A week ago I was standing in the O2 arena watching Led Zeppelin, with
goose-bumps up my arms and my mouth literally hanging open in admiration.
I’m there again tonight, but I have remained seated (despite the forceful and
repeated entreaties of the bloke next to me, who is gay, thirtysome-thing
and northern, works in the health industry and is absolutely hysterical with
excitement), and if my mouth does fall open once or twice, it is only with
the realisation that the Spice “Girls”, now all women in their thirties,
haven’t got any better in the decade since their heyday.
They still can’t sing - poor old Sporty, still forced to dress like a lesbian
games teacher, has a powerful set of vocal cords, but isn't what you might
call easy on the ears, and the less said about the others, the better,
though full marks for trying (and for self-belief).
They are all wearing Roberto Cavalli - whose designs Donatella Versace might
sneer at for being a tiny bit common - and there's more than enough fake
tan, fake nails, fake bosoms and fake hair to go round. Victoria Beckham has
no sense of rhythm whatsoever: she can’t dance, and she can’t walk in time
to the pounding beat either.
She moves her limbs robotically, woodenly, as if they couldn’t bend, and
strikes self-conscious, semi-hilarious poses like a poor man’s Erin
O’Connor. In her corset, her bosoms are literally up by her collarbones. She
looks like a cyborg, and I can’t stop staring. Every time she has a solo
line to sing, the whole auditorium erupts with wild cheering, drowning her
out and even causing her to crack the odd smile. The bloke next to me
bellows: “I love her! I love her! I want to be her!”
At this point, confusingly, I get out my camera and start taking pictures of
Posh, for no reason. What’s that about? I don’t want to be her, and I don’t
love her, either: I don’t understand what she’s for. But here she is,
practically within touching distance, waving at the crowd stiffly and
smiling, and some strange part of me thinks: “Ah, bless.”
Even when the other Spices perform solo tracks and Victoria, who doesn’t have
one, sashays down the stage instead, pretending to talk on a pretend mobile
while posing for pretend paparazzi, I think: “Good on you.” (At the same
time, obviously, as thinking: “How absurd.”) I assume she is being
self-deprecating - “Yes, I know I can’t actually do anything, but look, if I
walk like this, 20,000 of you will cheer. Who’s stupid now?” - but I’m not
sure.
I also assume the rather brilliant rubbishness of the whole show - flashy,
camp, stuffed full of tricks and gimmicks to detract from the fact that our
protagonists aren’t terribly good - is a sort of in-joke, an acknowledgment
of the whole ethos of girl power, which is “It doesn’t matter if you’re
rubbish - be determined”. But I’m not sure about that either: maybe both the
Spice Girls and the audience really think they are, and deserve to be,
global superstars.
Anyway, here is Victoria, posing in front of the seats where her three sons
are seated, along with Mel B’s daughter (“That’s Phoenix Chi,” my excitable
neighbour yells). Later, during a rendition of Mama, all the Spice Children
are brought onto the stage - Posh’s three boys, not looking entirely
comfortable, Phoenix, and Mel B and Emma Bunton’s new babies, the latter
wearing huge ear-phones to drown out the noise.
“Our greatest achievement,” Geri Halliwell says, gesturing to the children
(hers isn’t here). Mel C dances around trying to look like a groovy maiden
aunt. It may be as cheesy as a Christmas stilton, but it’s a neat
encapsulation of the fact the Spices have grown up with their audience –
until you realise that 20,000 people are whooping with amazed delight at the
fact that the Spice Girls have functioning ovaries.
The uncharitable view is that the Spice Girls, during their heyday a decade
ago, are directly responsible for the avalanche of talentless inanity that
followed - for encouraging young girls to pursue their dreams of stardom
regardless of ability, which soon translated into getting your kit off and
trying to land a footballer, which in turn evolved into a national obsession
with Wagdom; for incarnating a morally bankrupt “culture” and paving the way
for the Paris Hiltons of this world, who made doing nothing into a
multi-million-dollar industry; for, in Posh’s case, taking vulgarity to new
heights and inventing a whole bizarre idea of “style”, where stylishness
bore direct relation to expenditure.
