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Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Also by Sean Smith

6  Dedication

7  Contents

8  PART ONE: THE WANNABES

9  1 Irrepressible

10  2 Casting the Net

11  3 Mein Herr

12  4 In Search of the Magical Key

13  5 Melanie Chisholm Superstar

14  6 A Model Girl

15  PART TWO: HERE COME THE SPICE GIRLS

16  7 The Student House

17  8 Making It Happen

18  9 The Big Fight

19  10 Hang On to Your Knickers

20  11 The Power of Girls

21  12 The Genius of Geri

22  13 Spice All Over the World

23  14 A Schedule Not a Life

24  15 Stop Right Now

25  PART THREE: SPICE WOMEN

26  16 Nightmares and Fairytales

27  17 Dark Clouds

28  18 Baby Love

29  19 Look at Me

30  20 Reasonable Doubt

31  21 The Return of the Spice Girls

32  22 Olympic Gold

33  23 Spice World Again

34  Last Thoughts

35  Spice Stars

36  Acknowledgements

37  Select Bibliography

38  List of Searchable Terms

39  Picture Section

40  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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PART ONE

1
Irrepressible

The five young women who would become the Spice Girls didn’t need to be outstanding singers. Nor was proven dancing ability essential. They didn’t have to possess supermodel looks or have the wit of a stand-up comedian. They needed to be ordinary girls with a sparkle that could turn them into something extraordinary. They were not easy to find.

Melanie Brown, an irrepressible eighteen-year-old from Leeds, was the first name on the Spice Girls team sheet. She had a spark and exuberance that could poke your eye out. She had no idea that she had the ideal profile to become a member of a new five-piece girl group when she left her parents’ house in Kirkstall at the crack of dawn to catch the early coach to London.

She had seen the ad for a ‘female pop group’ in the Stage newspaper – or, at least, her mother Andrea had – but she was just as interested that day in trying out for a spell as a cruise-ship dancer. That job was for the summer months so there would be sun and sea for starters, as well as a regular wage. Still, she had never come across an advertisement for a girl band before so it was worth taking a look at that as well, especially as it was in the same building off Oxford Street.

This was traditionally the time of year when stage-school wannabes would try to secure work for the summer – seaside shows or cruises were the most popular so this was something different. The advertisement didn’t mention that one of the places would ideally be filled by a young black girl.

Her colour had seldom been an advantage for Melanie, growing up in some of the tougher areas of Leeds. She was mixed race – not black – an important distinction. The locals were confused by her heritage, not sure whether she was black or white, but that didn’t stop her being the innocent target of prejudice and bullying – even being called the N-word. Fortunately, the insults didn’t curb her natural high spirits.

While such treatment was upsetting, it didn’t signal an unhappy childhood – far from it. She had a loving and supportive family, as well as a best friend, Sherrell Russell, who lived round the corner on the council estate in the Hyde Park area of Leeds where Melanie spent her first few years. The modest family home was a mile from the famous Headingley cricket ground. Sherrell was also mixed race and the two girls became inseparable, forging a lifelong bond. It helped that their mothers were also best friends.

Melanie’s parents always encouraged her to fight her own battles, fully aware of the hurdles she would face. Life had been much more difficult for them in facing the full wrath of ignorant discrimination. Her father, Martin Wingrove Brown, was from Nevis, an island in the Caribbean renowned for its beautiful beaches and its reputation as a safe tax haven. As a baby, Martin was left behind to live on a small farm with his grandmother while his parents formed part of the Windrush generation of the 1950s seeking a better life in Britain.

Martin grew up playing cricket on the beach while his parents had to cope with the rampant racism of Britain during the post-war era when a commonplace sign in the windows of guesthouses would read, ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’. It was a huge cultural change for Martin when his parents decided the time was right for him to join them in the middle of a northern winter. He had just turned nine. His new home was in the depressed and depressing area of Chapeltown in Leeds, where the Yorkshire Ripper committed so many grisly murders in the mid- to late seventies.

Melanie describes her handsome father as a ‘cool, charismatic dude’. On a Christmas Eve night out in Chapeltown, Martin, aged nineteen, met seventeen-year-old bubbly blonde Andrea Dixon. The attraction was mutual. She lived in the district of Seacroft, an area on the east side of the city, where the black population was practically non-existent at the time and skinhead gangs were thriving – which Melanie found particularly upsetting as she grew up.

They had been going out for more than two years, as well as taking the daring step of moving in together, before Melanie Janine Brown was born on 29 May 1975 at the Maternity Hospital in Leeds. They married three months later at the city’s register office, which was the first time their families had met.

Melanie still recalls being told of bus journeys when, as a baby, she would be handed to Martin to protect him, not her, as he was less likely to attract trouble when he was holding a tiny girl. Fortunately, in time, Martin and baby Melanie were properly accepted by Andrea’s family – and she by his, although everyone understood the difficulties they would face.

For much of her childhood, Melanie shared a room with her sister Danielle, who was five years younger. They got on about as well as sisters normally do – Melanie would be mean to her sibling who would run off and tell Dad.

Nobody could fault Martin’s work ethic. For most of his adult life he worked as a welder at the Yorkshire Imperial Metals factory in Stourton, a five-mile ride on his bicycle. Melanie proudly declared, ‘He worked his backside off to raise his family, never missing a shift.’ He would often work double the hours to make sure he could afford the annual summer camping holiday in the seaside resort of Abersoch in west Wales. Many of Melanie’s extended family would make the trip, which was the highlight of her year.

