Tons of thanks to Kathryn, the moderator of SpiceOdyssey mailing list
group.
Mel C fights her eating disorder with Prozac. Victoria "thinks she's the
Queen of England". Emma has been used as a gay man's "beard" and Mel B's
got breast issues. Can the Spice Girls grow up without falling apart?
Adam Higginbotham puts them on the couch.
VICTORIA BECKHAM can't remember exactly when she last saw her husband play
football for Manchester United. But she remembers what happened at the
match very clearly. She had gone with her parents, Jackie and Tony. They
took their seats, the game began. David got the ball and the chant
started: "Posh Spice takes it up the arse..." As usual the fans sitting
around Victoria sat in awkward silence. She was used to this - she knew
she just had to take it. But her father turned to her, "What are they
singing?" he asked. There was a terrible moment... broken by a light
tapping on her arm. A woman sitting next to her, her face a mask of
sympathetic embarrassment, was offering Victoria a boiled sweet. The
moment passed. Her dad didn't mention it again.
Since then, things have improved. David tells her that now opposition
fans no longer chant "Posh Spice takes it up the arse" or even "We hope
your kid dies of cancer". Now they've got a new one: "David Beckham takes
it up the arse."
"And he'd prefer that they sing that," says Victoria. "I think he
probably find it a lot easier."
OCTOBER 2000. A rambling Georgian house in Spitalfields, London. Melanie
C wanders past, taking off her bra from beneath her khaki vest and
gesturing towards some piece of wardrobe in the next room. "I'm not
wearing that," she announces, "cos it'll make me look like a fat cunt."
Emma Bunton ponders over a small table covered in jewellery from Bvlgari,
each piece laid out on its own little suede pouch. Melanie B is on the
phone, ordering up Norman Wisdom videos ("I'm going to have such a giggle
tonight," she announces). And on the landing stands Victoria, her hair in
curlers and a white cardboard shoebox labelled "Made exclusively for
VICTORIA BECKHAM" at her feet. She stares balefully at my newspaper, as if
by concentrating she can make it turn to ashes.
It's Tuesday. A photoshoot is underway. The Spice Girls are together in
the same place for the first time in a couple of weeks. Today's headlines
are: IT'S WHO-ATE-ALL-THE-PIES SPICE (The Sun); MEL'S SPICE THE SIZE SHE
WAS (Daily Star); and finally, BECKS "INVENTED BABY SNATCH BID" (London
Evening Standard).
It's almost two years since the Spice Girls last released a record. Since
then, there have been babies, hilarious weddings, a divorce, a
debate about sexuality and solo records which met with varying degrees of
success. Along the way, without anyone noticing, their old
invulnerability wore off, Being the Spice Girls used to look easy.
Tabloids, the music, industry and a global audience of lorry drivers
and militant 12-year-olds were all on their side. But in the 21st Century
it's clear that Spiceworld is not the superpower it once was.
The girls' solo records reveal ever diverging priorities. The papers
treat them cruelly. It's increasingly clear that a colourful explosion of
platform boots and cartoonish postures is not going to cut it anymore, not
in the era of Britney, Christina Aguilera and the impossibly youthful acts
following in their slipstream. The Spice Girls are facing their mid-life
crisis.
What to do? In similar circumstances, other maturing artists have either
done a Ronan (i.e. mime a thick seam of soupy ballads for
the over-60s) or a Robbie (recreated themselves as half Alice Cooper, half
Queen Mother). The Spice Girls have opted to go for credible and
grown-up, with a slick R&B makeover from Darkchild Studios' Rodney
Jerkins, who earned his platinum reputation producing Brandy, Monica,
Whitney and Jennifer Lopez. Forever, the third Spice Girls album, glints
with all the state-of-the-art clunk-click precision you'd expect from the
man who is currently completing work on the new Michael Jackson album.
Jerkins' McDonalds bill during the Spice Girls sessions was said to be
$200 a day.
Yet it's far from a no-risk strategy, which makes it even stranger that
the girls have not curtailed their solo work in order to give Forever
space. Mel C has just finished her own tour and will shortly release a
fifth single from her album; Mel B's album came out just two
weeks ahead of Forever, albeit only making Number 28; Victoria is still
recording her solo debut. And Emma? Why, she's doing a lot
of work with... Rodney Jerkins. Are they somehow trying to sabotage
themselves? They insist that it's always been part of their plan
to combine their individual projects with the Spice Girls records. But it
still raises questions about the band's future. What does Mel
C think their appeal will be now, as a group?
