The story of Spice Girls

An advert in The Stage

In the early nineties, British pop belonged to boy bands like Take That. A father and son team, Bob and Chris Herbert of Heart Management, backed by a financier named Chic Murphy, made a bet that a group of girls could compete. They placed an advert in the trade paper The Stage, asking whether readers were street smart, extrovert, ambitious and able to sing and dance. Around four hundred young women turned up at the Danceworks studios in London on the fourth of March 1994. They were sent in groups of ten to dance a routine to Stay by Eternal, then sang a song of their own choosing. The wisdom in the industry at the time was that girl groups simply did not sell. The Herberts thought otherwise.[1] [2] [3]

Among the dozen or so called back for a second round were Victoria Adams, a trained dancer from Hertfordshire, and Melanie Brown, a loud and fearless dancer from Leeds who had worked the clubs of Blackpool. Melanie Chisholm, a singer from Widnes near Liverpool, missed that round with tonsillitis. Geri Halliwell from Watford talked her way into the process, and when another hopeful, Lianne Morgan, was let go, the Herberts called Melanie Chisholm back in. Geri had already lived several lives, as a nightclub dancer in Majorca, a glamour model and a hostess on a Turkish television game show. After a recall at Nomis Studios in Shepherd's Bush, five women were chosen for a band called Touch. The fifth was Michelle Stephenson.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Touch moved into a rented three bedroom house in Maidenhead, Berkshire, and spent most of 1994 rehearsing. Their songs were written by two of Bob Herbert's associates and, according to Michelle Stephenson, aimed at a very young audience. None of them were ever used. The girls cut demos at a studio in Bracknell and worked out their own dance routines in a studio near Woking. A few months in, Stephenson was out, and the management said she lacked commitment. Their vocal coach, Pepi Lemer, suggested a former pupil, an eighteen year old from Finchley in north London called Emma Bunton. Emma had trained at the Sylvia Young Theatre School and had even played a mugger in a small part on EastEnders. She auditioned, and the line up was complete.[1] [2] [3]

The five quickly grew restless. At one showcase they added a rap of their own to one of the songs they had been given, and its writer was furious, telling them to learn to write properly. So they did. They took songwriting lessons, and in one session with the arranger Tim Hawes they wrote a song called Sugar and Spice. It gave them a new name, Spice. Hawes later estimated that Geri wrote most of the lyrics on the songs he worked on, and she became famous among producers for arriving with a notebook full of scribbled ideas and titles. Melanie Chisholm said that at first they felt they had to fit a mould, until they realised their differences were their strength.[1] [2] [3]

Walking out and going it alone

By late 1994 the group still had no contract, so they persuaded Bob Herbert to stage a showcase for songwriters, producers and record company scouts at Nomis Studios in December. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. One man in the building that day was the producer Richard Stannard, there for a meeting with Jason Donovan. He heard Melanie Brown charging along the corridor and followed the noise. He later said they simply made him laugh and made him feel happy, the way great pop records do. The Herberts hurried to draw up binding contracts. All five refused to sign, acting on legal advice that came partly from Victoria's father, Anthony Adams.[1] [2] [3]

In January 1995 the group had their first proper writing session with Stannard and his partner Matt Rowe at the Strongroom studio in east London. The first song, a slow number called Feed Your Love, was judged far too racy for young fans and put away. Then Rowe set a drum loop running and the girls started throwing in chants, raps and bits of melody, which the producers stitched together like a remix. In about half an hour they had Wannabe. Victoria missed most of the session and followed along on a mobile phone. The last thing added was the sound of Melanie Brown's footsteps as she ran to the microphone. The same team went on to write 2 Become 1 and Mama with them.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In March 1995 the girls walked out on Heart Management, frustrated that nobody was listening to their ideas, and they are widely reported to have taken the master recordings of their demos from the office on the way out. There was one snag. Chris Herbert had booked them a session with a songwriter called Eliot Kennedy, and all they knew was that he lived in Sheffield. So Melanie Brown and Geri drove north, found a phone book at a service station and started ringing studios. Eliot was the third Kennedy they called. That evening they knocked on his door and talked him into working with them, and the other three followed the next day.[1] [2] [3]

Kennedy, who had written Everything Changes with Gary Barlow for Take That, ended up putting the girls up because they had nowhere to stay. He said later there was no good reason for him to do it, except that they were so dedicated. None of them played an instrument, so he would sing them a melody and five notepads would come out. That week produced Love Thing and Say You'll Be There, and Kennedy named his brand new studio Spice in their honour. Through the showcase they had also met Paul Wilson and Andy Watkins, a production duo called Absolute, who noticed that the girls were planning the dance routine and the video while they were still writing the song.[1] [2] [3]