Andrea had left school at fifteen and took a number of low-paid jobs to do her bit for the family’s finances. She worked at the local C&A clothing store for eighteen years, as well as cleaning in an old people’s home. Her earnings would be invaluable when they discovered that their high-spirited daughter had a passion for dancing, which proved to be a good way of channelling her boundless energy. It was the one pursuit guaranteed to tire her out.

Melanie, aged nine, enrolled at the Jean Pearce School of Dance in Horsforth, a ten-minute bus ride up the road from the new family home in Kirkstall, Leeds. Jean was the doyenne of dance in the city. She had set up the school in 1945 and over the years had choreographed many amateur productions and pantos in the north of England.

Jean had also been responsible for the dancing in the popular Yorkshire TV series Young Showtime, which helped launch the careers of Joe Longthorne, Bonnie Langford and the Emmerdale favourite Malandra Burrows.

She worked wonders with Melanie, barking at her to point her toes and helping her develop the priceless skill for a professional dancer of being able to pick up routines quickly, having been shown the steps just once. She was also anxious to broaden her young pupils’ experiences and arranged school trips to see touring productions of Miss Saigon and Cats. Another valuable contribution Jean made to Melanie’s future was in teaching her to do her best at auditions.

At dance classes Melanie made new friends, including a local girl, Charlotte Henderson, who remains her closest friend, despite all the ups and downs of later years. Another was Rebecca Callard, a petite, pretty girl, whose mother is the popular Coronation Street actress Beverley Callard, who plays Liz McDonald in the evergreen soap.

The two teenagers saw little of one another at Jean Pearce but became best pals when they started senior school and bumped into each other on the first day. They were the new girls at the Intake High School in the West Leeds district of Bramley. The focus there was less on traditional academic work and more on the arts subjects that interested them – music, drama and dance.

Rebecca, who would go on to become a successful actress, had already appeared on TV, was good fun and introduced Melanie to the delights of smoking Marlboro Lights. She also joined her for sticky-bun binges. The two girls used to spend their lunch money on cakes and pastries and eat the lot in one break. Surprisingly, Melanie never seemed to put on weight. The teenagers were very much partners in crime, even double-dating twin brothers at one time.

Neither girl was considered star material at school. They managed very small roles in a version of the musical Godspell but that was about it. The Brown household was not especially musical, and Melanie’s love of dance was not matched by an overwhelming desire to become a concert pianist or a professional singer. She didn’t have singing lessons until much later, preferring to release her pent-up energy by bashing the drums.

Like most teenagers, she watched Top of the Pops every week. Rebecca was a big fan of Bros but Melanie couldn’t bear them. Instead, she preferred two of the biggest female artists of the eighties. Both were strong figures. First was Tracy Chapman, whose multi-million-selling self-titled first album remains a pop classic. She sang ‘Fast Car’ and ‘Talkin’ Bout a Revolution’ at the seventieth-birthday tribute to Nelson Mandela at Wembley in June 1988 when Melanie was thirteen. They were arguably the highlights of the whole event, especially as she sang them twice, filling in when Stevie Wonder had an equipment problem.

Secondly, Melanie loved Neneh Cherry, who was one of the few mixed-race pop stars at the time. Neneh’s father was from Sierra Leone and her mother from Sweden. She had a distinctive style that included large medallions and rugby shirts that Melanie tried earnestly to copy.

Neneh caused a mild sensation when she performed her hit ‘Buffalo Stance’ on Top of the Pops in the autumn of that year. She was the first artist to appear on the show while heavily pregnant, which was not a look normally endorsed by the male-dominated music business. It was a bold move by a young woman who defied convention throughout her career – someone with whom Melanie Brown could readily identify. Nearly ten years later, a pregnant Melanie would follow that particular girl-power lead.

Needless to say, Neneh’s ‘stance’ caused a media storm. One male TV interviewer asked if it was safe for her to go on stage in her condition and received a sharp riposte: ‘Of course. I’m not ill.’ Neneh later elaborated, ‘I didn’t feel being pregnant took anything away from my sexuality, who I am, the woman.’

Melanie would stand in front of the mirror in her bedroom at home and pretend to be her favourite star, singing along, just as a million girls would later do when ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls was an anthem for a young female generation.

Those schooldays were basically happy and uneventful for Melanie, even though she was occasionally chased home from school to her family’s house in Kirkstall, a fifteen-minute walk but much faster when you had to run like the wind.

It came as a great shock to everyone, then, when such a vibrant girl tried to take her own life for the first time. Melanie revealed this shocking event in her autobiography Catch a Fire, published in 2002 after the Spice Girls had finally split up. Her account is of an unhappy teenager feeling miserable and out of step with a world that didn’t understand her. She even fell out with Rebecca over a cruel and thoughtless remark Melanie had made. They didn’t speak for seven months.

And then she was nearly expelled from school for her part in composing an obscene poison-pen letter. Life seemed to be going downhill very fast and Melanie started hoarding extra-strong aspirin, building up a stash by taking one or two at a time from the bathroom cabinet. Eventually she had more than enough to overdose, so she wrote a note and took the pills one at a time while she sobbed her heart out.

Luckily her mum had a headache that night and realised what was going on when she went looking for some tablets. Melanie was rushed to hospital where doctors induced her to vomit the undigested pills. Afterwards the suicide attempt became an unspoken secret at home and at school, where nobody discussed it with her.

