SWTL.1996

'''Five young ladies. One mission. To make 1996 the year of Girl Power!'''

Obviously there was still work to be done on the writing and recording of the first album. And Virgin wanted their companies around the world to be fully primed before they let the girls out of the traps.

The Marketing
But there was also a degree of uncertainty about how best to proceed with an all-girl band of this sort. When Take That formally disbanded in February 1996, it was clear that a big gap had opened in the market. But for must pundits, the idea that an all-girl band, rather than another boy band, would be able to replace Take That as the best selling teen act, was simply not a credible proposition. The only successful British girl group of recent times had been Eternal, whose appeal was firmly based on the American, R&B model."Emma Bunton: We prefer TLC or Salt-N-Pepa [to Eternal]. They’re cool and they have an excellent attitude. They’re more in your face and sexy – although sometimes too sexy. We’re more the cheeky types. Boys love us and that’s great, but we’re definitely out to appeal more to the girls."But even within Virgin there were skeptical murmurings, and the MD of Virgin France was by no mean untypical when he voiced doubts about the viability of the project."Paul Conroy: I remember this conversation where we’re saying, ‘Girl groups, they might sell singles but are they going to sell albums? We were scared, but then we just had to remember the effect they had had on us when we met them. I felt almost evangelical about the group. The belief within the company was tremendous but it was a big roll of the dice."As they subsequently powered their way to global domination, it was easy to see why, in hindsight, the idea that Spice Girls had been the product of a ruthlessly team of record company image-builders quickly took root. But for all the faith that Virgin had shown in the group, there was nothing obvious about the theoretical appeal of the Spice Girls as far as the industry was concerned. Far from Virgin moulding them to fit into a carefully planned corporate vision, it was more like an inspired shot in the dark.

Robert Sandall, who became director of press at Virgin in January 1996, recalled that there was, initially, an element of mystification among some of his colleagues as to whom exactly a group like this might be targeted."Robert Sandall: Because they were a group of girls who weren’t conspicuously glamorous, it was difficult to know who they were addressing themselves specifically to a female audience before. This gave a lot of the plans a rather hazy aspect."Sandall and his colleagues at Virgin were evidently unaware that exactly such a group had, in fact, been launched before, with substantial record company backing and aimed at much the same market. The group, which comprised five lively, girl-next-door types, had even achieved a degree of commercial success, albeit strictly limited to their country of origin: Australia. They were called Girlfriend, and had got together at singing and dance classes while still at school in Sydney in 1991. Girlfriend initiated all sorts of strategies for tapping into the emergent young pop market.ut even with the full weight of the Arista marketing machine behind them, they never took off in Britain."Mel Brown - Arista press officer: It was hard for any girl band in those days. There weren’t any girl bands around. It was all boys in the pop magazines. They never wanted to write about girls, let alone girl bands."While the public were quick to make their preferences known once they had seen and heard what the Spice Girls had to offer, Nicki Chapman, who was in charge of promoting the group to radio and TV, remembered an initial resistance to the very idea of an all-girl group, particularly in the press."Nicki Chapman: They weren’t coming on board to begin with."Kate Thornton who was at the time editor of Top Of the Pops magazine was one of several pop pundits who told Chapman that in their opinion an all-girl group of this sort would be too threatening. Girls wouldn’t buy into it, and nor would boys, seemed to be the general presumption."Kate Thornton: It’s not going to happen."A couple of months later she had been won over. “For me Wannabe is the best pop record of 1996,” she declared. Another sceptic was Chris Evans, a figure with influence thanks to his breakfast show on Radio One and his popular TFI Friday TV show on Channel 4. Chapman took the Girls in to meet his producer Suzi Aplin, who was also Evan’s girlfriend at the time. Evans was supposed to be somewhere else, and Girls had just xxx on the music really loud and started their song and dance routines, when Evans unexpectedly came into the office."Nicki Chapman: He told us to fuck off back to Live & Kicking where we belonged. He just absolutely hated them. The girls were mortified. Geri, who was a big fan of his, was saying ‘Let me go and speak to him, let me speak to him,’ and if I had to hold her back and say, ‘No, let it go or else we’re going to humiliate ourselves here. He’s not the sort of person you want to address it with now.’ We had to walk out through the whole office and everybody was looking at us. It was so embarrassing. After that, every day on Radio One he made rude comments and insinuations about the Girls, even though everybody else was supporting them."Then, after they’d been number one for however many weeks, he saw them at a gig in a club called G.A.Y. late at night. He came up afterwards, shook their hands, apologized and said, ‘I was wrong, I think you’re brilliant’. It was to be the start of an association with the group which would eventually lead to a much publicized fling between Evans and Geri, of which more later.

