Slam Your Body Down And Wind It All Around

It seems like ancient history now, but back in 1996, the Spice Girls seemed to be the most pop thing around. They were new, their music following the tried and tested “First two songs upbeat, then a ballad for the third single that just happens to coincide with Christmas” formula, and by accident or design – although I think it was a bit of both, but I doubt you’d ever find anyone willing to admit that nowadays – everyone seemed to have an opinion and a favourite. Even those who pretended to hate everything they stood for could tell you at least one of their names, and most likely all five of their nicknames; there was Scary, Posh, Sporty, Baby and Ginger. You’d say it like that and it sounded like a sports team or roll call.

My favourite, when they first appeared, was Ginger Spice Geri Halliwell (although I was almost swayed by Posh, for about a day, and ended up thinking that Sporty was probably the talented one, the George Harrison of the group). The main reason was that she seemed like my girlfriend of the time, I admit; both of them were over the top and in your face and all those usual three word phrases we used to politely say “loud and annoying, after a while”. But there was something else, as well; she seemed to be the centre of the group, the one around whom the rest of them orbited, looking for what to do next. She was the most cartoonish, the one with the biggest personality and presence (Seeing her at the Brits the next year in the infamous Union Jack dress kind of made that the most obvious it would ever be; her appropriation of the then-still-cool iconic image from the fading Britpop scene in general and Oasis in particular making to clear that they were the then-new Queens of Pop. Next day, no-one could remember what the rest of the band looked like), just simply the most ideally “pop” of the five. Looking back, it’s strange to think that we all bought into it because now we can all see that she was TOO cartoony, too over the top with all the exaggerated make-up and knowing winks and practiced asides; she looks like a small girl’s idea of a cool pop star, or a drag queen’s. But at the time it worked; it was the antidote to the earnestness of the boys with guitars in sports tops that we were used to. It was a version of glamour and fabulousness, even if it was a ridiculous one, and that’s what we needed.
You could see that Geri really had been the centre of the band when she left, and the Spice Girls became a crap imitation of the R’n'B bands that were just breaking into the mainstream at the time. Suddenly they were taking themselves too seriously and she was going solo, being too cabaret and showing that her singing sounded a lot better when surrounded by four other voices. But there really was a time where all five of them were the most pop thing Britain could imagine, everywhere from songs on the radio to stickers and lollipops.