Spicing up
The Spice Girls were innocent, instinctive and inspirational when they first burst on to the music scene, says Aidan Smith
It was a long, long time ago that the Spice Girls burst into our lives and invaded the personal space of a street beggar blanketed up against the cold, the one called Baby nicking his bunnet.
That, you might recall, was the opening scene in the video for their first mega-hit Wannabe where each of the girls took it in turn to tell us what they really, really wanted from pop and the world – all apart from Posh who wasn’t given a verse to sing but cavorted in the semibackground which immediately made her seem the most intriguing.
It was so long, long ago, in fact, that what my features editor of the time really, really wanted from me was a celebrity vox-pop asking leading men in Scottish life the burning question: “Which one do you fancy?”
I don’t blame the paper (it wasn’t this one) for responding in that way. The Spice Girls were formed in 1994 which also saw the launch of Loaded. The first lads’ mag looked at Page 3, saw something unbudgeable and sought to intellectualise it. Yes, we’d had a female Prime Minister by ’94 – the original Spice Girl, as Ginger called Maggie Thatcher – but men were back in charge of things and that was certainly true of pop.
I can’t remember who featured in the vox pop – a handful of the usual suspects from Caledonian showbiz, most likely – and don’t think I ever wrote about the Spice Girls again. That wasn’t a conscious act on my part, simply that they never ventured into recording prog-rock triple concept albums or won the Scottish Cup after a 114year gap. But here they are back together and playing Murrayfield next summer by which time Ginger, the oldest, will be a few weeks away from her 47th birthday. Though they’ve rarely touched my world and never rocked it, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the Spices. In a pop laboratory they were Frankensteined up by men. Men who probably didn’t have the objectification of women,