"As a group?" she says, "Gosh, I don't know whether we do appeal anymore.
This is something that we're going to find out in the
coming months. I think there's a fascination now with the Spice Girls
because it was such a phenomenon. But whether it will continue to be
successful is something that... nobody knows, really."
IN NOVEMBER 1997 the Spice Girls fired their manager Simon Fuller. At the
time it looked like an act of suicidal self-delusion - weren't they
supposed to be a manufactured band? - but the years have remade it as the
Spice Girls' first turning point, the moment when they stopped talking the
talk about Girl Power and decided to walk it instead. In reality, they
now say, at that moment they weren't united but weak and divided. Their
coming together to sack Fuller was the exception rather than the rule.
Melanie C describes that time as one of ridiculous, unimaginable pressure.
The second Spice Girls album, Spiceworld, had just been
released. They'd written t in a Winnebago on the set of the matching
feature film, which was due out on Boxing Day. The recording of
the ITV special An Audience With The Spice Girls was due to be followed by
a European promotional tour, ending at the MTV music
awards in Rotterdam, where they'd perform their new single, the
Latin-flavoured Spice Up Your Life. And then the Spice Girls would go
on their first world tour.
But things weren't going well in the group. None of the girls were really
talking to one another and, when they did, they bickered. They
were all unhappy, says Mel C, and, although they didn't realise it, the
problems originated with Fuller. Manipulating each of the girls in turn,
he would confide in one about what another had said or done, insisting
they keep it between themselves; Mel B's motivation was
questionable; Geri was trying to take over; Victoria need putting in her
place. He did it to everyone. But the girls began analyzing
everything, phoning one another at three in the morning, calling urgent
emotional meetings. "It as the biggest therapy session in the
world," Mel C says. "Like going on the road with the fuckin' Priory."
Over the autumn months, they began to suspect what was going on. On 5
November, when Fuller was in Italy undergoing back surgery, the girls were
in Cologne doing promotion. In the middle of the night, Geri knocked on
Mel B's hotel room door. Then the two of them went to Mel C's room, then
Victoria and Emma. Everything came out. When they realised what had gone
on, they were horrified. Mel B pulled out the diary she'd kept every day
since she was 13 and made everyone write down their thoughts while they
decided what to do. They resolved to get rid of Fuller immediately. Then
Mel B and Victoria started crying.
The following day they flew to Rotterdam and phoned the band's lawyers to
tell them to sack Fuller. They were all frightened but excited - after
all the arguing, they'd finally made a group decision. During rehearsals
for the MTV show, Geri took one of their four PAs' mobile phones and
copied out all the numbers they'd need when they no longer had a manager -
security, legal advice, radio pluggers, staff at Virgin Records - into a
notebook. Terrified of losing the book, she hid it in a red carpet bag
she'd picked up second-hand somewhere, and refused to let go of it for the
rest of the day. Even when they went on stage to perform Spice Up Your
Life for the ceremony, she kept it with her.
That night the Spice Girls beat Oasis, Radiohead, Prodigy and U2 to win
the award for Best Band In The World. The next day Simon Fuller received
a lawyer's letter.
None of them has spoken to him since.
Fuller himself has never discussed the sacking. A spokesman for the
manager says: "Simon is very skillful at working with talent. Part of it
is managing the dynamics between individuals. He wanted to keep the band
together at all costs, that's why he managed things as he did. Obviously
six months after he got the push, Geri left the band and a number of
things started to go a bit squiffy." He is estimated to have received a
payoff of some £15 million. After the split, the rumour suggested by the
tabloids is that the girls were unhappy with Emma's "close relationship"
with the manager.
"He is a fantastic manager, as business goes," says Mel C now. "But he
needs to work with robots who have absolutely no emotion. And no brain.
And that's where he fucked up."