Looking back, Melanie stressed that nothing was ever so serious that it was worth taking your own life. Her mantra was: ‘Never let yourself get like that again, no matter what happens.’ It was sound and sensible advice that, sadly, she was unable to follow.

While she would never forget that dramatic event, Melanie resumed normal life as a young teenager. She didn’t go out much but went into town to celebrate her fifteenth birthday with Rebecca, both girls dressed to kill in hot pants. They saw the movie Ghostbusters II starring Bill Murray, but their first stop was Pizzaland where, to their surprise, they were able to order drinks, two white wine spritzers. Rebecca recalled, ‘Amazingly, I got served that night – the only time ever – and we spent the rest of the night giggling like fools.’

Melanie was restless to achieve. Even though she was not yet sixteen and still at Intake, she wanted to get on with her dancing career, which she saw as a passport to fame. She was in the middle of her GCSE revision when she decided to bunk off school and go for an audition in Blackpool. Her mum covered for her. Martin would have gone ballistic if he had discovered what was happening. He was a great believer in the value of education.

Melanie sailed through the audition and left home for the first time in June 1991, a few weeks after her sixteenth birthday. She spent the summer in Blackpool, dancing in two shows: in the afternoons she dressed in a cheerleader outfit for an open-air rock ’n’ roll extravaganza called The Jump and Jive Show. For her evening engagement she changed into a catsuit for a pre-show entertainment at the Horseshoe Bar on Pleasure Beach.

The one drawback for Melanie was leaving her home comforts in Leeds to live in digs, although her mum drove over every week to make sure she was eating properly. Her dad was particularly strict with his teenage daughter so it was a relief to have a taste of freedom. Inevitably, his old-fashioned attitude had only fuelled Melanie’s rebellious nature.

Back in Leeds she met her first serious boyfriend. She had caught the eye of handsome footballer Steve Mulrain one night when she sneaked out of home to go to the ever-popular Warehouse club in Somers Street. He noticed her straight away: ‘She looked sensational. She had on a short tight silver dress with black knee-high boots.’

Melanie pretended not to be bothered, which had the desired effect of grabbing Steve’s attention, and by the end of the evening she had agreed to go out on a proper date. He was nearly three years older than her and quite a catch.

Steve had joined Leeds United as an apprentice in the summer of 1991, at a time when the club was one of the top sides in the country. He remained her boyfriend for more than two years and she described him as her first love; a true love. She gushed, ‘Our relationship was absolute heaven.’

Originally a Londoner from Lambeth, he never made the jump to the first team, which was a disappointment as Leeds United won the last-ever First Division title in the 1991–2 season. By the end of the following year, he was the only black player on the books of Rochdale in the third division while Leeds were part of the inaugural Premiership.

At the end of her first summer season in Blackpool, Melanie enrolled at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Chapeltown Road. The college had been up and running for just six years but already had a growing reputation as the nearest thing to Fame in Leeds.

She did not thrive at the college, though, impatient after her spell in Blackpool to get on with her life in show business. She had some money saved from her dancing wages but that soon ran out and she earned some much-needed funds for bus fares and lunches by teaching an aerobics class at the nearby Mandela Community Centre.

She also entered the Miss Leeds Weekly News contest in 1992 and won, much to her surprise, although not to anyone else’s because she was a very striking young woman. She was now a Blackpool veteran, a beauty queen and still only seventeen.

Not everything was going so well, however. Like many of her contemporaries, Melanie had to trudge around to auditions, hoping that the next might be the one. She soon developed a tough skin when it came to rejections. Her future might have been entirely different if she had won the part of Fiona Middleton, a young hairdresser in Coronation Street. Despite getting to the final four, she lost out to another aspiring actress from Leeds, Angela Griffin, who had also been at Intake High. They were never best friends because Angela was in the year below but they once performed a duet in a school production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Angela was also mixed race so, inevitably, she and Melanie often went up for the same part. Usually, neither of them was hired, but on this occasion Angela’s success would lead to TV stardom. She started playing Fiona in December 1992 and stayed for six years, appearing in 257 episodes. If Melanie had been successful, there would have been no thoughts of cruise ships, Blackpool or auditions for girl bands. Ironically, Angela impersonated Mel as a Spice Girl in a 1998 celebrity special of Stars In Their Eyes.

Melanie, meanwhile, had to be content with some work as an extra. She made several fleeting appearances stacking shelves in Bettabuy’s supermarket in Coronation Street and had a walk-on role as a policewoman in the locally filmed A Touch of Frost.

Closer to home, she took a part-time job in telesales and another as a podium dancer at the Yel Bar in a side street off the city centre. It certainly wasn’t a lap-dancing club or anything remotely similar – just a fun night spot where the waiters and waitresses wore swimwear.

Melanie picked up £20 for four hours of dancing on a Friday and Saturday night in front of a mainly male audience. The moment her shift was over, she changed back into an old sweatshirt and jogging bottoms, collected her wages and went home. This was a paid professional job.

Of course, Melanie was very popular with the lads but seemed unmoved by the attention. Lisa Adamczyk, her manager at the club, observed, ‘She was a great mover, a very professional dancer, but it was all just an act. At the end of the night she’d be off like a shot to get back to her boyfriend, Steve, who she loved dearly. She’d come across as the wildest girl you’d ever meet but underneath the image was a hard-working girl who was faithful to her boyfriend.’

