How a little Spice added some excitement to life in the 1990s
And how cuddly Friends Reunited seems 18 years on. No likes and dislikes to break friendships, no cyber-bullying
I’LL tell you what I want what I really really want and it’s not the Spice Girls reunion.
I don’t want to listen to Geri and the gang all over again, but as the nation implodes in a chaos of Brexit, resignations and plunging sterling, I wouldn’t mind going back to those happier, more certain times in 1996 when they released their debut single “Wannabe”.
Those heady pre-Brexit, pre-9/11, pre-austerity days when the .com crash was years away seems like a dream.
Wales was on the cusp of being Cool Cymru and people across the channel were more likely to be heard saying “Cool Britannia” than “good riddance”.
Geri Horner’s famous Union Jack dress would be highjacked as a totem for the far right if she wore it in 2018 and here’s betting she won’t be digging it out of the mothballs for the getback-together tour.
The group’s stage clothes, even with their flash of knickers, seem sweetly coy compared to the semi-porn uniform many of today’s entertainers feel they must wear.
And even the name – Spice in 2018 conjures up images of bodies lying drug-stupored in the streets. No marketing team would come up with that one now.
The Spice Girls were such a nice bunch they didn’t even split up when they split up in 2000. Instead, the biggest girl band on the planet announced unofficially they were having a “hiatus” to concentrate on their solo careers. No public rows or trolling on social media for them.
Twitter hadn’t been invented and social media was years away, with Friends Reunited only launched in June that year. And how cuddly Friends Reunited seems 18 years on. No likes and dislikes to break friendships, no cyber-bullying tipping young people to the brink of mental health crisis and suicide.
It’s hard to recall just how different life was then for all of us and just how big the group of five apparently squeaky clean young women were. Would they have the same success now with that image?
The group sold more than 85 million records worldwide. At the height of their success the Spice Girls became the fastest selling British act since the Beatles with their debut album Spice.
The album sold more than three million copies in Britain, becoming the biggest-selling album of all time in the UK by a female group and the biggest-selling album of 1997 in Europe where it sold more than eight million copies.
Those were the days when we bought albums. Innocent times before Spotify and the internet which made us want access to everything free.
The vast ticket sales for the Spice Girls’ reunion tour hints at nostalgia, a sure sign we’re in trouble and that they’ll make a few more quid than they might have expected.
There is, it seems, a thirst for dancing to 1990s tunes and times again. Back then few people were yearning for the sounds and times of the 1980s.
Who wanted to hark back to the miners’ strike, recession, unemployment and the divisive Margaret Thatcher when you had the 1990s?
The late 1990s seemed a time of hope and prosperity with Tony Blair’s Labour government as yet untarnished by the Iraq War, excitement about good times ahead in newly devolved Wales and little hint of dark times brewing.
The hunger for the Spice Girls (minus Posh, who is arguably rich enough now she is a designer and married to David Beckham not to need to tour) has led them to add extra dates to their UK tour after fans from around the world raced to buy tickets when they first went on sale.
Originally only six dates in 2019 were announced, with none in Wales, but after a surge of interest the girls we loved and still love added dates, including Cardiff, Wembley and Dublin.
The group, who will play the Irish capital on May 24, 2019, will kick off the UK segment of their stadium tour three nights later at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on May 27.
Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Geri Horner and Melanie Chisholm will reportedly make at least £2.2m each from the tour.
“Thank you everyone for such an amazing reaction, so excited to see you,” the official @SpiceGirls Twitter account said.
Such a sweet message. It’s straight out of the late 1990s. Those were the days.
Or were we all just blind to what was looming just around the corner?