Grenfell bonfire is vile – but is it a crime?
“The most important thing women have to do is to stir up the zeal of women themselves”
John Stuart Mill, philosopher, 1869
“I, being of sound mind and new Wonderbra, do solemnly promise to cheer and dance and zigazigah. Arriba! Girl Power!”
Spice Girls, 1997
As the Spice Girls announced plans to reunite for a six-date UK tour (without Victoria Beckham), I thought back to that time 20 years ago when I interviewed them in Madrid. Critics were already saying that the band was finished, and there was a certain malicious relish at the prospect of killing the chicks who laid the golden egg. The Spice Girl had eclipsed her sister from Essex as the nation’s bimbette of choice. (What do you call a Spice Girl with two brain cells? Pregnant.)
At this distance, it’s easy to forget what a phenomenon they were. Spiceworld, their second album, sold nine million copies. Even Spice World the movie went to number two in the US, behind Titanic. The Guinness Book of Records struggled to keep up. The Spices became the only group to have their first six singles get to number one. The Girls crushed The Beatles underfoot with their hideous wedge trainers. They were Take That and that and that! If, like me, you thought that Mel B was an affectionate term for Melvyn Bragg, the whole Spice Girl thing was puzzling. For my generation, Girl Power was supposed to involve women winning equality with men through the steady exercise of their abilities, not through shaking it to the right in a Wonderbra.
It was also ironic that the most famous and popular display of female solidarity ever should arise from the idea of a couple of blokes – Bob and Chris Herbert. Was women’s liberation, like our captivity, to be man-made?
So, when I arrived in the Spanish capital to meet the band, I was cross at being asked to cover something so shallow. It was the teenage girls outside the Ritz hotel who began to change my mind. There were hundreds of them. One – about 13 – had an angry red beard of pimples, which she tried to keep covered with her hand. (Funny to think that awkward kid must be in her early 30s now.) All of the girls had bodies they appeared to have purchased that morning and hadn’t quite got the hang of. Observing them, I had a painful flashback to puberty when I was an obsessive David Cassidy fan.
But girls screaming at girls was new. Previous generations of females yodelled for the kind of male star who would sooner share a Bounty with them than a bed. The Spice Girls took that unthreatening appeal a chromosome further. They didn’t deny the attraction of the opposite sex, but they pinched the bum of anyone who dared suggest that it should rule your life. I could see that this philosophical position – elegantly summed up by Scary Spice as “Don’t take any crap from fellas” – would be deeply comforting to an 11-year-old.
Madonna once said, “A lot of women are afraid to say what they want, and so they don’t get what they want” – a sentiment that karate-kicked its way right into
Wannabe, the Spice Girls’ anthem. The secret to their appeal was normality. The girls didn’t look like stars; they looked like the kind of girls who win a prize to meet a star. Mel C (Sporty) talked about fame as though it was a lottery win, which, for a girl who worked in a chip shop, it probably was.
When I asked if they would call themselves feminists, Mel C burst out laughing: “I can’t burn me Wonderbra. I ’aven’t gor anything up top.” Geri, the house philosopher of Girl Power, said: “I remember when I used to mention feminism to the girls, they’d kinda go: ‘Urgggh…’” Victoria recalled that, when she was growing up, “feminism was… you wore crap clothes and let your underarm hair grow. We’re saying now you can wear short skirts, but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna be dominated by a man.” Mel B concluded: “I loove men. I do. I don’t need them.”
The intervening years tell a rather darker tale. Mel B was famously in an abusive marriage and the divorce left her broke. All of the girls have known heartbreak. I last saw Posh smile in 1998. The most successful of the Spices, she also seems the unhappiest. It’s a shame that she won’t lower herself to take part in the tour; she could do with a laugh and it might give her a break from her famous marriage.
I have no doubt that the Girl Power generation grew up with a different attitude to mine, and that new confidence owed a lot to them. “Don’t take any crap from fellas” sounds like a harbinger of Metoo.
When I got back to London, I visited a primary school and asked the children, aged eight and nine, what Girl Power meant to them. “I think it gives girls a lot more self-confidence,” ventured Shani. “It’s usually boys doing everything, ’cos it’s usually like man-made things and football,” said Jessie.
“I do agree with Girl Power, sort of,” said sweet Joseph. “They should be allowed to do the same things as us. They can be firemen.”
And so they can. Twenty years on, the time is ripe for a reappraisal of the Spices. The five girls who were told they would never get on the cover of a teen magazine. Because it wouldn’t sell.
They pinched the bum of anyone who dared suggest the opposite sex should rule your life