The new demos reached Simon Fuller, whose company 19 Entertainment managed Annie Lennox. Fuller said what clinched it was that they had written strong songs of their own and had five huge personalities. He signed them in 1995 and took them round the record labels in London and Los Angeles. After a bidding war they chose Virgin, a label with plenty of credible alternative acts but no big pop stars. Only one thing had to change. An American rapper was already using the name Spice. So they became the Spice Girls, the name industry people had been calling them anyway, and not always kindly.[1] [2] [3]

Wannabe and Spicemania

Virgin did not want Wannabe as the debut single. Executives preferred the cooler sounding Say You'll Be There, or Love Thing, and in early 1996 Simon Fuller agreed with them. Geri was furious and told him it was not negotiable. The girls had already rejected an American remix that tried to turn the song into slick R&B, and the engineer Mark Stent tidied up the original in about six hours instead. The group got their way. Wannabe came out in Japan in late June 1996 and in Britain on the eighth of July. Richard Stannard said later that Geri's spirit ran through the whole band, and that the label never stood a chance.[1] [2]

The video sealed it. The Swedish director Johan Camitz planned one unbroken shot of the girls taking over a grand building in Barcelona, but lost the location days before the shoot. So on the nineteenth of April 1996 they ran riot through the old Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras station in London instead, rehearsing through a freezing night. Virgin executives were horrified and talked about a reshoot. The girls refused. On the music channel the Box, where viewers requested videos by phone, Wannabe shot to the top of the request chart within two hours. At its peak it was shown up to seventy times a week.[1] [2]

Wannabe entered the British chart at number three and then spent seven weeks at number one. When it hit the top, the girls were in Japan, so their first Top of the Pops appearance was beamed in by satellite from Tokyo. Around the same time, after a lunch with the group, the staff of Top of the Pops magazine gave them nicknames. Victoria was Posh for her designer dress and her pout. Emma was Baby for her pigtails and lollipop. Melanie Chisholm was Sporty in her tracksuit. Melanie Brown was Scary because she was so loud, and Geri was Ginger for her hair. The editor, Peter Loraine, said the names were never meant to go global. They did, almost overnight.[1] [2] [3]

Say You'll Be There followed in October 1996, with a video shot in the Mojave Desert that cast the girls as martial arts heroines. It went to number one as well. On the fourth of November came the album Spice. It sold 114,000 copies in its first week in Britain and then kept accelerating, with 364,000 copies in a single week before Christmas. The press called it Spicemania, compared it to Beatlemania and nicknamed the girls the Fab Five. Spice spent fifteen weeks at number one in the UK, sold more than three million copies there, and became the best selling album ever by a girl group.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In December the ballad 2 Become 1 became their first Christmas number one, selling 462,000 copies in its first week. It was a love song with a safe sex message, something Melanie Chisholm later said made her proud, even if it went over the heads of younger fans. That same season the girls drew a crowd put at half a million when they switched on the Christmas lights on Oxford Street. Simon Fuller was already lining up sponsorship deals with Pepsi, Walkers crisps, Cadbury, Polaroid and Impulse body spray. In six months, five unknowns had become the most talked about act in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

Girl power goes global

America came next. Wannabe was released there in January 1997 and entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number eleven, at the time the highest ever debut for a British act, beating the Beatles and I Want to Hold Your Hand. It went on to spend four weeks at number one, their only American chart topper. Spice became the best selling album of 1997 in the United States. Melanie Chisholm said being number one in America was something they had always been determined to do. In the end Wannabe reached number one in thirty seven countries, and it remains the best selling single ever by a girl group.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 1997 the Spice Girls opened the Brit Awards in London with Who Do You Think You Are. Geri wore a tiny Union Jack mini dress that was on front pages around the world the next morning, and it became one of the defining images of Cool Britannia. They won two awards that night. In March, the double A side Mama and Who Do You Think You Are came out for Comic Relief and Mothering Sunday, and it made them the first act in British chart history whose first four singles all reached number one. Their first book, Girl Power, sold out its print run of two hundred thousand copies in a day.[1] [2] [3]

Girl power was the slogan, though it was not their invention. The American punk band Bikini Kill had used it in 1991, and Geri said she first heard it on a 1996 single by the British duo Shampoo. The Spice Girls carried it into the mainstream, usually with a peace sign. It stood for confidence, individuality and friendship, and it was aimed at girls rather than boys, which Virgin's press director said no girl group had done before. Critics dismissed it as a marketing trick, and Geri raised eyebrows by calling Margaret Thatcher the pioneer of their ideology. Still, the phrase made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.[1] [2] [3]

