60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Spice Girls—“Wannabe”

Episode Date: December 1, 2021

Rob explores the Fierce Five, a.k.a. the Spice Girls, who became the biggest-selling girl group in the world following the success of their smash hit “Wannabe.” Rob tracks their rise to international stardom, a failed film, and the attempt to spread “Girl Power” across the globe. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Laura Snapes Producer: Justin Sayles Associate Producer: Lani Renaldo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, I'd like to introduce you to my 10-year-old son Max. Hello. And my 8-year-old son Griffin. Nice to meet you. My kids are very upset that I have not yet interviewed them for this show. And also, they can't really listen to this show because whenever they turn on an episode, dad starts swearing a lot, a lot of bad words, which are absolutely necessary. It's okay to swear if it's your job to swear. But so this time this week, I will not use profanity at all during this episode so my kids can listen to it.

and I will limit myself to innuendos that are totally over the heads of young children. And also, right now, Max and Griffin are going to help me recreate the outgoing answering machine message I used in college. I had my guitar. My buddy Jason helped me out back then. But now Max and Griffin will provide backing vocals. If you called my dorm room in 1997 and I wasn't there, the answering machine would pick up and this is what you'd hear. So what I want, what I really really want. So tell me what you want, what you really, really want.

I'll tell you what I want, what I really want. Tell me what I really want. I want to, I want to, I want to, I want to, I want to, I want to, I want to really, really want to zigzag and zig. Let's start actually with me at eight years old. Let's do it this way. Top three scariest songs in the whole entire world when I was eight years old. In ascending order of scariness. Top three.

Here we go. Number three. East St. Louis Tudaloo by Steely Dan. Don't ask me why I was eight. It was ominous. All right. It freaked me out. I was a skittish and eccentric kid.

Anyway, eccentric kids are cool. Who wants to be normal? Steely Dan, as pictured on the back covers of my dad's albums on grandpaps albums, they looked like some goony-looking dudes. The very second this song started pumping out of our stereo, I would tear at, I would run really fast out of there. Leave me alone. Number two, Pink Floyd's another brick in the wall part two, because of the

the P-Oed British school children who start shouting along. Terrifying kids, man, the masked voices, the unruly mob aspect, plus the pugnacious English accents, quite a jarring effect. It's like a Manchester juvenile delinquent street gang materialized in the trunk of my dad's car. I didn't care for it. I'm on the teacher's side where those kids are concerned. I was around eight years old.

I was in my buddy's car as mom was driving. I don't remember the kid's name or where we were going. And this song came on the radio, and the unruly English kids started wailing. And I asked my buddy's mom to change the station because the song was scaring me. I probably shouldn't have added that detail. And the mom was like, you're scared of Pink Floyd? And I was like, lady, I've got enough problems. Number one, I know there's something going on by Frida.

Burr. Yes, Frida. Frida from Abba. This was a big hit in 1982 for Frida, one of the singers in Abba. Yes, I was so raucous as an eight-year-old that I was deathly afraid of an Abba solo project. It's humiliating. But this song is bone-chilling, right? The giant, desolate, terribly lonely drums, the masked wails of multiple furious Frida's,

all trapped in their own individual ones. Wells. This song was a nightmare, dude. I had nightmares about it. But we are drawn to what scares us, Jurassic Park movies, for example. And so when I finally became fully aware of this next song that came out in 1983 and then turned into a huge hit in the Karate Kid soundtrack in 1984, I was emotionally prepared. Cruel Summer by Banana Ramah, remarkably chilly vibe for an anthem about oppressive summer heat. No, the masked ominous English voices frolicking dolorously amidst icy drum machines. There's a lineage. A bit more playful this tune. Though, when's the last time you watched the video for Cruel Summer by Banana Ramah,

not as glamorous as I remember this video? It's New York City. The primary location is a gas station. They square dance in a parking lot. This video costs $20. Banana Ramma, of course, a London girl group, three members, Sarah, Karen, and Shaban. They strut down various New York. York City streets or the same street repeatedly. If you're big into Hym, if you're big into Hymes various Paul Thomas Anderson directed music videos where they just look cool while walking, maybe check this out. Banana Ramah throw banana peels at cops. That's the big set piece, like a giant bunch of bananas throwing all the peels from a moving truck onto the windshield of a moving police car. Don't do that, obviously. In the great 2011 oral history,

I Want My MTV, the uncensored story of the music video revolution written by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks. Shaban from Bananorama tells the story of shooting the cruel summer video in New York. They had lunch at a seedy little tavern. They met some generous dock workers. She says, we were exhausted and they gave us very generous bumps. That was our lunch. When you watch that video, we look really tired and miserable in the scenes we shot before lunch. And then the after lunch shots are all euphoric and manic.

End quote. She means bumps like bumps on logs where you put peanut butter on celery with like the raisins. That's what she's referring to. The lesson, as always, is don't take anything from a lunching dock worker in a New York City tavern. Also, quick PSA. Banana Ramah did not sing the song, The Metro. I was confused about this for many years. This is not Banana Ramma.

The Metro, also a big. robotic, icy hit from 1982. But no, despite the references to Paris and London, this is the band Berlin, who are from L.A. And I mentioned this on both because I thought this was banana rammer for years, but also because as an eccentric eight-year-old kid, I misheard this next line for many years as swimming through a pile of cheese. That's not what she sings there, just to clarify. that line is not in fact swimming through a pile of cheese, but rather swimming through apologies.

She even says, sorry, right after that, I do not regret the error. I maintain that swimming through a pile of cheese is the stronger image. Anyway, that's not Banana Ramah. But Banana Ramas still managed to sell like 40 million records worldwide, which made them by far the single biggest girl group from the UK right up until they weren't anymore. Speaking of misheard lines from pop songs for 21 years, until this morning, I thought that line was, slam your body down with bodies all around. Slam your body down with bodies all around.