You could argue that they killed feminism while wielding the girl-power
banner, encouraging young girls to seek fame at the expense of
qualifications and resulting in the existence of hordes of teenagers today
who, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, reply: “On the
telly.” As for that whole girl group thing: far from inventing the genre -
girl groups have been around for decades – you could say they were yet
another example of desperately ambitious young women being manipulated to
stardom by clever male managers.
And yet ... The excitement within arena is undeniable (though there are a
couple of hundred emptythe O2 seats). Aside from gay men, mothers with their
young daughters and the odd teenager, the bulk of the audience is made up of
groups of twenty-something women, Spice fans the first time around. I talk
to a few of them and they all say the same thing: a) this is a brilliant
girls’ night out; b) they loved the Spices when they were 14 and they still
love them now; c) girl power, innit?
When you ask them to expand on c), they say all the Spice Girls have done well
for themselves. “I think it’s really cute that they all have babies,” says
one young woman. “We’ve got babies too - we’ve grown up alongside them.”
“There’s a Spice Girl for everyone,” her friend says. “Everyone wants to be
Victoria, but lots of women are more like Geri - you know, single mums who
can’t make their love life work.”
Which one are they most excited about seeing? “Victoria,” is the unanimous
reply. The consensus seems to be that seeing Posh in the flesh, as opposed
to across the pages of magazines, is worth the price of admittance alone.
I am confused by all of this. We live in a world where manufactured girl bands
are two a penny; the difference now is that they can all sing and that the
best of them - Girls Aloud, say - bang out pop classics with every single
release. We’re used to music, even pop music, sounding rich, complex,
multi-layered and satisfying - in stark contrast to the Spices’ output
tonight, which sounds incredibly thin and watery, sweetly jaunty though it
may be.
We’re also used, pace Britney Spears, to female pop stars who can really do it
- sing as well as dance and perform, not stand there woodenly doing karaoke.
But for all my bah-humbuggery, the crowd is going wild, and it can’t just be
nostalgia.
As I leave, it dawns on me that the Spice Girls weren’t, as mooted at the
time, the greatest girl band of all time, but rather a quintet of Eddie the
Eagles, a bunch of underdog wannabes who we loved for their determination as
much as for their catchy tunes.
They were, and remain, almost extraordinarily ordinary - even Victoria, with
her cameo appearance on Ugly Betty, her headlines, her husband, her
wardrobe, her mad, empty life. On stage, she’s a girl from Essex who knew
she’d do well, and did, and is loving every minute of it.
She’s in on the joke: how could she not be? Here’s Emma Bunton, “Baby”, her
post-pregnancy weight cunningly disguised by a series of shift dresses.
Here’s Geri Halliwell, with the million-dollar body and the £10 face, still
exuding that weird (and very female) mixture of ambition and neediness, and
here’s Melanie Brown, recently publicly humiliated by Eddie Murphy, shimmying
in leopard skin - because nothing changes in Spice World - reminding me of a
latterday Bet Lynch, a great triumphant northern “strong woman”. Melanie
Chisholm, she of the lungs, is still rocking out while wearing a track-suit,
and still looking mildly irritated at having to carry the vocals for
everyone else.
What is it about them that’s so compelling? I think it is that we all know
one. We’re all friends with one: the one obsessed by designer handbags, the
one who does too much yoga and wonders why men aren’t really into her, the
great survivor, laughing in the face of defeat, the tomboy who was good at
games.
We might even be one of them. We all know, deep down, that there are prettier,
cleverer, more talented people than us out there, but we all think we have a
chance of making it anyway. The Spice Girls told us so - and, looking at
them tonight, they were right.
Forget making extravagant claims in the name of feminism - that was just
clever marketing guff. But they believed in themselves and they did what
they set out to do, even though they knew they were just ordinary suburban
girls, with nothing but ambition to see them on their way.
Unlike the great divas, unlike Madonna, unlike anyone else and like all of us,
the Spice Girls are only human. And that’s why 20,000 people are on their
feet as the band perform Wannabe as an encore. The crowd is cheering for the
Spice Girls, and for the mirror they hold up to all of us - flawed, human,
fallible, a bit rubbish, but trying hard to have a laugh.
