The Spice Girls’ first album turns 25 - but will their legacy viva forever?

I’ll tell you what we want, what we really really want - to talk about the Spice Girls
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If you want my future, you probably need my past. Specifically December 25, 1996, when Father Christmas decided to buy me Spice on cassette tape (who knew he was such a proponent of girl power?), and, in the process, changed my life forever. I was six years old and I lived in Maidstone, but suddenly it seemed possible that I could grow to become a woman who roared, wore big shoes and pinched Prince Charles’s bum without getting arrested.

Like most of my generation, I grew up in the nineties worshipping at the altar of the Spice Girls. I listened to that tape so many times that the buzzy sound of it rewinding is synonymous with my memories of the actual music. Trying to remember the first time I heard Wannabe is like trying to recall the first time I breathed. The words to the song are nonsense (”slam your body down and zigazigah” - sounds... painful?) and yet I completely understand what they mean. The song encapsulates a spirit, a sense of feeling like you could do anything and that life would always be fun. They were five girls who were having the time of their lives, absolutely everywhere and megastar levels of unreachable at the same time, distinct in their personalities but especially unstoppable as a unit. No wonder there was a fourth wave of feminism just as millennials were coming of age. I suspect that for most of us, it was a bit of a shock to discover the world is still full of sexism after seeing five women rule the world.

Watch that iconic 1997 Brits performance now, Geri in her now infamous union jack and black pants regalia, and it seems surprisingly basic. The miming is unashamed, the dance moves are dad-esque, and the cameraman keeps trying to film their knickers. In our cultural imagination that moment is the epitome of Cool Britannia. Watching it back now, it sums up the fact that this was about an atmosphere, a mood – you had to be there.

The Spice Girls with Prince Charles
Rex

Time goes much slower when you’re young, so it always shocks me that the Spice Girls in their original form only really existed for about two years. I felt like they had and would exist forever. Not to be overdramatic, but Geri leaving the band in 1998 was probably the first time I experienced true pain. Aged 8, I learned from unsympathetic men reading the six o’clock news that people let you down and the things you love don’t last forever. It was visceral. One young fan summed it up on the news at the time when she said, “I think everything was fine with five. And now that Geri’s leaving she’s sort of… letting the whole country down.”

Twenty-five years later, and I had stopped listening to their music. I have this thing I call ‘the bus test’. If I were to be hit by a bus, would I want people to know that Who Do You Think You Are was the last song I was listening to? Frankly, no. Unsurprisingly for an album that sold 19 million copies in its first year, it’s been played so many times that you can’t really hear it any more. It also reminds me of the disconcerting whiplash I once felt after sweatily throwing myself around at a school disco, only for the lights to go up and find my parents staring at me, waiting to take me home and put me to bed. It was incredibly rude to be reminded that I was a) a child and b) not a Spice Girl.

But it was never really about the music. The Spice Girls only had two really good albums (I refuse to recognise Forever), and their sound hasn’t influenced the girl bands that have reigned since, like the more modern Girls Aloud and Little Mix. You only need to look at the ironically titled megaflop West End musical Viva Forever (it closed after seven months and £5m of losses) to see that the songs don’t really stand on their own.

What it was about – and what stands as their legacy – is a sense of possibility. Yes, they were massively capitalist peddlers of branded tat and the Ginger Spice doll I bought in Woolworths with my birthday money looked like it might attack me in the night. But when Kathy Acker interviewed them for the Guardian in May 1997, they basically spent the whole time trying to articulate their idea of utopia (talking over each other as they did so, of course). “We’re a community in which each one of us shines individually, without making any of the others feel insecure. We liberate each other. A community should be liberating,” said Geri, before nosediving into the next sentence, which happened to be: “Nelson Mandela said that you know when someone is brilliant when having that person next to you makes you feel good.”

The community they made was fun, silly, loud and welcoming: it was a place where you could be whoever you wanted to be. One of my favourite things about the Spice Girls’ legacy is how much drag queens love them – I squealed with delight when, in the current series of Drag Race UK, RuPaul declared “category is: night of a thousand Spice Girls!”

I broke my own rule this week. I’ve been listening to Spice everywhere I go. Say You’ll Be There is a categorical banger. Mama makes tiny little tears spike up in the corner of my eyes. And Wannabe reminds me of that moment when it felt like I could do anything. Next week I might even listen to Spice World.

Spice 25, a new expanded deluxe version of the Spice Girls’ debut album, is released on October 29