Spice Girls: Is anyone actually arsed?
Thursday, 28 June 2007
I could be wrong, but I’m sure it was no more than about six weeks ago I saw Mel “Melanie C” Chisholm on that vaguely annoying Sunday morning cookery programme with Tim Lovejoy, saying she would never be part of a Spice Girls “reunion” because she didn’t want to destroy the memories (man). She admitted that she was hardly making any money on her own label and that only Germany, Austria and Spain seems to be remotely interested in her music, but I believed her.
And yet today, and I’m certainly not wrong about this, I saw Melanie “Chisholm” C, with an inescapably bushy fringe, saying that she would, in fact, be part of a Spice Girls “reunion”! A world tour awaits, eh Mel!
What’s wrong with these people? They’re supposed to have made “several millions” (to use a topical Gordon Brown-favoured expression) from pissing off every right thinking person on the planet a decade ago. Do they really need to bother us again?
There’s little indication of a popular clamouring for this to happen, either. Their last album was a disaster, after fans seemingly grew out of the tedious “Girl Power” waffle. (Remember the single Holler? Thought not.) Unlike Take That, whose split caused a mass outpouring of national grief, was anyone even remotely bothered when the Spice Girls called it a day?
Since then, not a single one of them has managed to sustain a decent musical career, indicating the world has pretty much had enough. Victoria Beckham is a particularly good example of how to royally mess it up when an obvious career in pop is handed to you on a plate. Her debut album sold a mere 50,000 copies, which led to her being dumped by Virgin, after which her legendarily delayed/rewritten (and ultimately unreleased) second album almost singlehandedly bankrupted the Telstar label (thus ending the career of various other acts, including Mis-Teeq).
Publicity stunt after publicity stunt - from “going hip-hop” (Victoria) to “getting impregnated by Eddie Murphy” (Mel B) - has failed to illicit any kind of response from the general public. And yet we are now expected to get excited about some clearly half-hearted (look at the facial expressions), transparently cash-driven tour of the world’s concert arenas.
At the risk of sounding sexist, they also look a bit weird (especially Victoria, aka Alien With Breast Implants). As No Rock And Roll Fun notes:
They look so random and disparate that they could just be a bunch of people going in to the Big Brother house.
The Guardian, meanwhile, describes it as “the ‘Victoria needs a new boob job’ tour”.
And something tells me they should fire the PR who decided to have a press conference on the day Britain’s new Prime Minister names his first Cabinet. If they’d done it last week, Sky News would have been picking the bones out all afternoon. Whereas today… well, like the rest of us, Adam Boulton really isn’t arsed, is he?
