Girls wannabe back together
REUNION?: Baby Spice Emma Bunton, now 40, reminisces on 20 years
It was hardly a JFK moment, but if, like me, you remember what you were doing when you first heard a Spice Girls track, it may be hard to believe two decades have elapsed since the girl group released its debut single Wannabe in the mid-1990s.
They sold millions of records before embarking on what turned out to be a lengthy hiatus just four years later. There was a brief reunion in 2007-08, but the question now is: How, if at all, will they mark their 20th anniversary this summer?
Emma Bunton — formerly known as Baby Spice, who turned 40 in January — makes no secret of her hope that the “girls” (now all in their 40s) will get their act together.
“We adore each other. There’s so much we’ve been through. I would love to do something,” she says. “I think we’d all quite like to do something, but it really is figuring it out. We all have such different lives. Mel B (Melanie Brown, formerly Scary Spice) lives in (the U.S.). We’ve all got different managers.”
Not to mention the fact they are all mothers now and their busy schedules include commitments such as school plays, which makes finding time for a reunion even harder.
It’s natural to wonder, too, if any jealousy simmers beneath the surface. Victoria’s — Posh Spice — marriage to soccer star David Beckham, the couple’s children and her fashion line have kept her profile higher than that of any of her former bandmates. But Bunton insists she is delighted for her.
“When a friend does that well, it’s incredible. She’s just hilarious and I know exactly what she’s thinking just by looking at her,” she says. “I see pictures and I go, ‘I know what she’s thinking about!’ I’m very lucky because I know the fun, sarcastic, brilliant other side to her as well.”
When Baby joined the band in 1994, she was almost young enough to be in a school play herself. Now she has two children of her own — Beau, 8, and Tate, 4 — with her fiance, singer Jade Jones, to whom she has been engaged since 2011.
“Wouldn’t that be amazing?” she says of a suggested one-off gig at Wembley Stadium. “Fingers crossed. That’s something we’d really love to do.”
The phrase “Girl Power” — which Bunton defines as “supporting one another in everything you do” — was famously central to the Spice Girls’ brand and is something she continues to draw on.
“For me, it started with seeing my mom going back to college at 40, starting karate at 40. She just kept growing and I’ve really fed off that,” she says.