, deadpan, "I would have shagged Prince Charles."
"Fair play to her," says Geri. "She married a prince, she earned a billion."
"And, I mean," says Victoria, "Camilla is just an old horse, isn't she?"
There is a drawing of breath.
"That's Victoria's opinion," says Mel C. "Moving swiftly on..."
"Me," Victoria says, "and the rest of the country..."

"This is a historic shot! Like the Beatles! It's gonna be all round the world!"
Their press officer tries to encourage them. The tired, freezing Spice Girls are on top of the Empire State Building, posing for a photographer who - in true action-film style - is hanging out of a hovering helicopter, while curios tourists are held back by security guards. This photio session is to be released to celebrate the arrival of "Wannabe" at number one in the American charts. The Spice Girls do two principal poses. For one, they hold out an American flag and look over-excited. (We've conquered America!) For the other, they hold out a Union Jack and look over-excited. (The Brits are on top of America!) Never mind that "Wannabe" is, on this day, only at number six. Records move in the American charts in a far more predictable manner than they do here. And, naturally, if it somehow doesn't go to number one everyone will deny that they expected it to in the first place.
Back at the hotel, Mel B explains that she has left a note for another celebrity pop guest, Tori Amos. "I want to meet her, she's a freak!" Then, to the tune of "Professional Widow" she adds, "She sucks on pig!"
"No," says Mel C. "Pigs suck on her!"
"Pigs suck on her tit!" retorts Mel B. "You gotta bring it close to my hips! Sucking on pig!"
They are referring, in part, to the photo on Tori Amos's last album which shows her with a pig sucking on her naked breast.
"It's just rested there," asserts Mel B.
"Do you know that?" says Geri. "Do you know why I know that is true? Because when an animal is taken away too early from it's mother, you know? There was this little kitten, I got it too early and I was in bed..."
"Oh, shut up," says Mel B.
"...and it did it to me," Geri concludes.
"That's going to be all over the tabloids," counsels Mel C. "You shouldn't have said that." She may be right, through implied kinkiness with household pets is complicated material for the tabloids.
"I'm not going into it now," says Geri. "It was purely innocent. I just thought, Oh, get off there you twisted..."
"You put cream on your ninnie!" teases Mel C. Much hilarity.
"Put catnip on there!" hoots Geri. "Kit-e-Kat!"
"I'm repulsed by this," says Victoria.
"We were all signing on the dole four years ago," says Geri. "You've just got to think for a moment: you're in new York!"
"Even though we're tired and we really moan..." begins Mel C, "I truly believe that we are the luckiest five girls on earth. I know that sounds eurrghh, but I do."
"Yeah," says Victoria. "It does sound..."
"Victoria!" chides Geri. "You were rich anyway."
"No, she wasn't," defends Mel C. "She was... comfortable."
"But now she's rich," says Mel B. "Now we're all fucking rich!" They all laugh. They got what they call "a little bit of money" before Christmas.
"And," says Mel C, "we were all going, 'Do I look different? I'm...'" - she stands up and thrusts her hips - "'...rich!'"

This is the life with the Spice Girls. They are tired. They are ill. They are delighted. They write songs. They are always number one. They are getting the hits they always wanted. They are real. They are in the papers. It is pop music, and so they'll be like this forever, and they'll be like this only until it changes.
A comment on celebrity from Victoria: "Do you know that the bad thing about being known is you think twice when you pick your nose now?"
A characteristic response from Mel B: "I don't. I don't even think twice when I fart."
A handy piece of vegetable trivia from Geri: "Did you know that asparagus makes your pee smell?"
A useful reminder from Emma: "There's different levels of smiling. There is definitely."
A final, wise reflection on life as a Spice Girl from Melanie C: "When it all started, you couldn't get your head round it," she says. "But now we realize you don't have to get your head round it." This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page