The Single
The Spice Girls were adamant that it should be Wannabe, or at least Geri and Melanie B were firmly of that opinion. More than just a song, it served as an introduction to the five personalities and the group’s mission statement.

Victoria, who had missed the session when most of Wannabe was written, did not have such a strong attachment to the song, while Melanie C never really cared for it much. Be that as it may, once Geri and Melanie B were agreed on a course of action there was little that the others in the group could do to change the situation.

Virgin, however, proved not to be such a pushover. Ashley Newton, who was in charge of A&R, felt just as strongly that Wannabe was not the right song for the first single and wanted to go with Say You’ll Be There. There were various meetings about it, when that different tracks were played and discussed. The girls were represented by Geri who was told that Say You’ll Be There was a much cooler track and would cast them in a more favorable light.

Part of the problem was that the original recording of Wannabe suffered from a lacklustre mix (it was this version that eventually surfaced in Spiceworld – The Movie. But the girls, and Geri in particular, were implacable in their belief that it was the right choice for the first single."Geri Halliwell: Ashley Newton couldn’t stop tinkering with the song. He sent Wannabe to an American producer called Dave Way who had a reputation for creating an R&B swing sound. The result was blood awful.""Ashley Newton: I got a little offended when Geri said that. Tinkering’ is the wrong word to use. Involved, committed, caring, wanting them to make the best possible pop records they could make – yes. But tinkering? Well maybe I was an irritant sometimes, because I always wanted them to search for perfection."Eventually Simon Fuller gave the track to Spike Stent to remix. Stent was and engineer who had worked with Depeche Mode and Massive Attack and who later went on to produce Oasis’s third album. When Fuller asked him to remix Wannabe, Stent was working in Ireland with U2 on their Pop album. He remembered thinking that Wannabe was a weird pop record that didn’t sound like anything else around. He did the remix in six hours, a process which he described as “tightening it up” and “getting the vocals sounding really good”.

So successful was he in tailoring the sound of the record for pop radio, that Stent was called in to remix all of the subsequent singles from the first album as they came up for release, and eventually to mix the whole second album.

The Brits
They first attended the Brits on February as guests on the Virgin table.

Apparently Victoria tried to get Melanie C sacked after a drunken row at the 1996 BRIT awards. It seems as though things might have been a little less harmonious behind the scenes than the Spice Girls made out after it was revealed that Victoria Beckham tried to have Mel C kicked out of the band after a drunken row. Mel confessed that she ended up in an argument with the posh brunette at the 1996 Brit Awards, where she told her to "fu** off."

Since then, the girls had noticed people’s tendency to refer to them as “those Spice Girls”.

One early piece of press had a profound and lasting effecting on the group. They had also become aware of an American rapper called Spice 1 and he was not a man who would respond favourably to the idea of sharing his name with five girls from England.

The TV Debut
The Spice Girls had their first live TV slot on broadcast on LWT's Surprise Surprise. The little known group were at Key 103 to be interviewed by a girl taking part in Cilla Black's TV show. Local girl Sally was a big fan of the station and had won the opportunity to present a show and meet presenter Steve Penk. "Geri Halliwell: Our first TV appearance took place in April on Surprise Surprise. [...] In a car park, leaning out from behind a pillar to sing our bit... - IF ONLY" As part of her day at Key 103 she also had the opportunity to interview the Spice Girls who were due to release their debut song 'Wannabe'. The five girls gathered in the radio studio introducing themselves to Sally who asks them why they are called Spice Girls, to which Mel B responds, “we're five completely different people here with different personalities, therefore we're going to wear different clothes.” She goes on to say how that having different personalities doesn't mean they can't all get on. Aired May 12th At their first MTV appearance the girls performed an accapella medley of Do You Think About Me, Wannabe & One Of These Girls. They then chat to the host Davina McCall. A nice thing to note is it is Victoria’s birthday. Location: MTV Studios, London, UK.