VICTORIA BECKHAM is sitting in the beer garden of a pub near Olympic
Studios, Barnes. She is still recovering from viral meningitis. Chatting
to her PR about the upcoming weekend's newspaper stories about her, she
learns that a report will "reveal" how the illness has committed her to
work with meningitis charities. "Hardly!" she cackles.
More likely to make me stay away from them, isn't it? I don't fuckin'
want that again!"
These days Victoria is the most popular Spice Girl. How does she think
people see her now?
"They see me as miserable and up-my-arse," she says, "that I don't really
care about anything except for Prada and Gucci, that I boss
David about and tell him what to wear... In most people's mind, I think
I'm the Queen of England. And that is so not me, but then
people do believe what they read.
"I'd never complain about what's written about me, but if I read all that
stuff I probably wouldn't like me very much either. I'd probably
find me quite irritating, hahahahaha! When me and David look at Posh and
Becks in the paper we think, Bloody hate those two! Because that isn't
what we're like at all."
Tell me something surprising about David.
"He's got that obsessive compulsive thing where everything has to match.
He's got it, like, ridiculously. Everything has to match in
the house. If you open our fridge, it's all co-ordinated. If there's
three cans of Diet Coke he'd throw one away rather than having three -
because it's uneven."
Do you think that David suffers because he's got you as his spokesperson?
"Yeah. I do often say things that I shouldn't but that's my personality.
I mean, when I said the thing about him wearing my knickers... I'd never
say anything to purposely make it difficult for him. I have learned my
lesson but in interviews I am quite an honest person. I've got a dry sense
of humour and unfortunately most of the media don't have a sense of
humour. As if he'd fit in my bloody underwear for God's sake! I'm, like,
a size six. Come on."
Maybe he likes them very tight.
"Maybe he likes them really tight. I found that really funny. No-one
else did.
"But he's a very strong personality, David. He would never do anything he
didn't want to do. People think he's some kind of an idiot and Posh Spice
says to him [adopts wheedling estuarial voice] Oh, put on this skirt,
Da-vid, it'll look really great! And then he goes out looking a prat.
He's really nor like that. He's got a personality, he's a good-looking
bloke, he's got the body to wear whatever he wants to wear and look
amazing in it. And he loves it! If he didn't love it, he wouldn't dress
like that. It's nothing to do with me."
EMMA BUNTON is drinking water and smoking B&H in a pub off Edgware Road.
The regulars seem unfazed by her presence at the pool table - where she
has just beaten me - apart from one ardent fan. An unshaven man in a
grubby anorak, he proffers a torn piece of card for her to sign. She does
so sweetly but declines his offer of a game.
What's the most appalling rumour that you've heard about yourself?
"Most appalling rumour? [Long pause] Have you heard any?"
Simon Fuller?
"Oh, that was appalling. But I've had a few of them. I had Stephen
Gately. Did you read that one?"
This was before he came out, presumably?
"Yes. But I think it was a his-side-of-the-press thing. I dunno."
You mean they deliberately planted it because they knew he was gay?
"I think so. I can't be sure but... oh God forgive me, I don't know.
There was a whole thing that we'd been out on a date and that he
really enjoyed it and hopes we can do it again and..."
That you were pregnant with his child?
"Could have been, I suppose..."
That's the Simon Fuller story.
"[Aghast] That I was pregnant? You're joking me? That is ridiculous. I
just found that all really... I mean... who came up with that?"
It's used as a reason for why the band sacked him.
"[Practically speechless] But I... that's ridiculous."
Surely you've heard that one before.
"No, I heard that we had an affair. But I never thought that I was
supposed to be pregnant."
MELANIE BROWN remembers the moment when she first saw the man who is now
Britain's most infamous ex-husband. It was in Ireland in February 1998.
The girls had flown to Dublin for the warm-up dates for the Spiceworld
world tour. They were exhausted and just wanted to get straight to bed,
but Mel B insisted that they should meet the dancers for the tour. She
didn't want to just sweep in like a star the following day and start work
with them. As they walked into the gym where the dancers were rehearsing,
Mel was immediately struck by one man: bald head, covered in tattoos,
spliff hanging out of his mouth... beautiful. He looked a lot like her
first proper boyfriend, a footballer called Steve Mulrain who she left
behind in Leeds when she set out to become famous. Jimmy Gulzar seemed
calm, centred, mysterious.