Can you imagine going through life with this misconception? What was I envisioning? What did I think the spice girls were describing? A Fugazi-style mosh pit? a rugby scrum, an especially wild game of zombie tag? What? Who? That is obviously not what they're singing.

Slam your body down and wind it all around. Obviously. Now I just feel silly. My name's Ralph Harvilla. This is 60 songs that explain the 90s. And indeed this week, we're doing wannabe by the Spice Girls. The best-selling girl group from anywhere at any time in history. though, of course, they formed in London.

Quick question for you. Do you know this band, Take That? Mortal Kombat! Take That formed in Manchester, England, in 1989, a five-member boy band, most prominently, featuring songwriter Gary Barlow, and eventual breakout star Robbie Williams. Their smash hit, 1992 debut album was called Take That and Party. So do you know this band? Are you English?

Are European? Then yes. Are you American? Then probably not. Unless you know their sole top 10 billboard hit, 1995's tender and tuneful blanket apology back for good. Seriously, that's a lovely melody with which to convey the sentiment. I'm sorry for literally whatever I said and did.

I apologize for all of it in perpetuity. Baby, it is 3.30 in the morning. You have won this argument. Take that our superstars in their own sizable backyard. They have sold more than 14 million albums. in the United Kingdom alone. I am eternally fascinated by UK-centric teen pop that does not translate to the U.S. at all. Robbie Williams has apparently sold more albums than any British solo artist in history, and he couldn't get on like dancing with the stars in America. He couldn't get on

the floor is lava. The critic and author of Maria Sherman, a friend of the show, who wrote the Rad 2020 book Larger Than Life, a History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS, including in that book a section on the golden age of English boy bands here in the early to mid-90s. She wrote that at least compared to new kids on the block and so forth. Perhaps there is a S-E-X-I-N-E-S-S English boy bands could get away with that their prudish American counterparts could not. End quote. Who else we got here?

We got E-17 from London, formed in 1991, ostensibly as bad boy counterparts to take that. Well, bad boy counterparts with a hit-nepard. 1994 Christmas song called Stay Another Day. That video cost $35 in Selfridge's gift cards. Nice snow, fellas. One more. Okay, boys own. Brooding Irishman explicitly modeled after Take That.

Their 1995 debut album is called Said and Dunn. Here we've got a tasteful chest pounding power ballad called Love Me for a Reason. Budget for this video is $40 in Duns. gift cards devoted entirely to candles and sweaters. I'm just over here looking up UK-based department stores I've barely heard of. This is my job. So in the early 90s, a plucky young entrepreneurial prodigy named Chris Herbert, who starting at 17 years old had already launched a successful paintball venture,

joined forces with his father, Bob Herbert, and pivoted to music management. As Chris much later told the British online magazine Click, CLIC, Don't miss type that URL. Quote, at the time, boy band saturated the market. The formula worked. Dad and our backer wanted to go down that route, but I wanted to reverse it. I thought a girl band, sassy, S-E-X-Y, and well put together could be more successful because it would appeal to female and male listeners.

You double your audience, end quote. Chris wanted to catch this group like the then-popular and now popular American citizens. com friends, with distinct personalities, distinct characters to appeal to every segment of the population. The Spice Girls, therefore, were initially conceived as aspiring to the commercial heights and international reach of the likes of Take That, E17, and Boyzone, not to mention such lesser lights as A1, let loose and emanate, which at the time, no doubt, sounded delusional and megalomaniacal coming from underage paintball boy but in retrospect of course it sounds a bit parochial turns out he was underselling it cattle calls auditions bootcamps for songwriting choreography and so forth

a year or so of this heavy prep couple lineup changes blah blah blah enough preamble let's get to want to be let's meet the biggest girl group in world history melmy chisholm a k a k aqa sporty spice aka my favorite Girl, no apologies. By far, the best singer in the Spice Girls. That's not exactly a hot take. The construction of their songs will confirm this. Also, by far the best accent in the Spice Girl. She got that rad thick, scouse accent, a little more working class.

She's from Merseyside in Northwest England. Jody Comer from Killing Eve has that accent. If she's your jam, there's no chance I'm out of my depth here. Sporty Spice, of course, rock the track suits, the trainers, the ponytail, the back hand springs. Trainers, sorry. Sneakers. Athletic shoes.

Come on, Rob. You spent one night in London 16 years ago. She also challenged Liam Galler to a fight at the 1997 Brit Awards. Even odds on that one. Sporty Spice. She's the best. Okay. Emma Bunton,

aka Baby Spice, on account of being the youngest, on account of being the last to join the group, on account of being extra blonde and bubbly and family-friendly. go Baby Spice. Hence the pigtails, hence the omnipresent sucker in her mouth, the lullipop, which gets super weird on a long enough timeline, such as if you're watching a whole movie with her in it, hence the Megawatt smile in the Spice World movie when it's time to charm the cops after a deliberately poorly filmed climactic bus chase situation, that's Baby Spice's job. If you're a big talking heads

person, Baby Spice and deifiable talking heads basis Tina Weymouth, I always thought, thought they had a nice little crossover synergy going. I mean, that is a great compliment to them both. In 2018, the British market research firm, YouGov, asked 31,000 British people, the most important question, roiling the United Kingdom at that or at any other time. Who's your favorite spice girl, baby spice one? 37% of the vote. I got no quarrel with that.

