Geri Halliwell:
“Having Bluebell changed everything”
Twenty years after the Spice Girls, Ginger Spice Geri Halliwell, now a wife and mother, talks to Louise Gannon about bulimia, the Beckhams and beginning again.
It’s 20 years since the Spice Girls gatecrashed their way from suburban obscurity to global domination with their first single, Wannabe, and on a gloomy summer’s day in north London, Geri Horner (née Halliwell) is recalling her favourite ever Girl Power moment.
You might expect the woman formerly known as Ginger Spice to trot out the story of turning up to the Brits Awards in that Union Jack dress she made out of tea towels stuck on to a little Gucci number.
Or when she patted (“not pinched, I never pinched him”) Prince Charles on the behind, or when the Spice Girls – Geri, along with Victoria Beckham (then Adams), Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm and Emma Bunton – were Nelson Mandela’s guests of honour at his home in South Africa.
She shakes her head. “It was before all that,” the 44-year-old says. “It’s a snapshot that’s always stayed in my head. We’d just come out of a service station, where we’d had some terrible junk food, and we were piling into a dodgy van to finish a radio tour of the country.
“We were these five girls no one had heard of and we just believed we were going to do something amazing. In a way, that was my best time in the band, before it went completely crazy, when we didn’t know what was going to happen. We just felt we were in this big battle to change the world – to change our worlds. And then everything did change.”
Horner – who dropped Halliwell when she married Red Bull Racing Formula One Team chief Christian Horner a year ago – was the most iconic Spice Girl of them all. With her blazing red hair, cartoon outfits, turbo-charged ambition and endless store of cheeky soundbites, it was Ginger who burned herself on to the national consciousness of the ’90s.
Yet, in the process, it was she who got burnt. Within a few years, she was “Spiralling Spice”. Her weight dropped dramatically and she threw herself into extreme yoga, controlling diets and dead-end relationships (including with Robbie Williams and radio show host Chris Evans).
She then left for Los Angeles and seemed in danger of becoming lost in show business forever, until she re-emerged after the birth of her daughter, Bluebell (from a brief relationship with the film producer Sacha Gervasi) 10 years ago, to begin a new process of girl empowerment.
“I went from shouting to listening, from taking to giving and realised it wasn’t about people looking at me, it was about me looking at myself,” she says now, with a wry smile. “That’s just growing up. Getting famous arrests your development and all girls have to grow up.”
I’ve known Geri since the Spice Girls first burst into my newspaper office with a demo of Wannabe and an attitude that could move mountains. Today, she’s much softer, in jeans, T-shirt, minimal make-up and hair several shades darker (“however much I change it, the ginger always comes back”).
She lets you speak and thinks before opening her mouth – but every now and again, bursts out laughing in the same excitable way she always used to. Ginger is still alive and well, she has just evolved.
Geri has never had therapy, but says she has read pretty much every self-help book there is. Her pretty home is crammed with family photos, several taken on her wedding day to Christian, in large silver frames. Bluebell’s drawings are pinned up in the kitchen amid wellthumbed cookbooks (Geri recently won a round of UK TV cooking show Great Sport Relief Bake Off).
There’s no Spice shrine anywhere. The Union Jack dress is hanging in the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas. “I don’t hang on to anything,” she says, with a grin. “I lived it.”
“I was on a mission for fame …
But even though there were great times, I had this void in me. I just wasn’t happy.”
Geri – along with her wingwoman, Leeds-born Mel B – was always the friendliest Spice. She remembers your name, chats about the old days, laughs at some of the things she used to say, such as, “Imagination – use it. It’s pure escapism”. (“Actually,” she says, “I do still believe that.”)
Over the afternoon, she talks about the loss of her father when she was just 21, spending her 20s and 30s searching for happiness, her bulimia and why it took motherhood and marriage to give her the love she really, really wanted all her life. First, it’s only fitting to talk about the legacy of Girl Power and how one of those five lairy young wannabes – Victoria Beckham – became a much-venerated fashion icon.
Geri laughs. “I’m not surprised by what Victoria has done. When we were writing songs, Victoria would be out buying shoes. Now, well, she’s Fashion Spice. I remember her bursting in when I was in the middle of writing Who Do You Think You Are? and she’d bought a pair of Prada shoes. She was so excited. Victoria always knew about brands and labels, even then.”
The Spice Girls remain the biggest ever girl band
in British music history and one of a handful of UK bands to break America. Selected at an open audition by small-time agents, they bonded, rebelled and set off to record companies with their own ideas of how a girl band should be. Less than two years in, they had made two albums, sold 50 million records and had a net worth of
$175 million. And that was when
Geri decided to quit.
“After my dad died [in 1993, a year before the Spice Girls were formed], I was lost and looking for answers. I was very young and I pinned my happiness on getting fame, money and success. I was on a mission. But then I got it and even though there were great times, I had this void in me. I wasn’t happy. I still had all my problems.
“Fame is such a weird thing. It’s hard to handle. It’s like being given a Batman suit to wear and then some days you wake up without it. You want to hide away, but you can’t. You end up feeling very exposed and vulnerable.’
Her method of dealing with fear and insecurity was to control her eating with bulimia. “My eating disorder began before the Spice Girls,” she says. “I used it for stress relief. I thought [bulimia] was my way of being in control, but the irony is, it controls you. You’re even more out of control.”
She embarked on high-profile romances that went nowhere. “I was painted as this Bridget Jones figure,” Geri says, laughing. “But I’m a girl whose parents divorced. It was me who had the commitment problems. And I used to look for men in the wrong places.”
By the time the Watford-born singer hit her 30s, she realised that having everything she had thought she wanted wasn’t enough. She went back to the beginning: much of the drive and much of the confusion in her life began when she lost her father, Laurence, when she was 21.
Laurence Halliwell, a car salesman, encouraged his daughter to speak her mind and adored his youngest child (she has two older siblings and two older half-siblings). While Geri remains close to her Spanish-born mother, Ana Maria, (who split from Laurence when her daughter was nine years old), his death left a huge hole in her life.
“I’d got everything I thought would make me happy, but none of it really did. I never felt like I had the emotional connection I needed and I realised I had to look at myself and start working myself out,” she says.
Geri wrote an autobiography and began talking about her eating disorder. “Once I spoke about it, it was like this cloud lifted. The more I talked about it, the less power it had over me. I started being kinder to myself. I finally started to like myself and to allow myself to be who I was.”
Marriage and motherhood have, she says, been the making of her. “Having Bluebell changed everything. You have someone else to think of; you want to pass on the right lessons, be a good mother. It’s lovely to share that with my husband and be our own team.”
She met Christian through friends on the Formula One scene (she’s a friend of the family of F1 boss, Bernie Ecclestone) and they dated for a year before marrying in May 2015. “I can be totally nerdy in front of him,” says Geri. “He’s as geeky and silly as me.”
Their wedding was, she says, full of laughs. The vicar was so flustered by Dawn French – a friend since Spice