SWTL.1994

In the advertising world, when an agency is given a new product to promote, the creative directors will often start by building what is called a mood board. Onto an initially blank canvas will go pictures, words, fragments of ideas, anything which they might have come across in the media or elsewhere that relates to the image they are hoping to put across or the market they are trying to reach with their product. Days will be spent pondering and discussing in a vibing-up process which points the creatives in a direction that will determine the ultimate shape of their ad.

The Spice Girls began life as an idea on a mood board, not in an advertising agency but in the office of the father and son management team of Bob and Chris Herbert in Lightwater, Surrey. One day they set their minds to the task of creating something different.

The Herberts
Robert “Bob” Herbert (February 7th, 1942) was an accountant from Brentford, England, specializing in musicians’ finances, who drifted into management in 1986 when he took a liking to Matt and Luke Goss, twin friends of his son Chris when they were pupils together at Collingwood School in Camberley, Surrey. Luke Goss played the drums and Matt was the singer. Their band, with the bassist Craig Logan, was called Gloss. Bob Herbert suggested they changed the name to Bros.

Realising the blond looks of Matt and Luke could be exploited to market a group that could be the Eighties' answer to the Bay City Rollers, Herbert offered Gloss advice and provided rehearsal space for them in his summer house. But it wasn't long before he was investing a lot more than time and friendly encouragement in Bros. He introduced them to songwriters, financed their early demo tapes and plotted their route to success – for a while."Bob Herbert: I paid for studio sessions to get their songs recorded. I did a video, styled them, paid for everything. It must have come to £40,000 to £50,000."What Bob Herbert didn’t do, however, was to sign the boys (who were both under 18) or their parents to a formal contract. So, when, as is the nature of things in the pop world, they were snapped up by a more experienced manager – Tom Watkins of Pet Shop Boys fame – who quickly proceeded to steer them to the top of the charts, Herbert found himself in a peculiarly vulnerable situation.

According to Erwin Keiles, a guitarist and songwriter who was a close associate of the Herberts at that time and for many years afterwards, Bob Herbert actually ‘did OK” out of the Bros affair."Erwin Keiles: His daughter, Nicola, was going out with one of the brothers, and the group's relationship with him continued after Tom Watkins became their manager. So they took care of him."So you would think that Bob would have taken great care to avoid getting himself into a similar position again. But the Bros venture was not the last occasion on which he was to find himself unable to capitalize on his investment in a pop group. Even worse, compared to the jackpot he was going to miss out on next time. The years passed and Bob was joined in his management activities by his son. Chris Herbert (born March, 1971 in Hillingdon, Middlesex, England) grew up in music industry orientated environment that had a large influence on his eventual career direction. At the age of twenty-one Herbert approached his father for advice and assistance in setting up his own talent management company.

Together they worked on a succession of humdrum pop acts including the aptly named Optimistic and the unconvincing Worlds Apart. and has helped overseen the careers of Five, Stephen Gately and Hear'Say, B*Witched, The Honeyz, Ben's Brother. But the first project the pair worked on was the creation of an all-girl pop group to cater to what he had identified as a potentially massive untapped market.

The Mood Board
So… in 1994 the Herberts and Lindsey Casbon set their minds to the task of creating something different.

This is where the mood board came in: why was it, they wondered, that apart from Bananarama in the ‘80s, and to a lesser extent Eternal in the ‘90, there had never been a massive-selling, all-female British group?

They suspected that it was because female groups, unlike the boy bands that were such an established feature of the pop landscape, tended to be of limited interest to girls.

The Herbert’s starting point, therefore, and the one unarguable stroke of genius in their vision, was to come up with the idea of a female version of Take That which would aim to appeal primarily to young girls. "Chris Herbert: The whole teen-band scene at the time was saturated by boy bands. It was all clones of New Kids On The Block and Take That. That was all a bit of a yawn for me, and only appealed to female audiences. At the time I just thought to myself, you know, it’s possible to kinda do this with a girl band. I felt that if you could appeal to the boys as well, you’d be laughing.If you could put together a girl band which was both sassy, for the girls, and with obvious sexy appeal, to attract the boys, you’d double your audience and double everything else that went with it. I think at the time Bob wanted to do a boy band. And just like we always do in this industry we followed a safe formula. And that was working very well, and that was when I said ‘Let do this instead. I think this one could work.’"From there to the details quickly fell into places. They reasoned that like Take That there should be five in the group, because a gang of four will invariably split up into two separate camps, increasing the likelihood of feuds and potentially damaging disputes (the wisdom of this was demonstrated years later when All Saints – a quartet who were touted as the successors to the Spice Girls – ended up, divided into pairs). A five-piece, the Herberts decided, would feel like a proper group and be a good, democratically balanced number.

So what would they look like? The mood board brightened up as the Herberts started going through magazines, tearing out pictures of girls – models, actresses, singers, whoever – who looked like the ones they would want to see in their band."“Here’s some expenses. Find some girls,” Bob told Chris."Chris rose to the challenge with predictable enthusiasm, but rather than searching for singers, he began his quest by looking in clubs and pubs for girls with the “right” image. This may have looked suspiciously like an excuse to go out on the pull, but the Herberts, however, were more systematic, shifting through photographs from stage schools and dance academies in the field, so to speak, and as well as trawling the local night-spots, took to hanging out at stage doors, handing out flyers whenever West End shows held auditions for singers or dancers.