She's got the second most demeaning role in this group, and she charms her way out of any awkwardness. It's remarkable. As for the most demeaning role, well, you'll see Melanie Brown, aka Mel B, aka Scary Spice, yo, as has been frequently remarked upon. It is unfortunate to say the least that the one non-white member of the Spice Girls,

she was raised in Leeds, which comes up in the movie. Her mother is English, her father is from the Caribbean island of Nevis. That's the girl they nicknamed Scary Spice. Mistakes were made. A journalist, a writer for Top of the Pops magazine in the 90s, he came up with the nicknames while interviewing them because he couldn't remember all their real names. All five members have told that story millions of times apiece. It's not his fault. That's a benign enough origin story.

As origin stories go, scary spice is boisterous. Yes, her laugh, her cackle, basically introduced the spice girls to the world. It's the first sound you hear on wannabe. And so the first sound you hear on their 1996 debut. album, Spice. She had the tongue piercing. Yes, she was loud, brash, wacky, super energetic, even relative to her quite energetic bandmates. Nevertheless, she was also the member of the group when they were shooting the wannabe video who got told by a stylist that she needed to straighten her hair, which of course she didn't. She told the independent in 2020, my hair was my identity. And yes,

it was different to all the other girls, but that was what the spice girls were about, celebrating our differences. Melby also told the Independent a story about taking Jerry Hollowell, Ginger Spice, back to where she grew up. Quote, I got her to come back to Leeds with me, and we went to one of these really old school, underground blues and bass clubs that all the black kids in the area went to. She goes on, she says,

it was tiny and really packed. And when we were standing there, I said to Jerry, look around and tell me what you see. And she looked around and said, everyone else in here is black except me. And I said, that's what it's like for me nearly every day. I'm always the only brown girl in the room. That was quite an important moment for me.

End quote. A lot of boisterousness and brashness and infectious energy to Scary Spice's voice as well. In fact, I'm a little too in the tank for Sporty Spice. So let's adjust and say that Sporty and Scary Spice in tandem are the two strongest pure singers in this crew and the constructions of the songs reflects this. And sorry, I got a little ahead of myself. There she is. Jerry Hallowell, aka Ginger Spice,

if not the most fashionable, than the most flamboyant member fashion-wise. If you remember exactly one, Spice Girls look, that's going to be Ginger Spice. In the Union Jack Many Dress, with the P sign on the back, at the aforementioned,

apparently cataclysmic 1996. Brit Awards. That dress has its own Wikipedia page. I do think in the wannabe video, which you may recall is one long shot of the Spice Girls, playfully wreaking sleepover havoc in a fancy nightclub restaurant speakeasy situation. Sporty Spice does a handspring on a table. A dude's monocle falls out in surprise. At one point, I'd never notice that. Your eye is drawn especially to Ginger Spice, who is clomp, clomp, clomping around. in extra giant high-heel boots. And also she is striking the most beguiling balance to me

between acting spontaneously and trying really visibly hard to be where she's supposed to be on and off camera at all times, blocking-wise. Also, I don't want to drag this out, so certainly we can agree that Ginger Spice has got by far the single best line delivery on wannabe, and by extension probably in the entire Spice Girls catalog. Thousands upon Thirteen,

thousands of self-help books, relationship books, how to find and keep a man or a lady-type books containing millions upon millions of words when really all you need is nine words as delivered by Ginger Spice. If you really bug me, then I'll say goodbye. It's a little over half a haiku, but it makes full haikus feel overlong and indulgent somehow. Yes? Our friend Chris Herbert, the former the original manager, Dr. Paintball. In that same interview about the group's early days, Chris talked quite a bit about Ginger Spice, going all the way back to the auditions. He said, we whittled the shortlist down to 15.

Then Jerry walked through the door and, wow. Talk about filling a room. She had the X factor. It wasn't necessarily about talent. It was all about energy. He also said, in my career, I've never worked with anyone as ambitious and driven as Jerry. If she walked into a room of 50 people, she'd have this internal heat-seeking camera that picked out the ones that could make a difference to her career, and she knew how to work them.

I admired her, but she was difficult to manage. We'd rub each other up the wrong way, which is probably what led to us going our separate ways. End quote, a lot going on there. Chris and his father actually did not succeed in landing the nascent Spice Girls, a record deal, so the disillusion group swipe their demos and absconded in the dead of nights, probably, like that one Mad Ben season finale where they started a new firm. And the girls hooked up instead with your friend in mind, Simon Cowell, grouchy Uber manager, who shepherded them to make a superstardom before falling out as well,

though he'd be back eventually. Let's not get bogged down in the industry of it all. So that's the Spice Girls. We got everybody, right? Are we missing anybody? Oh, sorry. Okay. So picture a scowling.

Brunette. Elegantly scowling. High fashionably scowling. Not scowling, but not smiling. Pretty much never smiling. She is wearing at all times somehow, a black strapless bandage dress. Shout out to the ringer's own Amanda Dobbins

for that description. And she appears to disapprove of the inelegance of her bandmate's zanier antics. You picturing this woman? You got it? Okay. That's Victoria Adams. Soon to be known, of course, as Victoria Beckham,

aka Posh Spice. Posh Spice does not have any solo breakout lines on the song Wannaby. Let us resist the urge to infer anything from this. As regards Posh Spice's singing ability, don't be rude. Don't make a gowns, beautiful gowns reference. My favorite Spice Girl's song is actually Say You'll Be There, their second single, track two in their 1996 debut, A bubbly little G-Funk situation here.

