David Sinclair - Spice Girls Revisited

I remember exactly when I decided to write a book about the Spice Girls. I was in a shop called Helter Skelter in the West End of London in the summer of 2000, and I thought I would see if there was a book about the Spice Girls I could buy for my then 11-year-old daughter, Faith. Helter Skelter was the rocknroll bookshop; perhaps the only shop in London dedicated entirely to selling books about popular music. If you wanted to find a book about a pop group, this was surely the place to go. Except I couldnt find one about the Spice Girls. Nothing. So I asked the guy on the counter.

We dont do books like that, he said, sniffily. Its not that kind of shop.

Next to the counter, hot off the presses, was a pile of copies of

Clinton Heylins newly updated biography Dylan Behind The Shades (Take Two). I looked across at a shelf already groaning under the weight of publications dedicated to the life and music of Bob Dylan and I thought, How on earth is this guy going to fit any more books on there? And who is going to buy, let alone actually read, yet another massive tome about Bob Almighty Dylan?

I looked around for something a bit more modern, a book that might appeal to an intelligent teenager, or perhaps address a subject that hadnt been chewed over dozens of times already. But surprisingly few of the items on offer fitted this description. I did, however, find about six books promising to tell the inside story of Oasis in amongst the retrospectives and reappraisals of Jimi Hendrix and The Doors and the entire sections devoted to The Beatles and the Stones.

So, no one had written a book about the Spice Girls or at least no one had written a book about the Spice Girls that would find shelf space in that kind of shop. What was going on? The Spice Girls were the biggest British popular music act of the Nineties and probably the biggest selling pop act in the world during the latter half of that decade. Not only that, their influence extended way beyond the selling of vast quantities of records. Ginger, Posh, Baby, Sporty and Scary were the most widely recognised group of individuals since John, Paul, George and Ringo. They were a social phenomenon that changed the course of popular music and popular culture. And yet their achievements had gone unrecognised and unchronicled by the army of self-appointed biographers and historians which has attached itself like a barnacle to the pop industry over the years. Shouldnt someone have been keeping an eye on this stuff?

It occurred to me that for Faith and her friends, Helter Skelter would have seemed more like a museum than a bookshop. If this place couldnt find a Spice Girls book that they could bear to stock, perhaps Id better write one for them, before the world and a new generation of readers had completely passed them by. After all, how hard could it be?

I quickly discovered that one reason why no one had written a sensible book about the Spice Girls was because very few people believed such a book could be written or was worth writing. The songwriter Biff Stannard, who co-wrote Wannabe and many other hits with the Spice Girls, told me that when he went to a dinner party, or met people socially, he would try his best to avoid the subject of what he did for a living not because he was ashamed in any way, but for exactly the opposite reason.

Whenever you get on to the Spice Girls thing, he said, you end up getting into a two-hour discussion, and I get quite heated about it.

I soon found out what he meant. To announce that you were writing a book about the Spice Girls was to be forced, ipso facto, to defend both the groups honour and, pretty quickly, your own. Why write a book about the Spice Girls? I was asked time and again, although curiously, never once, anywhere in the world, did I have to explain to anyone who the Spice Girls actually were. Such was the level of prejudice that had taken root against them, it was simply assumed that unless I was going to reveal some salacious details about their sex lives or pen a worthy polemic condemning them and everything they stood for, then I must be slightly bonkers.