She was still very much a dancer, never having bothered much with singing, although she started having some lessons to broaden her chances of landing better roles. She danced on The Bonnie Langford Show and on Keith and Orville’s Quack Chat Show, starring the popular ventriloquist and his green baby duck.

Her friend Rebecca had moved to London and Melanie was feeling constrained by Leeds. She was hired for another summer season in Blackpool, this time on The Billy Pearce Laughter Show at the Grand Theatre. Billy, the son of Melanie’s old dance teacher, was one of the most popular old-school entertainers in the north of England.

This time she would be away from home for four months and so, reluctantly, decided to split up with Steve. She opted for a clean break rather than keep things dragging on when she had ambitions to see the world and be a star – or, at least, a headliner in Blackpool. She did not want to settle for a cosy, settled life in Leeds.

Melanie was very fond of Steven and is nice about him in her memoirs, but she acknowledged that his life took a few wrong turns after his football career was wrecked by injury. He was sent to prison for nine months in 2002. Now working as a decorator, he had been convicted of affray after attacking two men in the street with a machete.

In Blackpool, Melanie enjoyed her new freedom. She was more independent than she had been during her first summer there and enjoyed dating as a single woman, as well as acting as understudy to her show’s female star, Claire Cattini. As far as Melanie was concerned, Claire was the epitome of a big star and a role model for the teenager from Leeds, even though she was only a couple of years older.

Melanie fell for another sportsman – this time a professional snooker player from Iceland called Fjölnir Thorgeirsson. Fjöl (pronounced Fee-ol) was very Nordic looking – tall, blond and well built. Melanie fancied him as soon as she saw him in a café on the promenade near the Norbreck Castle Hotel where he was competing in a number of qualifying tournaments for the big professional events.

Blackpool had become an important centre for snooker. The future world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan won an amazing seventy-four out of seventy-six matches at the Norbreck in 1992.

Fjöl wasn’t as successful but he did win through to the European Open held in Antwerp in September. He had a walkover in Round 2 and lost in the next. Melanie knew nothing about snooker but she came to watch him whenever she could get away. She enjoyed a summer of love in a boy-meets-girl sort of way. The chances for any future relationship seemed slim when Fjöl returned to Iceland and promptly suffered a serious motorbike accident, which meant he could not travel.

In fact, it was Melanie who hopped on a plane, as a dancer in a troupe entertaining the armed forces in the Falkland Islands, Bosnia and Northern Ireland. Her last show business job before her life-changing audition was in Lewisham. She had one line in the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk starring Saracen from the hit TV series Gladiators – he eventually became a fire-fighter. Her heart wasn’t in it and she was sacked for skipping rehearsals, so it was back to Leeds and scouring the ads again.

Melanie had a habit of landing on her feet but her career to date seemed to be one step forward and one step back. She was still just eighteen but she badly needed something to happen.

2
Casting the Net

Imagine you were casting a sit-com. That was what Chris Herbert did. He wanted characters who would appeal to everyone. The series Friends wouldn’t start until later in 1994 but his idea of throwing together a group of young people with different personalities, characteristics and quirks was very similar to the thinking behind the classic comedy.

He wanted to cover all bases: ‘I approached it as if I was a casting director, finding characters that appealed to every colour in the rainbow – finding a gang of girls everyone could relate to. We were looking to create a lifestyle act.’

In the early nineties there was no The X Factor, The Voice or Britain’s Got Talent. The new millennium celebrations would come and go before Pop Idol heralded a new era of Saturday night TV in 2001. There was no quick fix to becoming a pop star. None of the young women who became the Spice Girls was likely to thrive in those competitions.

The era of the Spice Girls was closer to Opportunity Knocks than one of the new reality talent shows. The old favourite, originally hosted by Hughie Green, left our screens for good in 1990.

Instead, young hopefuls would rush to buy the Stage newspaper every week. Chris Herbert, too, would go to auditions, not to grab a spot on a cruise ship but to hand out flyers about his new group and see for himself the sort of personalities who were out there seeking work.

He decided not to limit his search. He went to pubs, clubs, open-mic nights, dance studios – anywhere he could get his message out: ‘My number-one focus wasn’t looking for singers. I was looking for young girls seeking opportunities within entertainment. I was trying to cast the net as wide as possible.’ He even went to Butlins and Blackpool in his search for five stars. He was unlucky not to have come across Melanie before the big audition day.

Chris might have been a young man, filled with enthusiasm and energy for a great new idea, but he wasn’t a novice in the music business. He had grown up in that world and was at ease within it, well used to coming home from school and finding pop stars sitting on the sofa enjoying a cuppa.

His father, Bob Herbert, was a millionaire accountant, drove a Rolls-Royce and had a penchant for wearing white suits. Geri Halliwell memorably described him as looking like an extra from Miami Vice, the American cop show from the eighties that perfectly captured an era obsessed with designer fashion.

More pertinently from the point of view of the future Spice Girls, he had experience of nurturing young talent. He spotted the potential of two of his son’s teenage friends at the Collingwood College in Camberley, Surrey. They were twin brothers, Matt and Luke Goss. At the time they were only fifteen but Bob could see they had the looks to engage a strong female following.

Bob was of the music school that was always seeking to copy a successful formula. He saw the twins as a late eighties version of the Bay City Rollers, the teen heartthrobs of the previous decade. When the brothers formed a band called Gloss, with young bassist Craig Logan (Goss with an L for Logan), Bob stepped in to offer them advice and, more importantly, space to rehearse in his summerhouse. He helped to plot their futures, introduced them to songwriters and financed their demo tapes but, because of their age, could not sign them to a binding legal contract until they were eighteen. When they came of age they were snapped up by Tom Watkins, former manager of the Pet Shop Boys, who secured them a deal with CBS.