I associate this song very strongly with my freshman year college dining hall. The TV is playing this video constantly. The Spice Girls are throwing space boomerangs at fish bowls in the desert as I eat multiple chocolate vanilla twist ice cream cones. Anyway, Posh Spice handles the pre-chorus and does just absolutely a lovely job with it. So that's Posh Spice. Now we got everybody. One of my favorite things about the Spice Girls is the relentless egalitarian nature of the Spice Girls, the trading of lines, the cheerful refusal to anoint a leader, the true more than the sum of their parts philosophy.

Girl groups and boy bands, there's a tendency to view many of them as a reality show competitions unto themselves, right, where one member wins or had one from the very beginning. Diana Ross won the Supremes, Beyonce won Destiny's Child, Robbie Williams, one take that. Justin Timberlake, one end sync, so on and so forth. The Spice Girls, you have a favorite, but nobody dominates. Nobody is the obvious breakout solo star. This, of course, is a calculation. This is part of the pop star manipulation, but the whole idea is when you picture the Spice Girls, you picture all of them in the wannabe video, on equal footing, on the stairs of that fancy nightclub restaurant speak easy situation, doing their very simple but enormously charming, little dance.

I don't have anything profound to say about the chorus, but it felt churlish not to play the chorus. Want to be it was written by the Spice Girls, all of them, see, along with Matt Rowe and Richard Stannard, who co-wrote and co-produced three other songs on the Spice album, the production team Absolute, which got their start remixing the likes of Biz Marquis and everything, but the girl, they handle the rest of the Spice album. I'm of two minds in these moments when dealing with the not quite superstar songwriters, the not quite super producers. Workmanlike is not the word, but just relative to the Spice Girls, to the planet-sized charisma fusion

reactor that is the Spice Girls just standing around. Part of me is quite curious about these normaler people who are crucial to the process, but by design invisible to it. There's got to be a story there. History tells us that often there's a better story there. And another part of me, I don't care. No offense at all, but I don't care. It's a damnedest thing.

You're a songwriter, you're a producer, you're backstage, you prefer it that way. You had a hand in a world historically great thing. Name recognition is not your deal. Great. I leave you to it. As for Spice Girls' song construction in general, I said it and I meant it. The gentle superiority of sporty and scary spices baked into a spice girl. song when it's time to sing to emote to set the right tone and or take it home you are never

surprised by who specifically in the group is called upon to do that and you are never unhappy about it that's sporty spice setting the right tone and the lush power ballad to become one i forgot my kids were possibly listening this is a very nice song about math about division and two divided by two, of course, becomes one. Great song about math. Here's Scary Spice, continuing to set the right tone. Two words I have not said to you yet in sequence are Girl Power. Girl Power being, of course, the Spice Girls Rallying Cry slash Philosophy slash Marketing Slogan.

I suppose that's the whole conundrum right there, what you'd call Girl Power, how optimistically or cynically you received those two words, depending on who you were, and how old you were. As a college freshman meek dude bro, securing the knowledge that I was way smarter than everybody, wolfing down my chocolate vanilla twist ice cream cones in the cafeteria as I watched the Spice Girls smash fish bowls with space boomerangs in the desert, I don't know what I thought.

Actually, who cares what I thought? When the Spice Girls reunited most recently in 2019 as a quartet, without Posh Spice, it was too busy designing super wide-legged pants that cost $310, the writer Katie Weaver wrote a great piece for the New York Times about the Spice Girls Generation. And first off, she wrote, members of the Spice Girls Generation are the only people in history to have both grown up with the Internet and to retain childhood memories that predate it.

That feels important. The Spice Girls lived in, and for a lot of people, defined interesting times, transitional times. They all joined hands and physically bridged the chasm that defined. finds the 21st century, which is to say they are the link between the era when you couldn't just jump online and talk mess about the Spice Girls in the public arena and the era where you can do that. As for Girlpower, Katie wrote, the Spice Girls were adult performers producing adult music that both appealed and was marketed primarily to children, music for millennials back when they were still called Generation Y. Their biggest hits included explicit and oblique

references to lovers and sexual Congress. They sang the praises of push-up bras, and by the end of their first tour, half the group was pregnant, but the Spice Girls were never meant to pass as kids. Their skill was in depicting a young girl's idea of adulthood. This is a quick interlude here, a dark host candidate for the most important song on that first album. The Spice album is the song Mama. This song is very important. It's about how you used to think your mom was nagging you and cramping your style, but then when you're older, you'll realize she was totally devoted to you. She was your best friend, so you should listen to her when she says to brush your teeth or stop playing Fortnite. Great song, Necessary Song. That's Scary Spice. Put your contacts in. It'll take 20 seconds. Okay, read anything

Katie Weaver writes. Katie also says, the aura of Spice Girl's success was sleepover antics turned career. photos depicted them spilling out of the same bed or piled onto a single couch, forever yanking one another into frame. In video interviews from the period, they cling to each other, all arms wrapped around legs, draped over thighs, tucked into neck crooks. While the average 30-year-old woman might prefer to perform some activities without being literally shoulder to shoulder with her four closest buddies for an anxious 11-year-old, the arrangement has obvious appeal. End quote. want to be took several months to even make it to the united states but once they got here the spice girls did the thing that super british pop stars very rarely did by that point which was get

super bonkers popular wannabe was the number one song in america for a month starting in february 1997 the spice album sold 19 million copies worldwide in a year the movie spice world came out in England in theaters in late 1997. It sought to immediately capitalize on all this unprecedented success. The Spice World movie came to America in early 1998. It opened his counter-programming the same weekend as the Super Bowl. That's genius. Roger Ebert hated this movie, and I love it when Roger Ebert hates movies. Roger Ebert wrote, The Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of 30 standing in line at Dunkin' Donuts. That's rude.

