Lauren Bravo - What Would the Spice Girls Do?: How the Girl Power Generation Grew Up

For Jo, Hannah, Rose,
Lizzie and Sarah.

And all the
Ace Gangs everywhere.

This book is not affiliated with, authorized or endorsed by the Spice Girls.

If youd asked at the time, Id have said the Spice Girls were a trivial distraction. Now, Im not so sure. I think they were quite pivotal for our generation, actually.

CLARE, 30

USUALLY, WHEN YOU say you came of age during something, it means adolescence. You think of high school movies, teen angst, disappointing proms, lots of drinking in parks and non-specific yearning out of bus windows.

But when I say I came of age during the reign of the Spice Girls, I mean that I was eight when Wannabe was released. The perfect age for the fandom, albeit a weird one to be singing about lovers. I turned nine in 1997, a year notable for so many things but not least for being the Spice Girls Year of Glory, in which they went eight times platinum, became film stars, wooed Nelson Mandela, won two Brit Awards and made a Union Jack tea towel one of the most iconic outfits in music history. I was ten (it really was only two years later) when Geri left the group and burst pops biggest bubble since Beatlemania.

Those years spanned, as my friend Alice puts it poetically, that golden period of girlhood. The halcyon days and the best ones, it turns out, for an all-consuming pop star obsession. When youre looking for an easy foothold in adulthood. Youre too young to know how complicated the world is, but just old enough to feel like you can conquer it.

Of course, that feeling fades. I started secondary school as we stared down a new century, and finished university in the chaos of a global recession at that point we still called it, adorably, the credit crunch. And this means Im every inch a millennial now; a card-carrying, app-reliant, slogan-toting, overambitious snowflake who cant do mental maths any more. But Im something else too. A graduate of the girl power generation.

Once, nostalgia seemed the preserve of crusty oldsters; now, like all Spice Age alumni, I get high on the memory of Sunny D and inflatable furniture. Misty-eyed for a time when influence meant a Smash Hits interview, and we coveted a Dream Phone rather than being ruled by a smart one. A time when being British was regarded as cool and exciting, not something murky and fractious to be apologized for on a European city break.

And at the centre of that nineties tableau, five bolshy upstarts in massive shoes, who changed everything. While Clarissa explained it all and only Smarties had the answer, the most pressing question in virtually every situation became, What would the Spice Girls do? Little did we know so many of the lessons we were learning then would be the same ones were still grappling with today.

Theres plenty I dont remember about those years. Fractions. The periodic table. What exactly happened at the Battle of Bosworth. Great chunks of my Key Stage 2 education have crumbled away into the ether. But I remember every single detail of Christmas morning 1997 the heady scent of the Impulse body spray in my stocking, the Dairy Milk selection box I ate for breakfast, and the soundtrack: Spiceworld, on cassette, boomed through the house from my bedroom tape player as loud as seasonal goodwill would allow.

I had never owned Spice, their first album only borrowed it from the library for a week at a time. Cost: 1 and the heartbreak of returning it afterwards for some other kid to adore. But now, here, finally, in my hands, was my very own piece of girl power.

Years later, I would learn that Spice was the first album my now-boyfriend ever bought, and see this as evidence of our ultimate compatibility. The yin to my yang! PJ to my Duncan! The other half of my mutant CatDog! But that Christmas morning, boys were nowhere on the agenda.

Chicas to the front! I sang, attempting a clumsy salsa as I crimped my fringe with my Babyliss 4x4 styler, the smell of turkey wafting up the stairs and mingling with my cloud of synthetic vanilla. I shook it to the right, like they did in the video. I slammed it to the left, and partially into a chest of drawers. I was having a good time.

The previous evening Id assumed my usual position: lying flat on my belly on the living-room carpet, nose towards the telly. It was from this vantage point, in May of the same year, that I witnessed the most historic landslide result of my generation Katrina and the Waves winning Eurovision. I taped it off the telly on VHS and re-watched it every day for a fortnight. It was lying on the carpet, one morning in August, that I flipped, aghast, through five channels announcing the same identical, horrible news, over and over. Princess Diana was dead, dead, dead, still dead, dead again, and all the cartoons had been cancelled.

And it was there again, on Christmas Eve, that I watched Ginger, Scary, Sporty, Baby and Posh perform the second of their three consecutive Christmas number ones. From Too Much I learned lessons that I would apply first to blue raspberry Slush Puppies, then to metallic cream eyeshadow, and finally to relationships. I learned that too much of something is bad enough, but too much of nothing is just as tough. And, more obliquely, that I needed to know the way to feel to keep me satisfied. I still do, lets be honest. It immediately became my second favourite Spice Girls song.

Whats my favourite Spice Girls song? Im so glad you asked! Its The Lady Is A Vamp.

I know, I know. In Spice Girls terms this is like telling people your favourite Bowie track is The Laughing Gnome. But I wont apologize, because The Lady Is A Vamp is fabulous. Its camp, ritzy, soft-jazz schtick couldnt have appealed more directly and urgently to my pre-teen self if it had a free snap bracelet attached. The song features a roll call of pop culture icons: Elvis, Ziggy, Marley, Twiggy. Jackie O. Diana Ross. Even a cryptic nod to John Coltrane. It was a sheet of ready-made crib notes for kids at the arse end of the millennium, gagging for their own pop heroes but also for a handle on everything that had gone before.

I would sing along to The Lady Is A Vamp standing on the living-room ottoman in an imaginary gold lam sheath dress, a chorus of imaginary dancing boys swirling around me. In my head I was part An Audience with Shirley Bassey, part Marilyn doing Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend. Except I hadnt seen Marilyns version, or even Madonnas Material Girl homage I only knew the routine because someone had parodied it on short-lived CBBC sitcom No Sweat. Thats how it was, being a kid of the nineties. Everything felt like a hand-me-down.

Until the Spice Girls.

Their stratospheric rise to fame might have earned comparisons to sixties and seventies pop hysteria, but they were no retro reboot. And their attitude wasnt about chewing over the past, either it was brand spanking new. It didnt dwell on the things we werent; it was a soundtrack for all the things we could be.

I grew up in an era of contradictions. It was the golden age of lads mags, ladettes and professional socialites, a time that winkingly called itself post-feminist while it pinched the metaphorical arse of the progress that went before it. Many of us were raised by women who had fought for the rights we took for granted women who remembered a time when abortion was illegal, but sexual harassment and discrimination were not. Women who needed the signature of a husband or father to buy a home or open a bank account. Women who probably werent sure how to feel about tweeny-bopper daughters who wanted to wear a PVC miniskirt to Tesco. Indie, grunge and riot grrrl fans saw mainstream pop music as the plague, while the old guard of feminists heaped scorn on what they saw as a watered-down, capitalist appropriation of womens lib.