In May 1997 they played their first live show in Britain, at a Prince's Trust concert, and caused a royal stir when Melanie Brown and Geri kissed Prince Charles and Geri pinched his bottom, breaking every rule of protocol. Meanwhile the brand was everywhere. Pepsi printed ninety two million promotional cans and bottles with their faces on them. Walkers crisps sold sixteen million packs of Spice Girls crisps, and Polaroid made a Spice Cam. By June the group had applied for more than a hundred trademarks. Simon Fuller later said the deals were more about exposure than money, using other companies' advertising budgets to make his group famous.[1] [2]

Spiceworld, Istanbul and the backlash

In June 1997 they started filming their own movie, Spice World, in the spirit of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. Disney had offered a film first, but the girls turned down its script about a young single mother struggling to form the band. Simon Fuller's brother Kim wrote a comedy instead, with cameos from Roger Moore, Elton John, Elvis Costello, Stephen Fry, and Meat Loaf as the driver of the Spice Bus. The catch was that the second album had to be written at the same time. No songs existed when filming began, so the girls wrote and recorded between takes in a mobile studio built into a Winnebago that followed them from set to set.[1] [2] [3]

It was exhausting. Melanie Brown said that within a couple of weeks exhaustion set in. Geri scribbled the start of Too Much in the back of a car, and Stop grew out of the girls' frustration at being worked so hard by their own management. When they recorded Spice Up Your Life, Matt Rowe remembered an MTV crew filming, label staff phoning and fans throwing things at the studio windows. In the end all five squeezed into the vocal booth and sang the chorus together. The single was held back a week so it would not collide with Elton John's tribute to Princess Diana, and in October 1997 it went straight in at number one, their fifth in a row.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then came their first full concert, a Pepsi sponsored show at the Abdi Ipekci Arena in Istanbul on the twelfth of October 1997. Twenty five years later, in her memoir Who I Am, Melanie Chisholm revealed that on the eve of that show she was sexually assaulted by a masseur at a hotel in Istanbul. She said she felt violated, vulnerable and embarrassed, but buried it at once, because everything was building towards the moment she had always dreamed of. She had not planned to include it in the book. She said the memory came back to her in a dream, and she decided it was important to finally say it and deal with it.[1] [2] [3]

In early November, Prince Charles introduced the group to Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Mandela called them his heroes and said it was one of the greatest moments of his life, and Charles joked that it was only his second greatest, the first being when he met them himself. Days later, on the morning they performed at the MTV Europe Music Awards, the Spice Girls fired Simon Fuller and announced they would manage themselves. Geri was widely seen as leading the revolt. The sacking made front pages around the world, and many commentators assumed the group had just thrown away its brains.[1] [2]

The backlash arrived fast. The album Spiceworld shipped seven million copies in two weeks, a record, but critics sneered, and a national survey found two thirds of Britons thought the group was overexposed. They were booed at an awards show in Barcelona, and Smash Hits readers voted them worst group. Yet Too Much became their second Christmas number one and their sixth straight chart topper, making them the first act whose first six singles all reached number one in Britain. The film Spice World opened in December to scathing reviews. A four minute cameo by Gary Glitter had been cut after he was arrested on child pornography offences.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ginger says goodbye

In January 1998 Spice World opened in America and set a box office record for Super Bowl weekend, taking more than ten million dollars. At the Brit Awards in February they performed their next single, Stop, a Motown flavoured song, dressed like the Supremes. It stalled at number two behind It's Like That by Run DMC and Jason Nevins, ending their run of six number ones. On the twenty fourth of February 1998 the Spiceworld Tour opened in Dublin. It had eleven costume changes and an introduction narrated by William Shatner, and in New York thirteen thousand tickets for Madison Square Garden sold in under twelve minutes.[1] [2] [3]

Behind the scenes, things were fraying. British tabloids reported rows on the flight home from a show in Helsinki in late May 1998. Geri pulled out of a National Lottery television appearance, and then missed two sold out shows in Oslo, with the band blaming a stomach bug. On the thirty first of May her solicitor released a statement. She confirmed she had left the Spice Girls because of differences between them, apologised to the fans and ended by saying she would be back. It was one of the biggest entertainment stories of the year. The other four said they were saddened, but that the Spice Girls were here to stay.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The four carried on. The North American leg opened in West Palm Beach, Florida, on the fifteenth of June 1998, and her lines were shared out, with Victoria finally singing lead on Wannabe. Across the year the tour played to an estimated two point one million people over ninety seven shows, and it remains the highest grossing tour ever by a female group. It also broke new ground by showing sponsors' commercials on the big screens before the show and during the interval, a first for a pop concert. Meanwhile Viva Forever, the last single from Spiceworld, became their seventh UK number one that summer.[1] [2] [3]