But what I will say about the Spice World movie is that it really does pull off the sleepover antics turned career vibe Katie was writing about there. It's contrived. It's manipulative. It's a facade. Maybe the Spice Girls all hated each other at all times. Definitely they hated each other some of the time. But I do so enjoy feeling brain dead and naive and be dazzled by the Spice World movie,

which to be clear is very stupid and relentlessly silly. but I dig all the yanking one another into the frame. The inside jokes, the dopy banter, the stealing of boots, the masterful illusion that I am watching five best friends conquer the world together. It's not titillating on the slightest, and it sure as hell ain't Beatlemania, but nor is it some appalling sign of the imminent collapse of Western civilization. Somebody put it to me like this. I loved Spice World when I was 12, and I have no intention of ever finding out how wrong I was. that is the right attitude. Spice World is not available via the usual channels in America,

streaming, DVD, etc. There is at least an attempted memory-holling happening here. But let me just play you the audio for my favorite part, which is when Baby Spice imagines that the whole Spice Girl's phenomenon has collapsed and a judge played by Stephen Frye is now sentencing them to total cultural obscurity. You have been fun guilty of releasing a single that is by no means as kicking as your previous records, nor does it has such a wicked, dirty, fat baseline. Seriously, shout out Stephen Fry.

In 1997, he also starred in the movie Wild, as in Oscar Wild, as in he played Oscar Wild. He got nominated for a Golden Globe. That was his second best film performance of the year. You are sentenced to having your next record enter the chart. at number 179 before dropping straight out the following week. Seriously, Elvis Costello and Elton John both have cameos in this movie, and who gives a toss? You are sentenced to 20 years of having to appear on cheesy chat shows in Taiwan, talking about how you used to be famous.

I'd rather just sidestep entirely the matter of what actually happened in the Spice Girls. Nothing terrible, prominence-wise. Three albums total, and a medium-awkward. breakup followed by soul careers of various levels of prominence and also various reunions driven by various levels of awkwardness. I will note politely that the best song on their second album, 1997 Spice World tying into the movie, it's called Stop, an upbeat Motown sort of deal. It's very catchy. And this song is very explicitly about how the Spice Girls would like to stop working so hard.

Seriously, they're talking directly to their management team. They're exhausted. This song is a cry for help. That's not the subtext. It's just the text. I suppose I should also briefly mention that the rap-esque part of wannabe handled by Scary Spice with some ginger spice assistance is allegedly, according to some darker corners of the internet,

rife with innuendos that go right over a 10-year-old head in terms of romantic preferences and so forth. But this show is briefly a family affair and I'm staying out of it. Let's stay naive forever, shall we? To paraphrase the Bible, 1st Corinthians, when I was a spice girl, I spake as a spice girl, I understood as a spice girl, I thought as a spice girl, but when I became a spice woman, I put away childish things. What this saw in presupposes is, what if you don't? Our guest this week is Laura Snape's deputy music editor for The Guardian. She's also written for Pitchfork, Uncut, the NME and NPR.

Laura, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Laura, I'm sorry to ask a personal question right off the back, but who is your favorite spice girl? Well, it has changed over the years. These days, I would say it's Mel C. Sporty Spice because she seems like the most well-adjusted.

a normal one. Also, I have a ponchoon for how bizarre Jerry Halliwell, now known as Jerry Horner's life is these days. But if you'd ask me when I was 7, the answer was probably Baby Spice. I've asked a lot of people this question this week, and a lot of them say, like, do you mean back then or do you mean now? Like, obviously it's going to evolve. So do you think that's a given that your favorite Spice Girl at 7 is definitely not going to be your favorite Spice Girl at like 25? That's flattering. I'm 32, but I mean, I think what I was. When I was seven, I was quite timid, and I looked at the other Spice Girls, and it's like, well, definitely not scary or ginger because I wasn't extroverted. And I didn't like Melsie because she seemed shy, but I was not sporty whatsoever. And posh, there seems something silly about being posh. It's like even at seven, you understood that that wasn't really something you wanted to be. And so you were kind of left with baby, who didn't really have much of a personality apart from being nice. Right. And the sucker, of course, was very important to the personality. Oh, the lollipop, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's really excellent, like, exclusion, you know, deduction that you did there.

You just, you just knocked the other four out, you know, in 10 seconds and arrived at baby at 7. That's really good deductive reasoning that you were using. You mentioned like Jerry, you've written a few times that like Jerry has like this lady of the manner effect now. Like what is what is her arc specifically? Well, from the very beginning. I guess. She really, really wanted to be famous.

And I think that she had been like a page three girl and a Turkish game show hostess. Goodness. Yeah. And there's footage of all of this stuff, or photos at least. And then she auditioned for the Spice Girls. And I think she might have been one of the last ones to get in. And then obviously she's the first one to leave the Spice Girls in May 1998, very traumatic date for 9-year-olds of the era. And then she watches a solo career, which I think is still the first steps of that solo career are incredible.

And I think that it's almost like Da-Dar-esque brilliance. Her first single is called Look at Me. And in the video, she holds a few. funeral for ginger spice and has like a coffin and like the union jackdress and everything and then she's reborn the first time she performs at the brit awards as a solo artist she emerges from between a gigantic pair of inflatable legs she sort of gives birth to herself oh my goodness yeah her first two solo her debut solo album very good her second one pretty good after that very much diminishing returns but then she has this weird arc in that well i guess a very human part of the

arc is that she was in the, by her second solo album, she was very evidently suffering from an eating disorder, which I think had plagued her long before that, but it was incredibly obvious at that point. And like, she made yoga videos and it was not a sympathetic era in the tabloids. And so she kind of had her recovery from that. And then I think she was married to somebody else before and she had a kid with them. And now she's married to like a Formula One billionaire called Christian Horner. And she appears on Instagram solely wearing white, mostly in the vicinity of horses.