As the tour got underway, Mel, Emma and the dancers went out together in
cities all over Europe, doing all the clubs, having a good time. They
called themselves The Monsta Girls. By June, Mel was pregnant with
Jimmy's baby. As soon as she met him, Mel's mother told her that Jimmy
will be no good for her. She said it once and didn't mention it again.
Naturally, Mel didn't listen.
In September '98, they married in an all-white ceremony in a Norman church
near the seven-bedroom manor Mel had just bought in Marlow,
Buckinghamshire. Baby Phoenix Chi was born five months later, on 19
February 1999. But Mel's mother was right. The marriage lasted until New
Year's Eve, when Mel took the baby and flew to New York. This year Gulzar
sold his story to the Sun, revealing that I'M NOT GAY: I WENT OFF SEX WHEN
MEL PUT BOOB OP BEFORE BABY.
What was the point at which you knew the marriage was over?
"Oh God, if I told you that you'd think I was a fool," says Mel B as she
plays with Phoenix in her dressing room at Top Of The Pops. "There was no
moment, it's just a feeling you get. There was nothing that was said or
done. I had the feeling a long time before anything started going
downhill and I just ignored it. Don't forget, I write every day, so every
day I was sitting, doing meditation and asking myself a lot of questions
and trying to be positive and mature about the situation. With a baby on
the way and everything..." She stops herself. "I nearly gave you away a
time there, didn't I?"
"I do believe I was meant to meet him and I do believe I was meant to get
married and have a beautiful child with him. And I was meant to not,
unfortunately, be with him. But I learned a lot from it. Good. Bad.
Everything. Condensed into nine months. I learned I have to listen to
myself more and I bloody am doing that."
Why did you decide to have a breast enlargement operation?
"I didn't!" she shouts. "I don't know whether Jim said it when he sold
his story or what, but I think that might have fuelled people's
gossiping about it."
That's exactly where it came from.
"I didn't read it. But if that's what he's saying then he's just... he's
a liar. You can touch them if you want. You can tell if they're real."
Erm, no. I'll just trust you on that. You really haven't had them done,
have you?
"I haven't! Hahahaha!"
WHAT DID THE other girls think of Jimmy?
Emma: "Jimmy? He was really just another one of the dancers. He seemed
fine but I wasn't that close to him."
Victoria: "Er... I didn't really know him that well. I got on with him
as Melanie's husband.
[Leans forward over the tae record] You know I can't answer this, don't
you? So what's your next question? Get me off Jimmy Gulzar. David
always got on with him. That's all I can say."
Mel C: "Erm... I didn't really know him that well. I had my reservations
with it being so soon after they'd met. You don't get married when you've
not really known someone for less than a year. It was months."
People do, though.
"Yeah. But not everybody's in the Spice Girls, are they?"
You can't be ordinary and famous simultaneously.
"Yeah, well you can't be famous and naive, either."
MELANIE CHISHOLM is sitting in an empty room in Spitalfields, post photo
shoot. She's open and vivacious - she explains that she's
happy to have legions of gay fans, and that, for all the young lesbians
who come up to her and ask her when she's going to come out,
there are as many older women who tell her that she is obviously not gay.
Three days into her tour, Mel C started seeing Dan, the
singer for her support band.
For all the the tabloid innuendo about her weight and sexuality, Melanie
Chisholm has become the most successful solo Spice Girl.
Yet, when she arrived in LA in Spring last year to work on her solo album,
she was terrified. She had no idea whether she could write
material on her own. She felt overawed by the prospect of working with
producers Rick Rubin and William Orbit. And there were other
problems too.
Right from the start, Mel C had never felt good enough to be a Spice Girl.
She wasn't pretty enough, she didn't have a good enough body - whatever.
Not good enough to be famous. Before 1993, Melanie had been a dancer.
She'd follow diets, but she always tried to eat healthily.
But after Wannabe became a hit in 1996, and the band became a phenomenon,
Melanie slowly became disgusted with herself. She
fixated on her body, thinking if she couldn't compensate for her failings
by being as thin as she could be, then she would become as fit as she
could be. Where she had used to go down to the pub every weekend, now she
gave up drinking. For three years, she barely touched alcohol at all.