Viva Forever had a haunting afterlife. Its video, made by Steve Box of Aardman Animations, showed the girls as tiny stop motion fairies, and it took five months to finish, longer than the whole Spice World shoot. It had been commissioned before Geri left, so she was still in it, a farewell nobody had planned. The song had started life under the title Obrigado, and the producers who wrote it with them said the lyrics were mainly Geri's. Box said his idea of the girls as lost tin toys was partly a comment on modern pop, bought one moment and gone the next. It sold 278,000 copies in its first week.[1] [2]

On tour in America the four reworked a song called Goodbye, and Stannard and Rowe flew to Nashville to record it. Melanie Brown was filmed walking out of a vocal take, later explaining that the song was about Geri. Released in December 1998, Goodbye became their third Christmas number one in a row, equalling a record set by the Beatles. By then two members were expecting babies. Melanie Brown had married the dancer Jimmy Gulzar that September, and Victoria was engaged to the Manchester United footballer David Beckham. At the Royal Variety Performance they sang Goodbye sitting down, so the two pregnant members did not have to dance.[1] [2] [3]

Forever and the long break

1999 brought babies, a wedding and a tragedy. Melanie Brown's daughter Phoenix Chi was born in February, and Victoria's son Brooklyn a month later. On the fourth of July 1999 Victoria married David Beckham at Luttrellstown Castle in Ireland, and the photographs of the couple on golden thrones became famous. That August, Bob Herbert, the manager who had placed the original advert, was killed at the age of fifty seven when his car spun out of control in heavy rain in Windsor Great Park. By then Melanie Chisholm and Melanie Brown had both had solo hits, Melanie C with Bryan Adams on When You're Gone and Mel B with I Want You Back.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Fame also brought danger. In January 2000 police were tipped off about a plot to kidnap Victoria and baby Brooklyn and hold them at a house in Hampstead, and the family moved to a secret location. No arrests were made. That March she received a death threat before the group performed at the Brit Awards, and at rehearsals a red laser dot appeared on her chest and she was rushed off stage. She later said she was terrified. In November 2002 five people were arrested over another alleged kidnap plot, exposed by a tabloid newspaper, but the charges were dropped after a witness was judged unreliable.[1]

At those 2000 Brit Awards the Spice Girls became the youngest ever winners of the award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. Geri was in the room but did not join them on stage. The four had been making a third album since August 1999, moving from bubblegum pop towards R&B with the American producers Rodney Jerkins, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Jerkins, known as Darkchild, announced himself at the start of the single Holler, the first male voice on a Spice Girls record. Holler, paired with the ballad Let Love Lead the Way, became their ninth UK number one that autumn, the most by any girl group.[1] [2]

The album, Forever, was another story. It came out in November 2000, went head to head in a heavily publicised chart battle with Westlife's Coast to Coast, and lost, entering at number two. In America it reached only number thirty nine. At the MTV Europe Music Awards in Stockholm that month, Melanie Chisholm said it could be their last appearance together for a while. In December 2000 the Spice Girls stopped promoting the record and began what they called an indefinite hiatus to focus on solo careers. They insisted they were not splitting up. For almost seven years, it looked exactly like a split.[1] [2] [3]

The solo years brought hits and hard times. Geri scored four UK number ones, including It's Raining Men, and later spoke about bulimia that she said brought her close to death, crediting Robbie Williams with urging her to get help. Melanie Chisholm topped the charts with Never Be the Same Again, featuring Lisa Left Eye Lopes of TLC, but took time out with clinical depression and an eating disorder, and after Virgin dropped her in 2004 she started her own label. Emma had solo hits and became a radio presenter. Victoria's solo records sold modestly before she turned to fashion, launching her own fashion label in 2008.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The return of the Spice Girls

On the twenty eighth of June 2007 all five, Geri included, appeared at a press conference at London's O2 Arena and announced a world reunion tour. Each was reportedly paid ten million pounds. Victoria said she wanted her children to see that their mother had been a pop star. Demand was enormous. The first London date sold out in thirty eight seconds, more than a million people in Britain signed up for the ticket ballot, and sixteen more London nights were added. The comeback single, Headlines, subtitled Friendship Never Ends, was the Children in Need record for 2007, and it peaked at number eleven.[1] [2]

