What do scary, sporty, baby, ginger and posh all have in common? You might not find them in your spice drawer, but you definitely know them as the Spice Girls. The song was an instant smash and sold 73, copies in its first week. While that may not seem like a lot in the modern era in music, remember that this was before even iTunes was a thing.
But how did the five women come together? In , aspiring singers crowded into a London theater to audition to be part of a new girl group. Mel C, Mel B, Victoria Beckham and Geri Halliwell all made it to the second round, with six other singers, and eventually were selected with a fifth member who left shortly into the vocal and dance coaching they went through before their debut. The fifth and final member, Emma Bunton, was then added to the group per recommendation of their vocal coach.
The Spice Girls had a brilliant marketing tactic that has yet to be replicated. In February, Spice was released in the U. Girl Power! The group also performed their first live British show, for the Royalty of Great Britain. At the show, they breached royal protocol when Mel B and then Geri Halliwell planted kisses on Prince Charles' cheeks and pinched his bottom, causing controversy. This entered in the UK charts at number one making it the girls' fifth consecutive number one hit single.
That same month, Simon Fuller took the Spice Girls east to perform their first live major concert in Istanbul, Turkey. Later, the Girls travelled to South Africa to meet Nelson Mandela, during the height of their career. In November, the Spice Girls released their second album, Spiceworld. The album was a global best seller as it set a new record for the fastest-selling album when it shipped seven million copies over the course of two weeks. Gaining favourable reviews, the album went on to sell over 10 million copies in Europe, Canada, and the United States combined, and 20 million copies worldwide.
Criticised in the United-States for releasing the album just nine months after their debut there, and suffering from over-exposure at home, the Spice Girls began to experience a media backlash. The group was criticized for the number of sponsorship deals signed — over twenty in total — and they began to witness diminishing international chart positions. Nevertheless, the Spice Girls remained the biggest-selling pop group of both and After this performance, the Spice Girls made the decision to take over the running of the group themselves, and fired their manager Simon Fuller.
The firing was front page news around the world. Many commentators speculated that Fuller had been the true mastermind behind the group, and that this was the moment when the band lost their impetus and direction. The group quickly found the burden of managing themselves time- consuming, so they assigned various responsibilities to each member of the group: Melanie B. They later built their own team, headed by Nancy Phillips, to deal with their affairs.
Two of the Spice Girls, Emma Bunton and Victoria Adams, later returned to Fuller's stable once it was clear that the impetus behind the group was starting to disappear. In December , the second single from Spiceworld , Too Much , was released.
This became the second Christmas number one for the group and the sixth consecutive number one hit single in the UK. In February , the Spice Girls won a special award for overseas success at the Brit Awards, for sales of 32 million albums worldwide, That night, the girls performed their next single, Stop.
This was their only track not to hit number one in Britain it entered and peaked at number two. In early the Spice Girls embarked upon the world tour that Fuller had set up for them covering Europe and North America. Performing to 2. It was here that recordings were made for a planned live album.
Despite masters of the recording being made, the idea was eventually dropped. This was their last song recorded with Geri's vocals, until On May 31, Geri announced her departure from the Spice Girls after many rumours cropped up about her disappearance from the group in interviews, which the girls were fully unaware of her status at the time.
A statement was released by the Spice Girls sent a statement to the offices of their solicitors in central London at BST:. The Spice Girls are here to stay, see ya at the stadiums. X vb spicegirls. Despite their professional parting of ways, the women remain close friends. The five ladies reunited in amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Well, this year we were in wellies, walking in the rain. But I don't want to be strong any more. I just want to sit down and cry… and have someone stand in front of me with their shield and say, 'I'll protect you'. The Spice Girls performed their first ever concert at an 8,capacity basketball arena in Istanbul, Turkey, on 12 October Why Turkey? One popular theory said they had chosen it to get as far away from the UK as possible, afraid the British press would savage their stage debut.
But the reality was more prosaic. Pepsi was sponsoring the tour, and they insisted on launching it in a country where Pepsi outsold Coca-Cola. The soft drink deal was hammered home at a press conference the day before the show. The concert itself was "the sort of pop show they don't do any more", said The Guardian, full of pyrotechnics, slick choreography, and even a miniature roller coaster.
And yes, the review added, "they really sang". The Sun was more cautious, calling the gig "competent and capable" with "plenty of room for improvement".
Part of the Spice Girls' appeal was their absolute refusal to play along with the media. Interviewing the band was like being dragged into a Top Shop dressing room by a hen party on its third day. They suffered no fools, and took no prisoners. They brought everyone around them to their level," their PR Nicki Chapman once said.
For example: When the Spices announced their first reunion tour in , one hapless journalist asked if the band were "unfit to do the dance routines" after having children. But the absolute gold standard, wheels-falling-off-and-car-crashing-into-a-ditch Spice Girls interview was conducted by Jamie Theakston in Luckily, someone's put it on YouTube.
He was also the brother of the Spice Girls' manager Simon - which is how he ended up writing a script for the band's first and so far only feature film, Spice World: The Movie. I think it was about a young single mother of one of the girls, fighting hardship to form the band.
The girls hated the idea, so Kim asked if he could have a shot. The story, such as it is, involves the band preparing for a concert, while dealing with unscrupulous journalists, space aliens and bomb on a bus that mysteriously vanishes. Frankly, I think we did. Pop stars were often cautious about sponsorship deals.
But the Spice Girls had no such qualms. Modern pop artists, starved of income by the economics of streaming, often subsidise their careers by following the Spice Girls' example - but for Simon Fuller, it wasn't about the money.
They're no good at maths. The rest were pretty easy really because the girls' characters were already really strong. Jennifer Cawthron, who was also from Leeds, came up with that one because Mel B was so loud and had tried to take over our whole photo shoot. By , the band were already coming up with replacements. In private, though, Geri called Mel B The Ox "because I could operate perfectly on the most outrageous hangover - or even do a full performance faultlessly after several bottles of champagne - while she would be throwing up in the loo.
The last time all five Spice Girls performed together was at the closing ceremony of the London Olympic Games in The band emerged from, then stood astride, five London black cabs, as they played Wannabe and Spice Up Your Life to rapturous applause. According to Mel C, they had rehearsed the performance for a week and a half but were still absolutely petrified. Victoria even had a panic attack inside one of the taxis and almost refused to come out.
That's how you know a real friend. In fact, shambolic is more like it. But it went perfectly. The Spice Girls' world tour saw them play to 2. In the midst of it all, both Melanie B and Victoria Beckham became pregnant - and went to great lengths to hide it from their crew and fans. Nobody knew why and we'd have to say, 'We're just getting fat'," Mel B disclosed in the tour retrospective, Forever Spice. Then it got ridiculous because I'd have to have a plastic cup in my room to wee in.
I needed to wee three or four times during the show and the toilets were miles away. Officially, the explanation was that she was suffering from exhaustion. But in her autobiography If Only, the singer said she'd been frustrated that the band had prevented her from giving a TV interview about surviving breast cancer in her teens. This was about saving lives," she wrote.
Ginger Spice was no more. And for Victoria, "there was one big plus - for the first time ever, I got to sing on Wannabe". Relationships were strained for several years, but the band eventually kissed and made up.
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