The Videoshoot
19.04.1996. SG. WANNABE VIDEOSHOOT - Midland Grand Hotel - St Pancras, London, England

The Stent remix solved the impasse between the girls and Virgin over the choice of the first single, but there was another clash of opinions over the video for Wannabe.

On Fuller’s recommendation, this had been directed by Jhoan Camitz whose visually striking commercials for Volkswagen, Diesel and Nike had been screened all around the world, but who had never made a music video in his life. The girls were very enthusiastic about using him, because he would give their video a different look, which he certainly did.

His idea to do a one-take shoot of the girls arriving at an exotic building in the middle of a park in Barcelona. The décor of the building would be slightly surreal and it would be peopled with mysterious, bohemian Spaniards creating an effect like something out of a Fellini movie. The girls would come tumbling in and take over the place, running riot in much the same way as had long been their practice when invading management and record company offices.

Five days before the shoot in April 1996, Camitz announced that he had been unable to get permission to use the building. With time running out and budgetary constraints in mind, the shoot had been relocated to St. Pancras Hotel in London. Suddenly the beautiful Spanish building, the bohemian characters and the warm Mediterranean light were replaced by the sight of the girls tumbling out of a taxi on a dark London night and running through a rather dowdy looking entrance-way into an interior that looked like an old gentlemen’s club. Once inside, they proceeded not so much to Spice up as terrorise the inhabitants, some of whom looked nso ancient that they might have been there since the place was built."Melanie C:  Wannabe was recorded in under an hour, whereas a lot of the other songs on the album took two or three days at least. The video was a good laugh because it was the first one we made. The day before we shot it, we went to check it out and have a walk through what we were doing, because we knew we were going to do it in one take with a SteadiCam. We rehearsed for a couple of hours, then went back the next day and spent ages getting ready before we started shooting at about nine in the evening. It was really cold and the guy with the SteadiCam looked like Robocop, running around with this weird contraption on him.""Emma Bunton: We recorded it about 10 to 15 times, so I think we all lost quite a bit of weight that day.""Melanie C: How cold it was. It was really cold and he had them little tops on! Can’t you tell? The video got banned in parts of Southeast Asia because of the… because it was cold [laughs].""Victoria Adams: There was a good feeling on the set of Wannabe video, even though it was so cold. It was our first one and I had a shock when I arrived and saw how many people were working on it – all there just for us! It was meant to be a documentation of us, so it didn’t have any close-up beauty shot. That made it a bit easier."The video may have looked cheap, but it had already had in excess of L100,000 spent on it by this point. High-level discussions were immediately opened about when and where to re-shoot it. But as far as the girls were concerned the Wannabe video, like the song, was more than a promotional gambit; it represented at a fundamental level what they were about."Geri Halliwell: It’s us, warts and all. We’re not going to have some slick Elton John/David LaChapelle-type video production. We had a laugh doing it. That’s us, and if you don’t get that, you don’t get us."The Virgin suits were horrified."Ashley Newton: The girls were clearly freezing cold, which showed itself in various different ways. They had stuck with the one-take idea, and just about managed it, but even the best takes had Geri looking behind her and bumping into a chair. It didn’t have this sexy, Spanish light we had been promised. In fact the whole thing had a rather dark, gloomy feel to it.""Paul Conroy: It was a big worry. There were old people in the video. Would The Box find that a bit threatening? And then we were worried about the bit where they jumped on the table. Was that too threatening? Had Geri gone too far with the sort of circus outfit that she almost had on it?"Newton argued just as firmly against using the video, but in what was already becoming something of a pattern, it was the girls’ wishes which prevailed. Not only that but Newton has since accepted that he was wrong and their instincts were absolutely right."Ashley Newton: We in the record company were trying to overthink in certain situations. The girls were much more impulsive and much more knowledgeable about what a young kid wants from rock and pop stars. They were closer to it than us. They just understood it."The video turned out to be the trigger for launching the Spice Girls’ global success. When it was delivered to The Box video channel in Britain, where viewers phone in to vote for the next track they want to see, Wannabe went to number one within two hours of going on air. That meant it was more popular than 500 other videos that the channel was offering at that time and, to begin with, a whopping 10-15 per cent of the 250.000 weekly telephone requests to The Box were for Wannabe.