Melanie Brown brought her own drama into the reunion. In 2006 she had been dating the actor Eddie Murphy, and when she became pregnant he told a reporter he would not know whose child it was until it was born and had a blood test. Their daughter Angel was born in April 2007, and a DNA test ordered by the court that June confirmed Murphy was the father. Brown later said she had walked out on him after a row, and still called him the love of her life. Within months, she had married the film producer Stephen Belafonte in Las Vegas, a relationship that would later go badly wrong.[1] [2] [3]

The Return of the Spice Girls Tour opened in Vancouver on the second of December 2007 and was a triumph. Seventeen sold out nights at the O2 in London drew more than a quarter of a million people and won the Billboard award for the top grossing engagement of the year. In a knowing nod to history, Geri left the stage early at the end of Viva Forever. But on the first of February 2008 the group announced that, because of personal and family commitments, the tour would end in Toronto on the twenty sixth of February. Planned shows in Beijing, Sydney, Cape Town and Buenos Aires were cancelled.[1] [2] [3]

In June 2012 all five met the press at the St Pancras hotel where they had filmed the Wannabe video, sixteen years to the day, to launch Viva Forever, a stage musical produced by Judy Craymer of Mamma Mia fame and written by Jennifer Saunders. Like Mamma Mia, it told a new story rather than their own, about a young singer on a television talent show. It opened at the Piccadilly Theatre that December with all five in the audience, after a delay blamed on Victoria's late arrival. The reviews were among the worst of the year. It closed after seven months with losses of at least five million pounds.[1] [2]

Between those two moments came a night the whole world saw. On the twelfth of August 2012 the Spice Girls reunited for the closing ceremony of the London Olympics, performing a medley of Wannabe and Spice Up Your Life. It was widely praised and became the most tweeted moment of the entire Games, with more than 116,000 tweets a minute. As of 2026, it remains the last time all five performed together at a public event. Melanie Brown later said she had disliked the Viva Forever musical, and that the group had really wanted a show that told their own story.[1] [2] [3]

Scars, stadiums and anniversaries

Behind the smiles, Melanie Brown was in crisis. In December 2014, weeks after telling an interviewer how happy her marriage was, she attempted suicide by taking an overdose of aspirin, then appeared as a judge on the X Factor final with a bruised cheek. In 2017 she filed for divorce from Stephen Belafonte and, in a sworn court declaration, accused him of years of emotional and physical abuse and of threatening to release private sex tapes. She won a temporary restraining order. Belafonte's lawyers called the allegations outrageous and a smear campaign, and she later withdrew the claims of physical abuse. The divorce was finalised in December 2017.[1] [2] [3]

Brown told her story in a 2018 memoir, Brutally Honest, became a patron of the domestic violence charity Women's Aid, and in 2022 was made an MBE for services to charitable causes and vulnerable women. The group, meanwhile, kept trying to regroup. In 2016 Brown, Emma and Geri teased a three piece project for the twentieth anniversary of Wannabe, with Victoria and Melanie Chisholm giving their blessing but staying out. A song called Song for Her leaked online that November, but the plan was dropped when Geri announced she was pregnant with her son, her first child with her husband Christian Horner.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In November 2018 the Spice Girls announced a stadium tour for 2019, as a four piece. Victoria declined because of her fashion business, and later said it just did not feel right, adding that she would always be Posh Spice. The Spice World 2019 Tour opened at Croke Park in Dublin on the twenty fourth of May and, after sound problems in the early shows, ended with three nights at Wembley Stadium, the last on the fifteenth of June. Thirteen shows drew seven hundred thousand people and earned more than seventy eight million dollars in ticket sales. The Guardian called it about as good as nostalgia tours get.[1] [2] [3]

The 2019 shows put some old wounds on stage. On her birthday, Melanie Brown reminded the crowd that Geri had first walked out on her birthday back in 1998, and the two ended up throwing cake at each other while Emma hid under an umbrella. At the final Wembley show, before singing Goodbye, a song recorded after she had left, Geri publicly apologised for quitting the band. Three years later, in 2022, Melanie Chisholm published Who I Am, the memoir that revealed the assault in Istanbul and her long struggle with depression and an eating disorder during the height of their fame.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The anniversaries kept coming. For the twenty fifth birthday of Spice in 2021, a deluxe edition called Spice25 took the album back into the UK top five, and Spiceworld25 followed in 2022. Emma Bunton married her long time partner Jade Jones, the former singer of the boy band Damage, in July 2021. In January 2024 Royal Mail issued fifteen stamps marking thirty years of the group, and that year all five surprised guests at Victoria's fiftieth birthday party by performing Stop together. As of 2026, their thirtieth anniversary year, several members have hinted at a full reunion, but no five piece tour has happened since 2008.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The legacy of girl power