The whole nightmare sequence of events would come back to haunt Bob with the Spice Girls. Under the new name of Bros, the boys released their first single, ironically titled ‘I Owe You Nothing’, which, when re-released in 1988, would be their only UK number one. At this time, a very large poster of Matt Goss was adorning the bedroom wall of an ambitious teenager called Victoria Adams.

Undaunted, Bob decided to have another go at finding an all-conquering band. After his son left college, they went into partnership, forming a management company called Heart, with offices in the Surrey town of Lightwater. Bob was keen to develop a project for his son to take on but, like all good accountants, he preferred to find someone else to absorb the financial risk. He immediately thought of his old music compadre, Chic Murphy.

Tall and silver-haired, Chic had a tiny cross tattooed on his earlobe and spoke in an EastEnders Cockney accent, but he frequented the upmarket Surrey haunts more usually associated with stockbrokers and golfers. Chris Herbert describes Chic as ‘old school’, which in music-business terms means he played it tough and preferred an environment in which the artists had very little control over their destiny.

He had made his first fortune importing big American cars into the UK. Subsequently, he had seen the business possibilities of bringing US pop acts across the Atlantic. In the eighties he signed up chart regulars like the Drifters, who were plying their trade in Las Vegas, and brought them over to the blossoming cabaret club scene where venues like Caesar’s Palace in Dunstable or Blazers in Windsor could pack in a thousand people a night. It was very lucrative.

From the point of view of the future Spice Girls, his most important involvement was with the Three Degrees, the popular UK girl group of the seventies. The trio, modelled more or less on the Supremes, were originally part of the Philadelphia stable, a rival of Motown in the US. They had their biggest hit in the UK, however, in 1974 topping the charts with the disco favourite ‘When Will I See You Again’ before Melanie Brown and Emma Bunton were born.

The public profile of the Three Degrees increased greatly when the media decided they were the favourite group of Prince Charles. This might not have done wonders for their musical credibility but took them off the pages of NME and Melody Maker and into the columns of the national newspapers. They became much more famous. Prince Charles invited them to perform at his thirtieth birthday party at Buckingham Palace in 1978, and they were subsequently guests at his wedding to Lady Diana Spencer three years later. It would not be the last time the Prince gave an all-girl group the oxygen of priceless publicity.

By the end of the seventies the Three Degrees were moving inevitably towards the cabaret circuit. They were still very popular, though – the sort of act that always gets work – and throughout the eighties Chic Murphy had been a familiar figure at their gigs. Bob Herbert, who did all the accounts for the nightclubs, became part of the group’s management team and forged a long-standing alliance with Chic.

If Bob and Chic had decided things, the new band would have been the Spice Boys. The initial conversation in the offices of Heart Management was about putting a boy band together. In late 1993 Take That were everywhere, with three number-one singles in a row and the platinum-selling album Everything Changes. The entire music world was looking to jump on the bandwagon of their popularity.

Fortunately, for five ambitious young women, Chris Herbert had a better idea: ‘A boy band seemed like the obvious route into the market but I wasn’t that keen on it because I thought we were sort of late to the party. There were loads of them.’ As well as Take That, there was East 17, Bad Boys Inc and Worlds Apart, with the prospect of another arriving any minute, like a double-decker bus in Piccadilly. Chris explained, ‘My feeling was that boy bands of the time were only really appealing to 50 per cent of the market – a female audience. I wanted to put a girl band together that was a bit feisty, sexy and sassy so that they could appeal to both a female and male audience. The girls could relate to them and aspire to be them. The guys would just adore them.’

Bob and, in particular, Chic took a lot of convincing that a girl band was the way forward. Chris observed, ‘They were kind of following the market and it just seemed fairly radical that we should be doing the absolute opposite of that.’ The first thing they wanted to know was the strength of the opposition. It was anything but strong. An all-girl group called Milan were signed to Polydor in 1992 and looked promising for a couple of years, featuring a teenage Martine McCutcheon before she found stardom playing Tiffany in EastEnders. They opened for East 17 on tour but a few singles failed to set the charts alight and they folded in 1994.

Eternal represented more serious opposition. They had already achieved a couple of top-ten singles and their first album Always and Forever peaked at number two. Chris, however, did not see them as direct competition. Despite being very glamorous and including the lads-mag favourite Louise Nurding, they were basically a soulful vocal group specialising in R&B. ‘They were pretty slick and smooth,’ observed Chris. ‘I felt we needed more character.’

Eventually he got his way. ‘My dad was probably the first to come round to the idea, Chic less so. His approach was “Well, OK, go out and see what you can find and we’ll reassess it.” Actually, Chic was like that all the way through. He kind of let me out on a rein to go and do it and then was slightly cynical but I suppose he was prepared to see what turned up.’

At first, it seemed as if it was going to be a hard slog – until he paid £174 to place his own advertisement in the Stage. The now famous ad that would eventually lead to the formation of the Spice Girls appeared on 24 February 1994. It read:

R.U. 18–23 WITH THE ABILITY

TO SING/DANCE

R.U. STREETWISE, OUTGOING,

AMBITIOUS & DEDICATED

HEART MANAGEMENT LTD

are a widely successful

Music Industry Management Consortium

currently forming a choreographed, Singing/Dancing,

all Female Pop Act for a Record Recording Deal.

