Girls Reunited: Too Much Spice?

After twelve months of gossip, leaked memos and sour-faced grumbling from Mel C, it’s finally happened. The Spice Girls reunion is here. The pop group who sold over 50 million records, endorsed everything from Chupa Chups lollipops to Channel Five and – with their “Girl Power!” slogan - made feminism a going concern for eight-year-olds, are back. Back. Back! There’s going to be a world tour at the end of the year - including performances in eight different countries - and a greatest hits album. But, despite the military-like precision with which they’ve attacked the comeback trail so far, Baby, Ginger, Posh, Scary and Sporty have neglected to ask one question. Do we, the British public, really want to spice up our lives again?

More than any other group of the nineties, the Spice Girls captured a moment in time. From July 1996, the month in which their debut single ‘Wannabe’ became a number one smash, to May 1998, when they released ‘Viva Forever’, the final single from their second album Spiceworld, they were pretty much inescapable. The statistics are incredible: nine number one hits (from ten single releases), 35 million album sales, three Brit awards and a successful spin-off movie. But mere figures can’t convey the extent to which the Spice Girls greedily grabbed the zeitgeist by its balls. Every feisty, opinionated woman in history – even Maggie Thatcher, if Geri Halliwell is to be believed - was branded a forerunner of girl power. Every loud-mouthed, lairy girl-about-town was lazily described by the man down the pub as a ‘spice girl’. Hell, even political journal The Spectator was seduced by the cheeky quintet, running a piece in which the Spice Girls were quizzed about their political allegiances. (Unsurprisingly, Posh admitted that she was a bit of a Tory.) But the winds soon changed. Geri quit. Pop moved on. The four remaining members of the group lost their spice when they tried to become Destiny’s Child-style urban divas on their third and final album Forever. In February 2001, the Spice Girls announced that they were taking a break.

Until now. Doubtless influenced by the success of the Take That reunion - two sold-out arena tours, a pair of number one smashes and a multi-platinum album – they’ve decided that they want another slice of the pop pie. But comparisons with the comeback of Gary Barlow and co. only make it obvious that, in all honesty, the Spice Girls never really went away. Take That’s return was so welcome because we’d had a chance to miss them. Sure, little Mark Owen had staked his claim to being the nicest man on earth on Celebrity Big Brother, and the tabloids ran occasional pieces asking: ‘Did Gary eat all the pies?’, but we hadn’t heard from Jason Orange or Howard Donald for almost a decade. In stark contrast, there’s not been time to pine for the Spice Girls. Victoria Beckham is still hellbent on turning her marriage into a multinational corporation. Melanie Brown’s paternity battle with Eddie Murphy has kept the gossip rags in juicy cover spreads for months. Emma Bunton tangoed into our hearts on Strictly Come Dancing last year. Geri Halliwell is writing a series of children’s novels about – no joke – the second wind of girl power. Melanie Chisholm continues to labour under the misapprehension that she has a solo career. The question is glaring: have we ingested too much Spice already?

And yet, given all they achieved during their time at the apex of planet pop, it might just be time to re-evaluate their legacy. The Spice Girls challenged – and overthrew – the established wisdom that teenage girls couldn’t become infatuated with an all-female pop act. Before they arrived to tell us what they wanted - what they really, really wanted - the charts were dominated by a bevy of hormone-teasing boybands. In fact, there hadn’t been a successful British girl group since Bananarama in the eighties. (Eternal, with their soulful warblings and fondness for sober power suits, don’t really count.) The flurry of all-female hitmaking combos that followed – the successes (Atomic Kitten, B*Witched, Girls Aloud), the failures (Girl Thing, Girls@Play, Buffalo G), the downright disturbing (Vanilla) – all owe a portion of their 15 minutes to the Spice Girls.

Even more importantly, the feisty five-piece gave pop music to a group of fans who’d previously been ignored: tweenagers. All over the country, little Alfies and Amelias would tug at daddy’s trouser leg and whine: "Can I pleeeease have the new Spice Girls single/ polaroid camera/ moped?" Naturally, these badgering babes grew up and moved on. These days they’re doubtless stuffing their ipods with tunes by the Kooks, the Kaiser Chiefs and the Killers, but their love affair with pop music began when a lairy woman in a leopard-print catsuit eyeballed the camera and screeched “zigazigah”. The success of the Spice Girls reunion will largely depend on whether these clued-up indie hipsters– more in thrall to Peaches Geldof than Posh Spice of late – can spare the time for nostalgia.

And then there’s the music. The best Spice Girls songs were sexy, fun and packed with more attitude than a pregnant teenager. They were era-defining. Are we willing to get sucked into the Spice bubble second time around? Listen again to the teasing sensuality of ‘2 Become 1’, the boundless energy of ‘Who Do You Think You Are’, the joyous stomp of ‘Stop’, the wistful regret of ‘Goodbye’, the sheer chutzpah of ‘Wannabe’, and the answer becomes clear. We don’t really have a choice.