By most counts the Spice Girls have sold around a hundred million records, making them the best selling girl group in history, and Spice remains the biggest album ever by a girl group. They had nine UK number ones, level with ABBA, and three Christmas number ones in a row, a feat shared only with the Beatles and LadBaby. They were the best selling British act of the nineties, ahead of Oasis. In 2000 a British Council study found they were the second best known Britons in the world, behind only the prime minister Tony Blair, and the best known of all in Asia.[1] [2]

Their timing was perfect. They arrived in 1996 when Britpop, grunge and dance music ruled, and they are credited with reviving mainstream pop and opening the door for Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and a wave of teen stars. In Britain around twenty new girl groups launched in 1999 and thirty five the next year, from All Saints and Atomic Kitten to Girls Aloud and the Sugababes. Later stars from Adele to Charli XCX and Billie Eilish have named them as an influence. Adele was reportedly so starstruck on meeting Melanie Chisholm at a Coldplay show that she burst into tears.[1] [2] [3]

They also changed the business. The Spice Girls are the most merchandised group in music history. Their dolls sold more than eleven million, the best selling celebrity dolls ever, and in 1998 they were the second best selling toy in America behind the Teletubbies. Commentators credit Simon Fuller's approach with turning the band into a brand, and blame it for a celebrity obsessed culture that followed. Fuller himself went on to create Pop Idol and American Idol, and to manage David Beckham. Critics once sneered that the Spice Girls were manufactured, but the five of them had a hand in writing every one of their songs.[1] [2] [3]

And the songs have outlived the sneering. A 2014 study by the University of Amsterdam and the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester found Wannabe to be the most recognisable pop song of the previous sixty years, with listeners naming it in just over two seconds. In 2016 the United Nations backed campaign Project Everyone remade the Wannabe video to push for gender equality around the world. At the end of 2023 Wannabe passed a billion streams on Spotify. Once mocked, the film Spice World is now called a cult classic, and the Spice Bus has been on show on the Isle of Wight since 2014.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Spice Girls

Victoria Beckham and David Beckham. They met at a charity football match in 1997. David had already admired her on video, and Victoria had once worn his Manchester United kit for a Spice Girls photo shoot because their manager was a fan. Dubbed Posh and Becks, they married at Luttrellstown Castle in Ireland in July 1999, with baby Brooklyn as ring bearer. They have four children, and Simon Fuller later managed them both.[1] [2] [3]

Geri Halliwell and Mel B. The two loudest Spice Girls were rumoured to be fighting over who led the group, and the press blamed a feud between them when Geri quit in 1998. Mel B later admitted she had been unkind to Geri. By the 2019 tour they were joking about it on stage, throwing cake at each other on Mel B's birthday, the anniversary of Geri's walkout.[1] [2] [3]

Spice Girls and Simon Fuller. Fuller signed them in 1995, saying their own songs and five big personalities made them irresistible. He turned them into a global brand through deals with Pepsi, Walkers and Polaroid, earning the nickname Svengali Spice. They fired him in November 1997, but he returned as a partner, managed their 2007 comeback tour and helped develop the Viva Forever musical. He went on to create Pop Idol.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Spice Girls and Bob and Chris Herbert. The father and son team at Heart Management invented the idea of a girl group to take on the boy bands, placed the advert and picked the members. The girls outgrew them within a year, refused to sign contracts and walked out in March 1995. Bob Herbert died in a car crash in 1999. The Herberts went on to put together the boy band Five.[1] [2] [3]

Spice Girls and Richard Stannard and Matt Rowe. Stannard stumbled into the girls' 1994 showcase and told Rowe he had found the pop group of their dreams. Together they wrote Wannabe, 2 Become 1, Mama, Spice Up Your Life, Viva Forever and Goodbye with the group, recording some of them on the road in America. Stannard was still working with Melanie Chisholm on her solo music decades later.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Spice Girls and Absolute. Paul Wilson and Andy Watkins, working as Absolute, produced Say You'll Be There and wrote Who Do You Think You Are, Stop and Too Much with the group. They admitted they had little control over the girls, who knew exactly what they wanted to say. During the Spice World shoot, the duo chased the group around film sets in a mobile studio.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Mel B and Eddie Murphy. Mel B dated the actor in 2006. When she became pregnant he publicly questioned whether the baby was his, and a DNA test in June 2007 confirmed that he was the father of their daughter Angel. Mel B later said she had walked out after a row, and called him the love of her life. By 2018 he was seeing Angel regularly.[1] [2] [3]