The video stayed at #1 on the viewers’ chart for 13 weeks, until it was replaced by Say You’ll Be There."Robert Sandal: The sound of that song, the playground feel of it, worked for them across the world, without exception. Whether it was Bangcock, Tokyo, Paris or Buenos Aires, you got the same gaggle of girls, thoughly the same age, all absolutely obsessed with tha song. They were a soundborard for a change that came over young girls at that time. Girl Power – it sounds like a dumb slogan. But it did actually contain a hard kernel of truth. There was this emergent sense that youngish girls were newly empowered group. There was a sociopolitical message built into their appeal. And you have to give Geri credit for identifying that."

The Promo
One early piece of press had a profound and lasting effecting on the group. Right from the start, the Spice Girls were set on changing the whole concept of pop music as it had existed up to that point. In their first interview with Paul Gorman, a contributing editor for the influential music magazine, Music Week, he was impressed enough to write the following account of their music:"Paul Gorman: Just when boys with guitars threaten to rule pop life, an all girl, in-yer-face pop group has arrived, with enough sass to burst that rockist cherry!" The Spice Girls gave their first ever interview to Music Week back in May 1996 to Music Week. In a musical landscape dominated by Britpop and lads with guitars, the Spice Girls cut through the noise to become one of the most successful British pop groups of all time.

The same month the Girls performed Wannabe and were photographed for Channel 4's Hotel Babylon, a late-night music show hosted by Dani Behr. It was shot in a beautiful old manor house in Aylesbury. Buckinghamshire, UK. The EPK for Wannabe was released for the press and as June started the promo begins to intensify.

Back to MTV Hanging Out they performed Wannabe and, for the first time, a new track called Say You'll Be There.

Harry Borden did a photoshoot with the Girls. "Harry Borden: A few friends convene at my flat in Bethnal Green to watch England get knocked out by Germany in the Semi-finals of Euro 96. (6-5 on penalties).""The joyous atmosphere evaporated as Gareth Southgate missed his penalty and talk turned to the coming week. The frivolous nature of my life was mocked when I announced that the following day I was going up in a hot air balloon with an unknown band called ‘The Spice Girls’." "6am and Muff Fitzgerald (the press officer) and I head out of London to meet the girls. Our departure point, a field in Hertfordshire is enveloped in fog and the balloon pilot insists we must wait for it to clear.""Anxious to get ‘something in the bag’, I suggest a couple of frames in the mist.Not yet the well oiled machine they would become, this, there first press shoot was an awkward affair until, unbeknown to me, Muff decided to drop his trousers and moon at them from behind my camera." "After an hour at a service station drinking coffee we finally achieve lift off.  I’d hired a fish-eye lens and had to sit on the edge of our little wicker basket to get everyone in the picture.A memorable shoot ended with us crashing in a ploughed field.""A tangle of Spice." A great promo for the group was the appearance on GMTV, where they were interviewed and performed Wannabe.

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The Release
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The UK Promo
wannabe 3 15/7

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The Asia Promo
19/07. Spice Girls - Wannabe #1 Tokyo

The Spice Girls were in japan when WANNABE went to number one in Britain. The record had entered the chart on July 15 1996 (Gary Barlow’s FOREVER LOVE was at the top),

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The Euro Promo
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x Spice Girls make their first live appearance on BBC’s TOTP and perform Wannabe in the studio (aired Friday Aug 2nd) The group are photographed backstage for TOTP magazine for their iconic ‘Spice Rack’ article; giving each member a distinctive nickname.

"It was actually a lazy journalist that couldn't be bothered to remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames, and we were like, 'Oh, well, that kinda works. I don't mind my name. Do you like your name? Baby? Posh?' We were like, 'Let's just go with it,'" MB said.

Peter Loraine, who ran U.K. magazine and TV show Top Of The Pops in the 1990s, apparently devised the nicknames for a feature story on the group that ran in July 1996. The rest, as they say, is history. According to the Spice Girls official timeline, Loraine and his staff came up with them out of convenience.

"Posh was the first one to be thought up because Victoria looks pretty sophisticated. The rest were pretty easy really because the girls' characters were already really strong," he reportedly said. "The names jumped out at us. We laughed the most when we came up with Scary. Jennifer Cawthron, who was also from Leeds, came up with that one because Mel B was so loud and had tried to take over our whole photo shoot." MTV.COM

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The Next Hit
INTRO

The Promo Tour
INTRO

The Domination
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The America Promo
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The Euro Promo
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The Asia Promo
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