THERE’S a whiff of old Spice in the air. Last Tuesday, on a heavily carpeted staircase at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in London, five preened, powdered and ever-so-slightly ageing faces came together once more in the place where it all began.
The latest Spice Girls reunion, their first in four years, was set in the building where Britain’s most famous girl band shot the video for their debut single Wannabe. And it looked uncomfortable. While Geri Halliwell and Mel B hammed it up for the cameras and Emma Bunton and Mel C smiled as sweetly as their make-up would allow, Victoria Beckham, hand on hip and pout in place, appeared as though she were chewing on a particularly vinegary wasp.
They were there – ostensibly at least, to promote Viva Forever!, the unfortunately named forthcoming musical based on the band’s greatest hits. Written by Jennifer Saunders and produced by Judy Craymer, the woman who brought Mamma Mia! to the stage, it will tell the story of a young woman named Viva who becomes seduced by the world of fame and celebrity. It will open just in time for Christmas in London’s West End. If it’s a success, it could net each Spice Girl £3 million a year for each year it runs. Surely reason to crack a smile, Victoria?
Sixteen years on from that first, audacious single, does anyone still really wanna (really wanna) zigazig-ha? It is all too easy to be dismissive, as last week’s tabloid coverage amply demonstrated. But for a whole generation of women now in their 20s and 30s, are the Spice Girls actually much more than just a manufactured pop band? Is it time we put aside our cynicism and celebrated the inventors of “girl power” as feminist icons of their age?
Vicky Pitchers, who used to play their records regularly as a Forth One FM DJ, reckons not. “I think the message they had has been and gone,” she says. “Anybody who was a Spice Girls fan back in the day would have happily said they bought into girl power, not least because they had a great PR machine behind them and we weren’t as savvy to PR then as we are now. But those fans are fully grown women now and have girls of their own. Times have moved on. It’s not relevant nowadays.”
In truth the Spice Girls “feminist” message – they declared themselves Tories because Thatcher had been a powerful woman and therefore embodied “girl power” – was always slightly suspect.
“I mean, really,” asks Anna Close, a 36- year-old lecturer who admits she used to dance the night away to Spice Girls songs at the Union disco as a student, “what did they ever actually do to promote feminism? It was only ever lipstick feminism. Even back then, you knew that if you really were interested in empowering women, you needed to look to more traditional role models, like the suffragettes and Germaine Greer, not the Spice Girls.”
Others believe this misses the point. Anna Day, 36, who also enjoyed their music as a young woman and is now director of Literary Dundee and a mother of two girls herself, says the “girl power” concept lent the band an innocence that a lot of today’s female pop acts lack.
“The messages they sent out about ‘look after your mates, don’t bin them for a boy, respect women’ – these are messages you would want your children to have,” she says. “They’re not detrimental to females in any way. I wouldn’t stop my girls listening to the Spice Girls the same way I have had to stop them listening to Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, who have lyrics and images that are overly sexualised. The Spice Girls always managed to tread the line between giving out that message of power and not being overly sexy.”
But sadly, says Day, the chances that her six-year-old daughter will find the Spice Girls relevant to her generation, is minimal. “They’re just too old,” says Day. “It would be like watching your mum on stage. I just can’t see my daughter feeling that they have any message for her.”
All of the Spice Girls are now mothers themselves, and after a disastrous world tour in 2008 that was cut short amid tales of infighting, it is unlikely they will ever tour again.
“They’re not relevant to younger people, but for those of us at a Spice Girl-ish age, they’re actually far more interesting now,” says author Kate Harrison. “You see them going through these different incarnations, changing themselves and revealing more of themselves rather than the cartoon characters they once were. Now that they’re their own people, it’s about woman power.”
So who will shell out the West End ticket prices to go and see the Spice Girls musical? Close said she wouldn’t be rushing to see it. “It wouldn’t be top of the list. There are other musicals I’d go see first.”
Day said she might consider going with friends. “I’d go for a girly night out, or I might take my elder daugher, but only if I was already in London anyway.”
Perhaps then, like kipper ties and mullet haircuts, the Spice Girls are just another thing best left in the past. “They were part of the zeitgest at the time,” says Close. “They were a phenomenon. But they’ve changed and moved on. And so have we.” «