Mel B and Stephen Belafonte. Mel B married the film producer in Las Vegas in June 2007 after a short courtship, and they had a daughter in 2011. In 2017 she filed for divorce, alleging years of abuse and threats to release private videos, and won a temporary restraining order. His lawyers called her claims a smear campaign, and she later withdrew the physical abuse allegations.[1] [2] [3]

Emma Bunton and Jade Jones. Emma began dating Jade Jones, singer with the boy band Damage, in 1998. They split and reunited more than once before settling down in 2004. They have two children, got engaged in 2011, and although Emma once said they did not need a wedding to justify their relationship, they married in July 2021. He also sang with her on her 2019 album.[1] [2]

Spice Girls and Prince Charles. The future king became an unlikely fan. At a Prince's Trust concert in 1997 Mel B and Geri kissed him and Geri pinched his bottom. He took the group to meet Nelson Mandela that November and attended the Spice World premiere with his sons. When Geri quit, Charles sent her a personal letter signed with lots of love.[1] [2]

Melanie Chisholm and Bryan Adams. The Canadian rock star gave Melanie C her first solo hit, the duet When You're Gone, released in late 1998 while she was still a Spice Girl. It reached number three in Britain. The pair stayed close, and in 2022 they recorded the song again for his album Classic Part Two after she surprised his audience by joining him on stage.[1]