She followed faddish dietary advice from fitness magazines, she ran six
miles daily and if she didn't get to run, she'd freak out. She went to
the gym every day, sometimes only for a few minutes but most days for two
or three hours. And if,
because of the Spice Girls' punishing schedule, there wasn't time to get
to the gym at all, she had a simple solution: she just wouldn't
eat that day.
Concerned, the rest of the girls told her she needed to put on weight, but
she didn't listen. As far as Mel C was concerned, she didn't
have a problem. Driven by a maniacal urge to detoxify, her diet shrank
further. Meat went. Fish went. Dairy products went.
"Eventually I was just living on fruit and vegetables, steamed or raw,"
she says now. "There was no fat in my diet, no protein, no
carbohydrates. I even stopped eating potatoes."
She wasn't anorexic, but she was devastatingly underweight. There simply
wasn't enough food in her diet to compensate for the
exercise she was doing and, on top of that, she simply had no life beyond
work and the gym. In the end, the solo album was a catalyst. Mel decided
to sort herself out, hiring a cook to prepare proper meals for her. But
she carried on exercising too - trying to deal with it herself just wasn't
working. In time she began comfort eating, binging on food when she was
miserable. When she returned home from LA for Christmas, she found
herself in a crashing depression. Finally, in January this year, she went
to see a doctor.
What drug would Melanie C never take again?
"Prozac," she says and then laughs.
So you have taken Prozac?
"No. It was just a joke." She gives me a mildly inscrutable look and
then reconsiders. "If you look into eating disorders, Prozac is a
drug to combat them. It works for a lot of things."
What did you think when you saw the papers today?
"I was sad, I'm not happy with my weight. I am overweight for my frame
and my height but I've got a healthy mind - or healthier mind -
and I'd rather have that and not damage my body not damage my body inside.
I want to be able to have kids. So I'd rather be this size.
"Did you read what they wrote about me today? The Star, that was the
worst. Sumo Spice, saying I've got an arse like a rhino and I've
found Vanessa Feltz's lost chins. Isn't that horrendous? I'm getting
over an eating disorder and I have to read that. If I was still ill, and
I read that, I would have gone home, and I would have stuffed my face all
day."
"With drink and drugs, you can just completely stop it, but you need food.
So it's just so, so hard. And no-one knows. People reading this will
think, Oh, poor Mel C, she's one of the most famous women in the world!
She's got nice cars, she's got a nice house, she's got loads of money in
the bank. But when you're feeling that low, you just think, You can have
it back."
THE SPICE GIRLS rarely wonder about what it would be like to go back to
the way they were before they were famous. Mel B doesn't think she's
changed much anyway. She says she got used to being looked at all the
time long before she was a Spice Girl - when she was a dancer working in
Blackpool, she felt like she was the only black person for miles around.
People stared. Emma says she still feels very sane, and that her best
friends are still the people she went to primary school with - they watch
videos together all the time. Victoria has never thought about it.
And Mel C keeps it out of her mind because the thought would make her
depressed. Or rather, it would remind her that even before she was Spice
Girl, before she had all the things she had now, she was still unhappy.
"What would you rather have?" she asks. Everything and be depressed, or
nothing and be depressed?"
On Wednesday, Victoria calls to talk about the story which alleges she
made up a tale about someone attempting to grab Brooklyn from her outside
Harrods in order to get David off a speeding charge.
"It's the most terrifying thing for me as a mother, having death threats
and kidnapping threats," she says. "The last thing I'd want to do is cry
wolf."
And we talk about her friends. She doesn't have many: her mum, she says,
and her sister. And obviously David, as naff as it sounds. But apart
from the other girls, she says she's only really got one good friend:
Sarah Bosnich. "But I'm quite wary. I don't really make friends very
easily."
Do you think that's the reason celebrities become friends? Because when
they meet ordinary people, they're thinking about what their
agenda is.
"No. I think it's because they want to get their pictures in the paper."
That's quite a cynical interpretation.
"Yeah, but it's quite truthful. Why else would somebody that I've never
met before suddenly want to be friends with me? Let's be honest."
But that's how you make friends: you meet people, you like them, you want
to spend more time with them.
"Well, maybe I'm just really cynical. Maybe that's the problem."