The Stage
Whether to protect Chris from the increasingly likely risk of getting his collar felt the vice squad, or simply to speed up the whole process, in February 1994 they placed an advertisement in showbiz trade paper The Stage - a British weekly newspaper covering the entertainment industry, and particularly theatre. It was founded in 1880. It contains news, reviews, opinion, features, and recruitment advertising, mainly directed at those who work within the industry.

The ad asked: "WANTED: R.U. 18–23 with the ability to sing/dance? R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious, and dedicated? Heart Management Ltd. are a widely successful music industry management consortium currently forming a choreographed, singing/dancing, all-female pop act for a recording deal. Open audition. Danceworks, 16 Balderton Street. Friday 4 March. 11 am-5:30 pm. Please bring sheet music or backing cassette".

The Auditions
About 400 women who answered the ad went to Dance Works studios. In a process which continued over two more sessions at Nomis Studios in Shepherds Bush, and which seven years later would provide the template for the Popstars TV show, the Herberts proceeded to whittle down more than 400 applicants from which were picked the five lucky survivors. Geri Halliwell, 21, from Watford; Victoria Adams, 19, from Goff's Oak; Melanie Chisholm, 20, from Liverpool; Melanie Brown, 18, from Leeds; and Michelle Stephenson, 19, from Abingdon, Hertfordshire. "Melanie B: I started madly auditioning for summer seasons and West End show, going to London about three times a week. Mum would drop me off at the National Express coach station in Leeds at 6a.m. and then pick me up again at midnight. They were long days, but I didn’t care. I wanted a job really badly. I got The Stage paper every week and read it religiously. I had to find something in the end.'Melanie! Breakfast!’ I run downstairs. The latest Stages was lying on the kitchen table. Great. I noticed my mum had circled a couple of ads as usual. She used to mark the jobs she wanted me to go for and leave the paper open at that page. She knew what I was like, she couldn’t say, ‘Go for those jobs!’ So she’d wait for me to say, ‘That looks good. Oh, and you’ve circled it mum!’One of the ads was for a girl band. I thought, ‘Let’s see what it’s about.’ I used to go to a lot of auditions, for all kinds of different thing. You usually have to sing songs at auditions – something you’ve learnt and something they give you to do on the spot, to test how you really sing." "Melanie C: I was at an audition for a cruise ship when I noticed someone handing out flyers for a girl band audition. I thought: ‘This is it. This is the one.’ For the first audition I wore a lilac knitted little top, some black leggings I borrowed from a friend and my boots.""Victoria Adams: I read about the audition in The Stage. When I turned up there were loads and loads of girls there. The only other girl I remember from the first audition was Melanie C. I recognized her from other auditions and thought she always looked really fit. She was very friendly, too.""Geri Halliwell: I bought The Stage every single week. It was my one link to the chances I was looking for. I missed the first audition because I’d sunburnt my face skiing in Pyrenees, my face had swelled until I looked like the Elephant Man, but I’d ripped the advert out of The Stage and kept it for some unknown reason. Glancing at my reflection in the bedroom mirror, I scolded myself for being so negative. Then a scrap of newspaper caught my eyes. I had taped it to the mirror weeks earlier, after tearing it from The Stage."<>

The Workshop
Much of the project was down to the fore sight of the Herberts financial banker, a Surrey businessman called Chic Murphy, a tall, grey-haired cockney with a small cross tattooed in one ear.

A shadowy figure, Murphy was the third key part of the team known as Heart Management that gave the group their unusually well-starred in life. For although, Murphy was a multi-millionaire who earned his fortune from the music business, when he set up a management company with the American vocal group The Three Degrees, although this was certainly not how he made his fortune.

Murphy was closely involved with them that, for a while, he became know to insiders as “the Fourth Degree”. As he watched them performing night after night for anything up to 40 weeks a year, he would often get to wondering how much more successful a younger, fashionable girl group might become if they could apply themselves with a similar degree of professionalism to cracking the modern pop market. The Three Degrees’ Musical Director, Erwin Keiles, remembered Murphy trying to sell the idea to the group itself."Erwin Keiles: For ages he’d be saying to the girls: ‘You guys, you shouldn’t be working now. You should be using all your knowledge and stagecraft and business acumen to be managing a young girl group.’ That’s definitely where the idea for a girl group started. He kept on saying to them: ‘Take some of your money, let’s put it into a management company an let’s put a girl group together. You guys could be earning much more than you can now by using your knowledge ans skills to find and audition the right girls and then to teach them the whole stage act – singing and dancing.’ They couldn’t see it of course, because they aren’t business people."Putting together a young, all-girl group was clearly an idea whose time had come. Murphy felt out of his depth as a potential manager of such a group and out of touch with current trends, so it was agreed that while Bob supplied the management expertise, and Chris Herbert took care of the hands-on organization and development of the group, Murphy’s role would be to provide financial backing, which he duly did."Chic Murphy: You gotta think that if you can get five ordinary english girls - girl next door type, and at least the girls might buy the records, and um... the boys might buy the records."Murphy is no longer involved with The Three Degrees. According to some reports the group dumped him – a turn of events wich was already becoming recurring theme in this story before the Spice Girls had even properly met.

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