Rare facts about Spice Girls

• Eliot Kennedy was the third Kennedy the girls phoned in a Sheffield phone book when they went looking for him. Without their old manager's contacts, Mel B and Geri drove to Sheffield, found a phone book at a service station and rang around. Eliot was the third Kennedy they tried, and they turned up at his house that night.[1] [2]
• Eliot Kennedy named his brand new studio Spice, after the group. The studio had never been used before the girls arrived. They stayed at his house for most of a week and wrote Love Thing and Say You'll Be There there.[1]
• The first song the Spice Girls wrote with Stannard and Rowe was shelved for being too racy. Called Feed Your Love, it was a slow, soulful track that was recorded and mastered for the debut album but dropped as too sexually explicit for young fans. It finally surfaced on the Wannabe 25 EP in 2021.[1]
• Victoria missed most of the Wannabe writing session and took part over a mobile phone. In her autobiography she wrote that she could not bear not being there. She sang backing vocals and joined the chorus, but has no solo verse on the song.[1]
• The last sound added to Wannabe was Mel B's footsteps as she ran to the microphone. Matt Rowe worked through the night after the session and the song was finished by morning. The footsteps were the only later addition.[1]
• The Wannabe video was meant to be shot in Barcelona, not London. Director Johan Camitz planned a one take shoot at an exotic building in Barcelona, but lost permission days before. The shoot moved to the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras.[1]
• In a 2014 study, listeners recognised Wannabe in about two point three seconds. The University of Amsterdam and Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry found it the most recognisable pop song of sixty years, faster than hits by Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston.[1] [2]
• The Times Square in the 2 Become 1 video was fake. The whole video was shot in a London studio and the New York backdrop was added later. To make their hair blow realistically, the girls mimed the song at double speed in front of wind machines.[1]
• A deer in the 2 Become 1 video gave the girls a running joke on set. Whenever anyone made a mistake during the shoot, someone would say oh deer, a pun on the deer standing in the middle of Times Square in the final scene.[1]
• A lyric in 2 Become 1 was changed to make the song more inclusive. The album version had a line about boys and girls feeling good together. Emma Bunton said it was changed for the single after the group realised how big their gay following was.[1] [2]
• The harmonica on Say You'll Be There was played by the same man who played it on Karma Chameleon. Judd Lander, who played harmonica on Culture Club's hit, was the only musician besides Absolute on the track.[1]
• In the Say You'll Be There video, Victoria played Midnight Miss Suki in a black PVC catsuit. The others were Katrina Highkick, Trixie Firecracker, Kung Fu Candy and Blazin' Bad Zula. Victoria's catsuit reportedly caught the eye of her future husband, David Beckham.[1]
• Viva Forever was originally called Obrigado, Portuguese for thank you. It was one of the last songs written for Spiceworld, at the end of the summer of 1997, and the songwriters who worked on it credit Geri with most of the lyrics.[1]
• The stop motion Viva Forever video took longer to make than the entire Spice World film shoot. Aardman's Steve Box spent five months on it, building twelve inch tin fairy puppets of all five members.[1]
• Spice Up Your Life was delayed a week to avoid Elton John's Candle in the Wind 1997. The single was due out on the sixth of October 1997, but was moved back so it would not clash with the Princess Diana tribute at the top of the chart.[1]
• The B side Spice Invaders was made by recording the girls chatting into four microphones. With no new songs available during filming, Absolute let the group talk about anything, then added a backing track overnight. The Guardian later ranked it their worst song.[1]
• The middle eight of Too Much was inspired by a slogan on a T shirt. Geri wrote it with Melanie Chisholm at Absolute's studio in Richmond. She had started the song scribbling in a notebook in the back of a car during filming.[1] [2]
• Frank Bruno was originally cast as the Spice Bus driver in Spice World. He pulled out after a security guard stopped his son having a photo taken with the girls. Meat Loaf took the role.[1]
• The girls turned down a Disney film before making Spice World. They disliked the Disney script, about a young single mother of one of the girls struggling to form the band. Kim Fuller, their manager's brother, wrote Spice World instead.[1]
• The Spice Bus from the film has been on permanent display on the Isle of Wight since 2014. Driven by Meat Loaf in Spice World, it sits at the Island Harbour Marina.[1]
• William Shatner narrated the introduction to the Spiceworld Tour. The show opened with a computer animated spaceship and Shatner parodying his famous Star Trek opening speech.[1]
• The Spice Girls sold thirteen thousand Madison Square Garden tickets in under twelve minutes. It was reported as the quickest ever sell out there, and New York's attorney general looked into possible scalping, a claim later dropped.[1]
• Channel 5's very first broadcast was a Spice Girls music video. The group were paid a reported five hundred thousand pounds to launch the channel in March 1997, with a song called One, Two, Three, Four, Five.[1]
• Spice Girls dolls sold more than eleven million, the best selling celebrity dolls ever. In 1998 they were the second best selling toy in America, behind only the Teletubbies.[1] [2]
• The group was ordered to pay an Italian scooter maker after Geri quit. Aprilia had created five Spice Sonic scooters for the 1998 tour. After a long legal fight, a court ruled in 2002 that the group must pay for the scooters, plus damages and costs.[1]
• Geri was originally nicknamed Sexy Spice. The name was quickly changed to Ginger Spice to suit the group's young audience.[1]
• Before fame, Geri presented the Turkish version of the game show Let's Make a Deal. She had also worked as a nightclub dancer in Majorca and as a glamour model.[1] [2]
• Emma Bunton's first television role was a mugger in EastEnders. She appeared briefly in 1992, two years before joining the Spice Girls, and also played small parts in The Bill.[1]
• As a teenager, Victoria begged her father not to drop her at school in the family Rolls Royce. She was embarrassed by her family's wealth, which came from her parents' electronics business in Hertfordshire.[1]
• Melanie Chisholm has Chinese characters meaning girl power tattooed on her arm. On her upper right arm, the characters for female and force together represent the phrase.[1]
• A Red Hot Chili Peppers song is said to be inspired by Melanie Chisholm. Anthony Kiedis wrote Emit Remmus, summer time spelled backwards, about their time together in 1998. She said in 2022 they had only been friends.[1]
• Emma Stone chose her stage name because of Emma Bunton. The actor had previously used the name Riley Stone. Lady Gaga, meanwhile, performed as Baby Spice in school talent shows.[1]
• Geri's Union Jack dress once held the record for the most expensive pop star outfit ever sold. It went at a charity auction to the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas for forty one thousand three hundred and twenty pounds.[1]
• Nelson Mandela called the Spice Girls his heroes. Meeting them in November 1997 was, he said, one of the greatest moments of his life. Prince Charles joked it was only his second greatest.[1] [2]
• Holler features the first male voice ever heard on a Spice Girls track. Producer Rodney Jerkins opens the song by announcing himself as Darkchild. Geri did not perform Holler live with the group until the 2019 tour.[1]
• The Spice Girls were the first pop group modelled as a group at Madame Tussauds since the Beatles in 1964. The figures were unveiled in 1999 without Geri. Her figure was added in 2002.[1]
• A Spice Girls fight with Hanson on MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch launched a whole series. The claymation special aired during the 1998 Super Bowl halftime, became MTV's highest rated special, and was turned into a full show.[1]
• David Beckham says the idea for his tattoos came from a chat with Mel B. In his autobiography he said he decided after Brooklyn's birth in 1999, following a conversation about tattoos with Mel B and her then husband Jimmy Gulzar.[1]
• Christmas Wrapping was recorded by only two Spice Girls. Their cover of the Waitresses song features just Melanie Chisholm and Emma Bunton, because Mel B and Victoria were pregnant at the time.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.