And she did join the Spice Girls reunion. And that's where my knowledge of present-day Jerry Horner caps. Okay. That is a full Martin Scorsese should direct that movie. Wow. Okay. So seven years old did you say is when the Spice Girls come to you initially? Yes.

Can you describe to the best of your ability? Like, you know, your first contact with them. Did you love them immediately? Did everyone around you? Every other seven-year-old you knew loved them? Like, what happened to you at that moment? I don't remember encountering them in like, July 1996 when they would first have launched.

But I started a new school in September 96 and very quickly had a best friend. And I think she already knew who they were and she had the CD. And from that point, it was just like, it was a sort of friendship where anything she liked, I was obviously going to like. And from that point, it was just full-fledged obsession. And if you look at like photos from school trips in what we call year three, it's all good, just like little girls doing like the girl power fingers and stuff like that next to a climbing wall. There you go.

I was going to ask, like, what did girl power mean to you then? Like, did that phrase resonate with you? Like, even as a kid, did it feel at all like a marketing, like a branding thing? Or was it, like, legitimately empowering in any way? I can only talk about this using, like, adult language that I didn't know when I was seven. But I think I did find it enormously empowering. At the time, I had one younger brother, and I was soon to have another younger brother as well. And so I already had this, like, boy suck sort of mentality.

And I just started going to a girl school. And I had been very, I was very, like, dorky. and timid and I think that there was something quite affirming in like these huge personalities who were very friendly and had this whole world that you could become part of. And I was only made aware that it was that the marketing was a bad thing because I would obviously ask my parents or my grandparents like can I have these crisps with ginger spice on? Can I have this? They had like a body spray line and actually I knew all that body spray for a very long time. And it was I was told then like you know they're just trying to make money. But you know when you're six,

when you seven, you don't care. I wasn't allowed to have like the bedroom. wallpaper because my parents said you'll grow out of this. And the concept of that at seven was just like, what do you mean? I will never grow out of this. Did you grow out of it or how did you grow out of it? I guess. Like, did you reconsider all this stuff or does it just like, yeah, I was a kid. I had a genuine kid reaction, you know, and I feel differently now. But I'm not embarrassed about how I felt then. I'm not embarrassed about how I felt. But I did. I was like the last person to leave the party. Everybody else had a long given up on them by the time that I did. Like the friend who I met in year three who loved them. She and I ultimately fell out because she thought the S Club 7 were better.

And I was like, what is this heresy? No. Wow. Terrible. And so I think, I mean, I know my love and the Spice Girls lasted into the second year of what we call high school. So like 12, 13. Like, I owned all, I think Mel B's second solo album, although I knew that was bad. Mel C's second solo album was quite good. Jerry's was quite good. I don't think Emma had one. And Victoria's second solo album was canned and then emerged on the internet at a much later date. I see. You were a collector. You were deep into this.

I was going to ask it. Maybe it's an American thing, but I don't feel that one spice girl has emerged as like the winner of like the post spice girls, like the solo era. Like is there in England a definitive best solo album, best solo song, solo project? Like is that, are they thought, are they ranked in that way at this point? I think most of them aren't really thought of musicians at this point. I mean, Victoria obviously won the whole contest by becoming, like, a bona fide celebrity with, like, a fashion line and, like, a form of celebrity that has long outlasted the band. Otherwise, musically, it's 100% Melcy.

Like, her debut song is very good. And the second one has got good bits on as well. And, you know, she had, I turn to you. She had that great collaboration with Lisa Left Eye from TLC. The Brian Adams song, I think, is very good. Absolutely, yes. And then she kept releasing albums, like, all through the 2000s and through the 2000s and 2010s. I'd have to say, I didn't, you know, working in the music press,

there were things that people particularly paid attention to. But then she put out a solo album, I forget if it was last year, or I think maybe the year before, which was genuinely very good and sort of seemed to embrace the like grown-up pop disco that like Kylie and Jewelie and everybody was doing in a very convincing way. Like she's got very powerful voice and it lent itself well to those kind of songs. So musically she won, definitely. That was a piece you wrote, I think, at 2019.

Like you're sitting across from Melsie. you are sitting across from a spice girl. Is that challenging for you? You've interviewed famous people, but like, is that different someone who you worshipped in some way at seven years old? It was very surreal. Yeah.

Like I really get like starstruck or I didn't before, but it was very much like, you have those little moments where it sort of Dolly zooms out and you're like, oh my God, it's a spice girl. They're just like, no, I've got to focus in the moment.

And I never, ever, ever get photos taken with any media I interview because I think it's pretty corny. But when the interview was done, I think she had gone to the bathroom and I said to the publicist, like, do you think she would mind if I asked for a photo? She's like, no, of course not.

She'll be absolutely fine with it because it's a sort of thing that like, you show your parents, you show your grandparents and they get it. And so she came back and she was like, no, Laura wants a photo. And she said, oh, yeah, of course. And we sit next to each other sort of like posing like grownups. And then she says to me, do you want to do the girl power fingers? And it's like, do the girl power fingers, please.

That's amazing. That's a beautiful thing. She's very well practiced. What are your memories of Spice World, the movie? Did you see it in a theater? I guess that's the place to start. I did. I think I saw it for a birthday party.

Okay. It's a good birthday party, yeah. I have watched it at some point, I think, in the last five or seven years, because I showed it to my boyfriend who was too old to have watched it at the time. And there was a little of weird bits I'd forgotten. Like, I had forgotten the weird sort of like six friend pregnancy story and how they got to sort of like get her to the hospital while they're doing their work on concert. They're pregnant friends who they keep ignoring.