OPEN AUDITION

DANCE WORKS, 16 Balderton Street,

FRIDAY 4TH MARCH

11.00 a.m.–5.30 p.m.

PLEASE BRING SHEET MUSIC

OR BACKING CASSETTE

On the day, more than four hundred young hopefuls queued on the stairs of the studio off Oxford Street to impress the ‘panel’, consisting of Bob, Chris and his fiancée Shelley, who was a stylist. The girls were divided into groups of ten and put through their dancing paces to the sound of Eternal’s début hit ‘Stay’. The numbers were reduced to fifty before they were asked to do an individual song.

The panel kept rudimentary scorecards that would judge the girls on four categories: singing, dancing, looks and personality. It was the best and quickest way to whittle down the possibles into a short list. Melanie Brown performed her now regular audition song, ‘The Greatest Love of All’ by Whitney Houston. Chris gave her eight out of ten across the board.

She obviously stood out. It wasn’t just that she fitted his vision for the make-up of the group. She had a personality and charisma that shone. Chris recalled, ‘For me, she was the one who walked in and seemed the full package. She was good but she also just had the look. Her image was on point. She could sing and she had a big personality. On the day, I immediately thought, We have found one.’

Melanie had enjoyed the experience so much that she decided to skip the afternoon audition for the cruise ship, preferring to chat to some of the other girls before making her way back to Victoria station to get the coach home. Chris had told her he would be in touch and Melanie was confident she’d got it. She was right.

3
Mein Herr

Victoria Adams-Wood, as she was calling herself then, carried herself differently from the other hopefuls at the Danceworks audition. She was a curvy nineteen-year old, strikingly dressed all in black, with a crop-top showing off her very tanned midriff.

On his mood board back at the office, Chris Herbert had been toying with the idea that one of the group should appeal to the more mature man. He was looking for a young woman who might turn the head of a male consumer with a dash of discernment. You don’t need to be posh to have a touch of class and that was the quality Chris was seeking.

Victoria came from a North London working-class background. Her dad Tony Adams, the son of a factory worker, had been brought up in a two-bedroom house in Edmonton that had no bathroom, an outside toilet and no heating. These were the austere years that followed the end of the Second World War when money was rationed just as much as food had been during the conflict.

In 1957 when Tony was eleven, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously said, ‘Most of our people have never had it so good,’ which was small consolation for the youngster hanging around outside the pub waiting for his father to finish his pint. Sometimes he would be pressed into collecting cigarette butts from the overflowing ashtrays for his dad to smoke. Truly, Edmonton was a place to aspire to leave in order to make something of yourself in the world – and that was what he did.

Despite its drawbacks, Edmonton then had a strong sense of community and families had pride in their modest surroundings. The planners of sixties Britain have much to answer for in retrospect, bulldozing away those strong neighbourhood bonds in favour of anonymous tower blocks. Families there pulled together and survived together. Tony absorbed that spirit and passed it on to his eldest daughter.

Tony left school to train as an electrician but dreamt of being a pop star. He was unlucky. He shone as the lead singer in two groups, first in the Calettos and then in the Soniks, which was mainly a covers band. The biggest gig he played was at the famous Lyceum Ballroom on the Strand in London.

He caught the attention of the legendary impresario and manager Joe Meek, who had been responsible for one of the biggest hits of the sixties, ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados, the first US number one by a British group. Joe signed Tony to a contract but, unknown to many in the music business, his life was falling apart because of money problems and blackmail relating to his homosexuality. In February 1967 he murdered his landlady, Violet Shenton, then killed himself with a shotgun.

The difficulty for Tony, who had just recorded his first demo, was that he was under contract at the time and subsequent legal red tape prevented him from recording for five years. This huge disappointment meant that he was always extremely careful when it came to business and, in particular, contracts – a trait inherited by his daughter that would prove to be vital in the progress of the future Spice Girls.

Tony picked up his trade again, working as a rep for an electrical company. He already had ambitions to start his own company, supported by his girlfriend Jackie Cannon, a trainee hairdresser from Tottenham, who soon gave that up to join an insurance company in central London.

Jackie’s father, George, was a stevedore in the docks, loading and unloading ships. He worked all hours to improve his family’s life, an ethic that Tony and Jackie followed over the years, in much the same way as Melanie Brown’s parents. Tony and Jackie married in 1970 but waited four years to start a family, building a better future by moving out of London before their daughter Victoria Caroline was born on 17 April 1974 in the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, which technically made her an Essex girl.

In 1977, when Victoria was three, Tony bought the Old School House in Goff’s Oak, Hertfordshire. The place needed a lot of work but he had the skills and the contacts in the building trade to do it up himself. But, perhaps more importantly, it had a large garage, which would become the hub of his new electrical-supply company.

Goff’s Oak liked to call itself a village but was quite suburban, if full of people doing rather well for themselves. One ex-teacher at the local school observed witheringly, ‘Wait outside the school gates on any given day and you’d wish you had shares in a fake-tan company and one making leather trousers. They are women with too much time on their hands. They have nothing better to do than shop and get their hair and nails done.’

The media would always make much of Victoria being dropped off at school in her dad’s Rolls-Royce. That was much later. For now, she was driven in her father’s old Hillman, which also doubled as his delivery van. Victoria was a quiet little girl, who struggled with a lack of confidence, particularly in English, and took extra lessons in reading, comprehension and spelling. She was a million miles away from the outspoken woman with the ready wit she would later become.

