Rock and pop

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Spice Girls: The interview
Paul Taylor24/ 1/2008
ALL around the perimeter of the M.E.N. Arena are stalls selling
gaudy tat - furry stetsons, plastic sceptres and feather boas. Yards
away, inside a security compound, a silver-grey Rolls Royce slides into
a parking space and a slender figure in expensively-frayed jeans and a
blue Confederate-style cap saunters into the arena.
The
Spice Girls and all their celeb-tastic entourage - including that man
David Beckham - are back in town. It is like a glimmer of the
Manchester of the 1990s, when Becks would be spotted daily in a posh
car and Posh would be spotted round the shops{hellip}the days before
the paparazzi chased Coleen instead.
"I have such fond
memories of living in Manchester," says Victoria Beckham. "So I'm
really excited to be here, and I've got all three kids with me and
David. And some of his friends from the team are here to spice up their
lives{hellip}or slice up their wives."
Gales of laughter
erupt among the fivesome. It is just minutes before they take the stage
and they are plainly having a ball together. But is Girl Power back to
stay? That is the burning question as the Spice Girls reach the end of
their European tour here in Manchester on Saturday. After the
extraordinary success of this tour, will the Spice Girls make new music
together?
"This is something we were asked when it came
to the time of putting the greatest hits together," says Mel C. "We did
work on a couple of new tracks which are on the greatest hits. But this
tour was to celebrate all our past successes. We have no intentions to
continue as a group. We're big fans of Take That and they are really
deserving of all the new success they are having. But we really don't
want to follow that path."
Victoria, resplendent in
extraordinary gold corsetry and a severe black bob, goes further: "For
me personally, I would not want to be in the music industry any more.
It's not a very nice industry to be in. What we are doing is fun - on
tour, having a laugh with each other with our families around us."
So
this, then, is a "proper goodbye" to the fans, the 30-something girls
agree. They admit that it was Mel C who took most persuading to join
this reunion - she being the one with the most active solo career. Now
this leviathan enterprise is on the road, they couldn't be happier. But
as Mel C firmly points out: "the whole show is about nostalgia".
The
girls are touring with their families. Victoria admits that Brooklyn is
"completely obsessed" with Emma Bunton, and even made her a little cup
cake. Mel C, the only child-free Spice, "borrows" the other girls' kids.
Babies
"We get up on stage and we're like kids again. And then we're backstage feeding babies," says Emma.
Rewind
to 1993 and 400 girls answered an ad in the Stage newspaper, asking "RU
streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated". The successful
candidates spent eight months in a house in Maidenhead, transforming
themselves into all-singing all-dancing combo.
Ditching
the band's creator, Chris Herbert, the Spices linked up with Simon
Fuller who launched them on an unsuspecting world. It was 1996. Take
That had gone their separate ways, the Britpop rivalry of Oasis and
Blur was still simmering and these five very different characters with
their schoolyard-style nicknames represented something new.
Between
July 1996 and the end of the 1990s every Spice Girls single but one,
Stop, went to the top of the UK chart. Their debut album Spice sold
1.8m copies in its first two months, making them the fastest-selling
British act since the Beatles. And it did something few other British
acts had been doing - it sold well in the USA, topping the chart there
and in Canada, Brazil and much of Europe.
Following that
Beatles template, there was furious merchandising of anything you could
put a Spice Girl on, and then there was a movie Spiceworld, mauled by
the critics but a box office hit.
When an exhausted Geri
abruptly left the sisterhood in May 1998, it warranted the kind of TV
news reports usually reserved for resigning Cabinet ministers. In
February 2001, the remaining Spice Girls announced they were taking a
break. But as every band from Led Zeppelin to Take That staged reunion
tours, the return of Spice seemed inevitable. When the tour went on
sale, the 30,000 tickets for the first two dates announced in
Manchester sold out in 18 minutes.
By this time, life was very different for all
the Spice Girls. The solo music careers of Victoria and Mel B fizzled.
Both Mel B and Emma, both aged 32, took the reality TV option, the
former in USA's Dancing With The Stars and the latter in Strictly Come
Dancing. Geri became a UN Goodwill Ambassador, patron of a breast
cancer charity, a children's author and an ambassador for the Prince's
Trust, favoured charity of the heir, whose bottom she famously pinched
at Manchester's Opera House in 1997.
Split
Victoria,
aged 33, was the only Spice Girl to be more famous after the split than
before. Following husband David from Manchester to Madrid to Los
Angeles, she indulged her passion for fashion, a living embodiment of
the adage that you can never be too rich or too thin.
Together,
they have produced seven children: Victoria has Brooklyn, aged eight,
Romeo, aged five, and Cruz, aged three next month; Mel B has Phoenix
Chi, almost nine, and nine months old Angel Iris; Geri has Bluebell,
aged 19 months, and Emma has five months old son Beau. All this, you
suspect, has put the business of pop in perspective.
There
won't be time for a big party in Manchester, they say. After Saturday's
gig, they head back across the Atlantic to finish their world tour in
North America. So do the Spice Girls really think there won't be yet
another reunion tour a few years down the line?
"We're taking each day as it comes," says Emma.
Geri adds: "I never thought THIS was going to happen. That just proves that you never know what's around the corner."
*YOU can also listen to audio clips below.
The
Spice Girls play the M.E.N. Arena again on Thursday, January 24 and
Saturday, January 26. £55, £75. Call the Box Office on 0870 060 1768 or
click here
for more information.
Are you going to one of the shows? Why not tell us what you thought by entering our
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competition.
24/01/2008 at 22:40