Yeah, that doesn't feel true to life necessarily, but who knows. and I had forgotten that there's like the weird subplot with the aliens but also something that I really distinctly remember was when I saw it at the cinema, the movie theatre, it had a bit with Gary Gitter and they performed leader of the gang and I think between the movie being in theatres and it coming out on VHS he had been revealed to be a paedophile. And so in my lime green VHS, that bit was not on it anymore. Oh wow.

That's the first time I heard of Gary Glitter and then obviously very quickly the scales fall from your eyes. I had no idea. Because I was going to ask you, like, you can't stream that movie or, like, buy the DVD. Like, it's not impossible to get, but it's a lot harder to get Spice World to watch Spice World, like, legally now. And I was going to ask you if there was some conspiracy, some reason for that. And, like, Gary Glitter used to be in this movie is actually a pretty good answer to that question.

They had cut him even by the time it was released in, like, 98, 99 or whatever. I think I have streamed it here. Maybe it's a territory thing. or maybe I watched it on TV when I last watched it. The Spice Girls were inspired at the start by like 90s boy bands in the UK, take that boy zone and so forth. But like the Spice Girls conquered America and beyond to a degree that dwarfed any group that came before or after them, unless you count like the Beatles, which maybe you do.

Like, why do you think the Spice Girls were such an immediate and truly global phenomenon? I think if you're looking at boy bands and the US, like, you already had like new kids on the block and Backstreet Boys, and that wasn't really a new format. And also, Boise Zone, I mean, I was too young to take that, but Boys own were boring. I couldn't have told you which one was which at the time, nor take that. Whereas the Spice Girls, you know, they weren't, they didn't come with the ginger, baby, scary, posh night names. That was, I think, their first article in top of the Pops magazine or Smash Hits,

that was put on them, and then it stuck. And so you've got these immediately identifiable archetypes where even at seven, you can be like, oh, and that one. And they, I think they were probably fun. outrageous in a way that like most pop stars hadn't been allowed to be like in the UK the BBC shows repeats of top of the pops of like vintage episodes every week and they've been doing it from the very beginning and now they're up to 1991 and so I've just been like living through the years of like Tiffany for the first time as I was a baby when that happened and she's so

squeak and like Debbie Gibson she's so squeaky clean and kind of like nice and there's not really any sense of like here's a weird personality the spice girls are more sort of like the prodigy but in five girls I forgive my ignorance, but Melcy's accent is super striking to me. Like in the Spice World movie, like from the perspective of a totally clueless American, it feels like she's from a completely different part of England from the rest of them. Like within England, where there are these huge geographical or class divisions within the Spice Girls or within the way that people talked about the Spice Girls?

So Melcy is from the North and Melby is also from the North as well. Melby's from the North West. Melby's more from the North East. And Jerry's from the suburb of London called Watford, and I think she grew up very working class. I think Emma was like a sage school kid. I can't remember exactly what her background is. But I remember that Victoria was the only sort of like faintly middle class one, and that that was something that she would get ribbed for at the time.

And there's obviously a very famous interview from 99 to 7 in The Spectator where she and Jerry definitely come out to bat for Margaret Thatcher, which is very controversial. Emma, I think, says nothing. Mel C. sort of awkwardly tries to give the other side, because Liverpool, where she's from is like, labor till we die. I think Emma just sort of sits back. And so I think if there was a divide, maybe it was like that sort of thing. But no, otherwise not really. It was more that like you really got a sense of Victoria as the posh one as the sort of

outcast, the one that we can slightly take the piss out of. And who's starting to taking it out of herself as well and like never smiling. And she has that great line in the film where she's like, what am we going to wear today? The little Gucci dress, the little Gucci dress or the little Gucci dress. Right, right. You mentioned to Mel C in the piece that you did that the Spice Girls never really announced they were breaking up and like you agonized over that at 10 years old. Like you had this blind faith they'd return. Like how hard was that on you and like how did you

process, you know, the loss of them for a very long time? It was very difficult. Like I think maybe we had the internet at this point and I was allowed on it for about 10 minutes a week. And so you would go on like Spicegirls.com.com.uk. And wait for it to like crank up and there just wouldn't be anything or there would be like a bit of like a nice news story or something. Or you would go on, I remember like we would go on a family vacation and I would. would genuinely agonise that I might miss the news that they had broken up. And so, like, if my dad rang, like, my grandparents or something, I'd be like, can you just ask if there's been any news?

Oh, wow. That's a school trip to, like, a science park. And there was internet there that you could use freely. And it's like, I don't care about the science or the satellite dishes. I just need to go on Spicegirls.com. At UK to see what's happening. I think eventually I just sort of got the picture that it, like, they weren't going to come back.

Yeah. You mentioned, like, the UK tabloids, which are terrifying to me. how they treated the spice girls. Like, obviously here in America, primarily now we're grappling with Britney Spears and how she was treated for 20 years. How are the spice girls talked about or treated or regarded in England now? Do they constitute another sort of royal family? Like, what is their vibe in the way they're treated versus in 1997?

I think they're quite well regarded now. Like, obviously, you see Victoria in the press because there's always stuff about her marriage. There was an interview with Mel C in Stereogum that just came out recently where she said because she'd been, because she did dancing with the stars in America, and our version of that is called Strictly Come Dancing. And she said she'd been asked to be on Strictly tons of times, but she didn't want to do it because she felt like she had a manageable level of celebrity as it is, but if you're on Strictly, it sort of turbo charges your celebrity.