Tony loved listening to the Beatles and Stevie Wonder, and would dance his little girl around the house to the sound of the great Motown star’s hit ‘Sir Duke’, which Jackie said gave her daughter her love of performing. One teacher, Sue Bailey, recalled, ‘She always loved acting and enjoyed our drama lessons. She liked to sing and dance. She shone one year as Frosty the Snowman. She was a very sweet girl.’

Victoria was inspired by the iconic film Fame. She envied the energy and the exuberance of the students skipping down the corridors of the High School for the Performing Arts in New York. She wanted to be Coco, the multi-talented character played so memorably by Irene Cara. It’s easy to imagine the Spice Girls dancing on the desks and singing in the streets with the rest of the students.

She stuck a poster on her bedroom wall of the dashingly handsome Gene Anthony Ray, who played Leroy in the film and the subsequent TV spin-off. Ironically, Gene became a victim of his own fame, sinking into a life of drink and drugs and dying young, at forty-one.

Victoria was obsessed by the TV show, taping every episode so that she could learn all the songs and the dance routines. She persuaded her mum to take her to see the Kids from Fame on tour and subsequently badgered her into finding a ‘Fame’ school near Goff’s Oak. They couldn’t find an exact match but the Jason Theatre School a few miles up the road in Broxbourne seemed the best option for a nine-year-old.

Rather like the Jean Pearce School in Leeds, the Jason had been running for more than thirty years, founded in North London by greatly respected local dance teacher Joy Spriggs. From the first class, Joy identified Victoria as one of her most eager students, prepared to work her tap shoes off to improve: ‘At the time, all the children wanted to do jazz dancing, with the ankle warmers and the leotards and the colourful catsuits. There was Hot Gossip on television and they wanted to copy that. It was the style of the time.’

Victoria may not have been the most talented dancer ever to grace the Jason Theatre School but she made a dramatic improvement through hard work, determination and old-fashioned practice. Quite simply, the harder Victoria worked, the better she became. Joy observed, ‘She had a certain natural ability and we just channelled it in the right way. Victoria would shine because she was a very pretty little girl, with big dark brown eyes and long dark curly hair, but she was a little bit self-conscious to start with. She didn’t hold back but she wasn’t quite as confident as some of the others. We had to build that confidence with her.’

Her self-belief was boosted when the Jason Theatre School linked up with the local amateur dramatic society for productions of Hello Dolly, Sleeping Beauty and The Wizard of Oz, in which she played a Munchkin. Her ambition was also fuelled by trips to the West End to see the most popular musicals of the eighties – Cats, Les Misérables, Starlight Express and Miss Saigon.

Week after week, dancing provided a welcome escape from real school for Victoria. After the relatively quiet waters of primary school, her parents decided to send her to St Mary’s High School in Cheshunt where she stood out like a beacon, unhappily.

By this time Tony’s business was thriving and the family had plenty of money. The Old School House was now one of the grandest homes in the village, with a swimming pool in the back garden and the Rolls-Royce, with its personalised number plate, in the driveway. It was his pride and joy, although Victoria maintained she hated it.

She had to say that because it might have alienated a million potential Spice Girls fans to hear tales of Daddy dropping her off in the Rolls-Royce. Victoria has always been careful not to describe any days that began with a ride in the Roller and ended with a dip in the pool.

One of her best friends growing up, Emma Comolli, recalled that, perhaps unwisely, Victoria would talk about how rich her family was and how she was going to be famous one day: ‘The other children would turn on her and call her names.’

Another girl said simply, ‘Victoria was considered snooty.’

The full extent of the bullying Victoria suffered at school is a grey area. She was certainly verbally abused but her younger sister Louise recalled, ‘I don’t think she was bullied that badly.’

In the early days at the Old School House the two girls shared a bedroom, but that changed when Tony had finished the remodelling and Victoria had her own pink explosion of a room with giant posters of Bros and Ryan Giggs vying for space with Gene Anthony Ray.

Louise fitted in well at school and found herself having to stick up for her elder sibling. Their different personalities highlight why Victoria had a tough time. Ironically, considering the pack appeal of the Spice Girls, she was never one of the girls. She had a natural shyness that could be exploited by others, but beneath that apparent vulnerability was a girl who was thoroughly determined and as tough as old boots.

Fortunately, there was some enjoyment to be had at school in its lavish dramatic productions. Victoria was one of the best dancers in Les Misérables and Jesus Christ Superstar. Her passion for dancing was a double-edged sword. It gave her a sense of escape but also meant she seldom socialised with classmates. Boys were not on the agenda, although she did have a date aged fifteen with an American pupil called Franco McCurio who took her to the movies. The most memorable thing about it was that it marked the first time she had ever been on a bus.

Victoria met her first proper boyfriend in the kitchen of the Old School House when she was sixteen. Mark Wood had come to fit a burglar alarm. He was three years older, six foot two, and the epitome of tall, dark and handsome. They started chatting and she readily agreed when he asked her out on a date.

She didn’t have to travel by bus, which was a relief, when they went out for a drink to a wine bar. Instead, he picked her up in his dad’s white van, having taken the ladders off the roof for the occasion. Technically, Victoria was too young to be served alcohol but that didn’t stop her getting tipsy, although Mark did not take advantage.

