The story of the year the Spice Girls fell apart
Considering past ructions, the band’s ability to reunite astonishes Alice Vincent
Their spats continue to fill column inches. They haven’t had a new album for 20 years and one of the band hates singing and dancing in public. And yet the Spice Girls begin a new tour this week that will see them play to huge crowds in sold-out stadiums from Croke Park in Dublin to Wembley Stadium in London.
Riding a wave of Nineties nostalgia, Geri Horner (née Halliwell), Mels B and C and Emma Bunton (Victoria Beckham has diplomatically cited “other commitments”) will be slamming it to the left and shaking it to the right in a second reunion tour that few thought would happen.
Ticket sales prove there is still a deep well of affection for the band who dominated the charts between 1996 and 1998 with hits such as Wannabe, 2 Become 1 and Spice Up Your Life. The Spice Girls captured the public’s imagination with their bold style, chaotic antics and “Girl Power” credo.
But what many find extraordinary is that the four women have been able to put their differences aside and work together. After all, the last time they toured, in 2008, they were forced to cancel gigs in Sydney, Beijing, Cape Town and Buenos Aires. The official reason was “family and personal commitments”, but the truth, sources said at the time, was a huge clash of egos.
The video released by the band in November last year, announcing the 2019 tour, even made reference to an argument the women reportedly had during that first reunion tour, when Geri apparently broke an agreement among the band members to wear all-black at a photo shoot and turned up in a white maxi dress – thus grabbing the attention.
“It’s not the Spice Girls Geri,” Melanie Brown tells Geri in the video. Melanie Chisholm, always said to have been the group’s mediator, then chips in: “Seriously, we can’t be falling out now if we’re going on tour.”
Except that they have reportedly
fallen out. According to the tabloids, a proposed extension to the current tour – taking in America, Australia and the Far East – has been shelved after Brown told Piers Morgan, during the recording of a TV interview, that she and Geri had a fling in the Nineties.
Geri, who is married to multimillionaire Formula 1 boss Christian Horner, subsequently issued a statement, saying the claim by Mel B was “simply not true”.
Frivolous tittle-tattle to be sure, and there is a strong possibility that the controversy was manufactured to keep the band in the limelight. But the women (with the possible exception of Emma Bunton) have endured a love-hate relationship with the band from the moment Wannabe topped the charts.
Not only did they struggle with the pressures of stratospheric fame and sudden wealth, but there has always been the added obligation to suppress their real identities and perform the
‘I definitely felt very redundant, and the wheels were turning whether I was there or not’
roles assigned to them – Posh, Sporty, Baby, Ginger and Scary – while simultaneously pretending to be the best of friends. (The line “friendship never ends”, from Wannabe, has turned out to be something of an albatross around their collective necks.)
No one has struggled more with these contradictions than Geri, who famously quit when the band was at the peak of its popularity. And the event that tipped her over the edge was the Spice Girls’ first tour in 1998.
Until those concerts, the group had only ever performed in television studios or at Christmas light illuminations. The prospect of a gargantuan tour, which featured 97 dates in 24 different countries and was due to last seven months, thrilled and terrified the whole band. But, unlike the others, Geri had no formal singing or dance training, and found the meagre four weeks of rehearsals challenging. More personality than performer, she was left exhausted by the two-hour shows crammed with 11 costume changes and 21 songs.
As the tour went on, Geri became increasingly isolated from the rest of the group. “I linked up with Geri because at dinner she wasn’t sitting with them, and asked to come and join me on a separate table,” remembers filmmaker Molly Dineen, who had been hired to make a documentary about the tour but in the end would instead make Geri, a documentary about the star.
In an interview recorded for BBC Radio 1 shortly before their Birmingham show, Geri sounded noticeably hoarse and weary, describing herself as “a bit tired”.
Ginger finally snapped three months after the tour began. Back in London to perform on The National Lottery Live with the rest of the group, she flew to Paris and issued a statement via her lawyer saying she had quit. The news would have been no less hysterical had a senior cabinet minister broken rank: newspaper stands blared “GERI QUITS”. It was a brutal surprise for the remaining Spice Girls, but not, in hindsight, to Simon Fuller, the pop Svengali who managed the group before they decided they could manage themselves. “Geri couldn’t carry it off,” he told David Sinclair, the band’s biographer, pointing towards an inevitable tussle of personalities. “Without me it was obvious what was going to happen.”
Geri always maintained that her leaving was motivated by a sense that she didn’t belong anymore. “I definitely felt very redundant and the wheels were turning whether I was there or not,” she said in 2010.
Over the past 20 years, she has explored a series of different careers, from solo artist to children’s author to TV presenter, but she has never been able to resist the siren call of the Spice Girls.
As well as the 2008 reunion, the band performed during the Olympics closing ceremony in 2012. Geri was one of the driving forces behind this year’s tour, hosting the all-important meeting that led to the event. The money is, as it has always been, a major factor: each band member is expected to take home around £2 million. (Mel B is particularly keen to replenish her coffers after allegedly blowing her entire fortune on an extravagant lifestyle and an expensive divorce – provided a recent sight-loss scare doesn’t mean she has to miss the tour entirely.) But for Geri, one gets the feeling it is the spotlight that has lured her back: that unrivalled magic of being a Spice Girl.
Yet, to watch Dineen’s documentary is to realise just how lonely Geri was within it all. Fuller’s surprising claim that she may have been left out makes more sense when you see Geri’s babbling confessionals to Dineen, a relative stranger.
“She said she just wanted a friend,” Dineen remembers of their hours shooting together, often in lavatory cubicles, away from the paparazzi. “She did have a big hole in her life.” Dineen and Geri ended up friends; they’re still in touch. And Dineen believes that Geri is happier today. “They’ve got lives now, lives you don’t want to let down by crazy antics,” explains Dineen. But then she pauses.
“I still think Geri’s got her craziness in her, though.”
The Spice Girls tour starts in Dublin on Friday. Details: thespicegirls.com