And she said she couldn't handle being followed around by paparazzi again. Wow. So, yeah, like, you don't really see too much scurrilous stuff about their personal lives apart from Victoria. But I do remember, you know, as a kid I was first reading about them in kid magazines, like Top of the Pops and Smash Hits and like the other sort of girly magazines. and then as I got a bit older, especially because I walked to the post office to get the, like, my dad's newspaper and stuff, if I saw a tabloid with a spice girl on it, I would buy it.

And so it's through doing that at the age of like 10, 11, 12, that you start to realize, like, oh, this is how they're perceived in the real world. And these are the things that people say about them. And like the horrible stuff about Jerry's anorexia, there was a lot of really horrible speculation as well about Melcy's sexuality. They would get called, like, fat quite a lot. And I think that was quite sort of, that was a real sort of, because, it was a lot. against scales from the eyes where it's quite damaging where you're like, I've idolized these people and they, to me, they've shown me a way to be sort of like free and like a slightly bigger personality. And then here's this press that's actually like, these are all the things that are

dreadful about these people. Right. Well, that's, that's terrible. You reviewed a show on the 2019 Spice Girls' Reunion Tour for the Guardian, the one without Posh Spice, I believe. And it looks like it was kind of a drag. What happened there? Yeah, it was. I revisited that review earlier today. I mean, there's no way that it could have sort of, like, lived up to the billing. I didn't go to the 2007 shows when they first reunited, but they've got a very slim catalogue. And Mel C is really the only sort of, like, powerhouse vocalists. And just the vibes on stage were really weird.

I think just before the tour started, and this was the first day, there had been rumored, like, think maybe Mel B had said that, like, she and Jerry had had a relationship or something like that. And Jerry, now in her sort of very regal, I only wear white kind of phase, was really annoyed about this. And you just really noticed that, like, it was like two blue magnet. pointing at each other where they just couldn't get near each other on stage. Right, right. Okay. Yeah, like the set list was so thin that they did the Wonderbra chant from the movie. And it just felt very like, this doesn't need to happen.

There's a lot of reunion shows like that, I suppose. I want to be the single hit in summer 1996, like less than a year after Wonderwall in 95. Did the Spice Girls feel like a reaction or a backlash to Oasis or Brit Pop more broadly? or did Britpop help in terms of the extra attention the rest of the world was now paying to music from the UK? Like, is there any correlation or interaction there? I don't think that they were, like, a reaction to it. So, like, obviously, the Spice Girls were first put together by, like, a father and son management duo,

and then very quickly the girls give them the slip and they steal their demo tapes and they go and get their own deal. And I think that speaks to the sort of, like, spirited personalities that were in that band. And some of them had come out of, like, rave culture. And so I think they did sort of fit quite well in that like Brit pop, like the post-rave sort of like naughty Brit pop kind of thing. I think it's at the 1997 Brit Awards, they've got wind of the fact that maybe like the Gallagher brothers have been slagging them off. And Mel C says on the mic, come and I have a go if you think you're hard enough. And so that like, you know, they are part of the cool Britannian thing.

Jerry's Union Jackdress is a hundred percent part of that as well. And yeah, I mean, I guess that I can only speak to being like a kid in Britain at the time. but I imagine that added to a sort of exportable product overall. I'm stuck on this image of you, like reading the tabloids, like the music press for the first time as like a kid and like realizing how these people were talked about it. It's interesting that you became a music critic and now you interview them. Like, how have you seen the way like the music press and like critics treat the spice girls or write about the spice girls differently? You know, even in the past 10, 15 years. I guess now they're very much treated as a nostalgia thing.

There was a really sharp piece in The Guardian, maybe like five or six years ago even, where somebody said that you rarely hear the Spice Girls music out of the context of, like, their image being present. Like, you don't hear it soundtracking stuff on TV, particularly because the music is sort of inextricable from the image. And I thought that that was a very good point. They are sort of like, it is all tied up in this, like, product. You tend to just see sort of nostalgia writing about them or maybe pieces. I suppose there's been a lot from like women my age who are sort of revisiting, like,

this is what it meant to me at the time and this is what it means to me now. And obviously there's the huge, like, eternal debate about whether girl power was, like, genuinely empowering or whether it was a marketing thing. And I think it was absolutely both of those things at once. Yeah. It can be. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what its power was, was it was both sincere and cynical at the exact same time. How else are you going to read? Like, I'm really struck today when I see like older friends, kids, how young seven is. Because at seven I felt like, I'm a big girl. I understand what's going on. And you see seven-year-olds and you're like, they're tiny. They're really little children. And the way that you're going to. get a message to a kid of that age really is through like a mass commercial product. Like they're not picking up zines or really going on the internet by themselves at that stage. Hopefully not. Do you listen to the Spice Girls purely for pleasure in 2021? Like what would happen if you put on the first Spice Girls record now?

Like when I hear that music, like I don't put it on for fun, I have to say. Like I do think that like Mel C's solo hits would be the ones that I would listen to most. I did really like her last solo album. But the first Spice Girls album for me, like I know it's so intimately that it's almost, I don't even hear the instrumentation in it. It's like, when you look at the McDonald's logo, you don't go, oh, that's a yellow M.

You're just like, yeah, McDonald's. And like there's something about, it all just seems like, it's a sort of Disneyland of the mind. It's not like, that's a guitar, that's a piano, that's this. It's just a whole product, like this sort of like shiny gleaming thing that has a lot of memories in it.

That's a perfect answer. That's a beautiful, real way of looking at it. at it. Laura, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks very much to our special guest this week, Laura Snapes. Thanks to Amanda Dobbins and Dan Eaton for the research help. Thanks to our producers, Justin Sales and Lonnie Ronaldo. And thanks very much to you for listening. And now, without further ado, here we have the Spice Girls singing wannabe. We'll see you next week.