Being in a committed relationship with Mark was not necessarily the most important thing in her life that year. She was determined to leave St Mary’s to further her chances of a career in show business. She set her heart on going to a stage school. She still regretted not going to a ‘Fame’ school like the Sylvia Young Theatre School or the Italia Conti.

Victoria did a tour of the leading ‘finishing’ schools in and around London before deciding to apply to Laine Theatre Arts in Epsom. Joy Spriggs approved: ‘Laine is the crème de la crème really.’ The audition was itself an ordeal and a good grounding for more nerve-racking battles later on. One fellow student from Victoria’s year recalled that Betty Laine had a fiery disposition: ‘You wouldn’t want to cross her. She and the teachers present managed to convey a sort of good-cop-bad-cop aura. She was the bad cop!’

Not for the last time, Victoria had no idea if she had made a good impression so she was thrilled when she was accepted. Joy Spriggs and her other mentors at the Jason Theatre School were equally delighted, especially as Victoria was one of three that year considered promising enough to win grants from the local education authority. Joy observed, ‘I know her parents would have paid for her to go there but she deserved her place. She’d worked hard for it and it is so competitive. For the school to get three in with scholarships was quite something. They were a talented bunch.’

Victoria’s successful application demolishes the opinion that she has no talent or was in some way lucky to achieve any success. Laine accepted only serious, dedicated and talented young people. It had its Premier League reputation to maintain.

Leaving the Jason Theatre School was quite a wrench. It had been her comfort blanket and her inspiration for nine years. She never forgot how much it meant to her and in 2001, as a worldwide superstar, she went back to present the prizes when the school celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Joy gave her the Jason Anniversary Award – the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Victoria told the girls, ‘I wanted to come to the school to give back something that they’ve given me.’

She was not so sorry to leave St Mary’s, although she managed five GCSE passes and won a cookery prize. She left school and home at the same age as Melanie Brown but there was a world of difference between the bright lights of Blackpool and the gentle Surrey town of Epsom. It was too far to commute from Goff’s Oak so Tony drove her to some lodgings.

Victoria was quite young and protected for her age. One friend from Goff’s Oak remembered, ‘She was quite naïve when she went to college, not very streetwise at all.’ She made sure she went home every weekend. Slow to settle in, she rang Mark in tears. He recalled, ‘The teachers told her she was too fat. She had put on a few pounds after going on the pill. She said the other girls were awful and she wanted to come home.’

Even the slimmest of girls would be told to watch their weight at a dancing college. It’s the last thing any young woman would want to hear but Victoria was not being singled out. She was a healthy size twelve. By no stretch of the imagination was she fat – but in dancing terms she was not one of the slender visions that glide around in tutus.

Joy Spriggs explained that dance colleges would tell all the female students that they needed to lose weight if they wanted to get work: ‘They just want the girls to be slim, particularly if they are doing lift work. The boys won’t want to lift them if they’re overweight, will they?’

The girls lived in fear of putting on a few pounds. One fellow student explained, ‘It was generally accepted that if you put on a little too much weight in the holidays then Betty would have no qualms in telling you that you were too fat and needed to sort it out ASAP. We were constantly fretting about this possibility.’

Victoria liked a McDonald’s when she was out – there was a convenient branch on Epsom High Street – and her mum’s meals when she was home. She enjoyed cooking for Mark, particularly pasta. And she loved chocolate, so dieting was not an easy prospect. Like many of her peers, she took up smoking cigarettes to try to suppress hunger pangs. It was bad enough having to deal with the teenage nightmare of acne without having to worry about weight too. She was becoming very body-conscious.

Victoria did not stand out among many fine dancers in her year but she did excel in one of the courses at Laine’s. She was the star pupil in image classes. Betty Laine explained, ‘She was always very conscious of image, which is, of course, paramount to success. If they are going into the pop world, image is very important. She took it extremely seriously. She was always first or second in our image classes.’

Now seventeen, Victoria was beginning to get a better grip on things. Her parents had bought her a Fiat Uno and some driving lessons for her birthday. They also splashed out on a flat in Epsom where she lived with four girls from college. That meant they could visit her regularly and so could Mark.

She was also developing her image and plotting her professional future. She had some photographs taken locally by Geoff Marchant, whom most of the students used for their portfolios. She knew the look she wanted or, more precisely, the one she didn’t. Geoff recalled, ‘She didn’t want to make herself girly and she didn’t want to make herself pretty-pretty. She wanted this moody sort of expression, even though it meant there was a lot of shadow, which didn’t help her skin at all.’

Eventually Geoff persuaded Victoria that it might be a good idea to smile for a few shots in case an agent down the line asked her for something more cheerful. She insisted on wearing black for almost all of the pictures, though. At the time Geoff thought she was quite a cold young lady, but his view changed: ‘I think it may well have been a mixture of shyness and determination.’

Victoria had a very privileged lifestyle. For her eighteenth-birthday treat her parents arranged for her and Mark to go by Eurostar to stay in Paris. For his twenty-first, Victoria organised a surprise dinner at a West End restaurant and invited his closest friends. They spent their summer holiday at Tony and Jackie’s villa on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain.

Mark was treated as one of the family. He was now living full time at the Old School House – a big step for an eighteen-year-old girl and an even bigger one for her parents. When they got back from Spain, looking fit and tanned, she took Mark along to see Geoff Marchant for some shots, separate and together. This time round, Victoria was much more relaxed. It seemed she had designs on her boyfriend becoming a male model, although Geoff thought he lacked the extra something to make it in that competitive world.