After the release of Wannabe on 8 July 1996, the Spice Girls briefly became the biggest band on the planet. So what did it mean to be a devoted fan of Ginger, Sporty, Posh and co?

Twenty years ago , on 8 July 1996, the Spice Girls released their debut single, Wannabe. Within weeks it was No 1 in 31 countries, and the five had become more than pop stars they were archetypes: Scary, Sporty, Posh, Ginger and Baby. Its hard to imagine the 1990s now without the Spice Girls, and even harder to remember what kind of role models tweenage girls had before the band came along and mesmerised 10-year-olds the world over with their entry-level feminism, packaged under the name Girl Power.

Girl Power a term repurposed by Geri Halliwell after she spotted it on the cover of an album by the pop duo Shampoo was from the start a fan-based movement, and many of the fans were extraordinarily young. It wasnt unusual to find toddlers piping: Ill tell you what I want, what I really, really want and what they really wanted was to be part of the group. Failing that, they spent their parents money on the largest range of merchandise ever endorsed by a band, from cameras to crisps, deodorant to chocolate.

Theres nothing like a fan movement led by young girls to get adults backs up, and in this case the mercenary tone of it all riled them as much as the music. Theres a sort of arrogant sexism about what preteen girls listen to, notes columnist and author Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, who was a Ginger fan. It instilled in us the importance of being girls together, but [adults] look down on what the teenyboppers are listening to.

Shes not wrong. Much of the music press hated the group; Liam Gallagher let it be known that he was prepared to chin them (their response: Come and have a go if you think youre hard enough). I even wrote in the Guardian at the time: The Girls will undoubtedly be insulted by this, but they have more in common with Big Fun a faceless boy-trio who had some feeble hitlets around 1989 than they think. Both groups have a showbiz tang to them rather than the up-from-the-streets feel that is still crucial if a band is to be taken seriously. That was me.

OK, so I was wrong. But when I wrote that, authenticity was an important consideration when weighing up a bands prospects, and to me the Spice Girls were authentic fakes. They had been assembled after answering an ad in the theatrical magazine the Stage, while the title Wannabe had been lifted from the nickname given to Madonnas followers a decade before. They seemed so contrived in fact, the planning behind the launch was virtually military-level, affirms Selina Webb, then editor of the trade magazine Music Week. They were keen to have a piece in Music Week, so Geri and Scary came up to say hello because theyd been told to. But they did it in a charming, blow-you-away sort of way. The tried and tested way of breaking a band was to get excited about the music first, but with the Spice Girls, you got excited about them as people first. And they were unstoppable. They clocked up hit after hit nine No 1 singles and three top two albums, all selling in the kind of numbers that would make modern-day label executives weep.

The fans themselves, now in their 20s and 30s, remember things a little differently. Most fans were so young that the Spice Girls were the first band they had ever liked, and what they saw was something more transformative than just Ginger and the gang coining it from merchandise. Empowerment may not have been in their vocabularies, but when they saw the Wannabe video shot in one take at Londons then-derelict Midland Grand hotel, where the Girls rampaged through the rooms, jostling old people an ember of rebellion was kindled.

Mima Chovancova, a Slovakian who is now half of the Brighton-based DJ duo Tesla Girls was six she first noticed the band. It was my way into thinking about being a girl, and why that makes me different in terms of opportunities and standards. In Slovakia we didnt have young pop stars like that at the time the stars were middle-aged men or little kids, so when the Spice Girls came, it was just so powerful and happy and diverse. Each and every one of them was different. They were all mates.

Their merchandise wasnt available in Slovakia, but Chovancovas parents ferried things back from business trips to Paris. Her collection included Baby-style platform sneakers Emma Bunton was her favourite perfume, deodorant (horrible) and the entire set of Spice dolls. But the relentless merchandising takes on a different tenor when fans talk about owning lunchboxes and perfume: it wasnt money thrown away, it was a link to the group themselves, and to Girl Power.

I was most upset, because they did Impulse body spray and Ive never smelled anything as good again, says Elle Exxe, an electropop artist who was five when the Spice Girls launched. It had an orange top and their logo with different kind of fabrics. I was fascinated by how, even though they all had different personalities, they came together and became a unique brand.

Some fans were influenced in more formative ways. You have only to read the DenDen forum, run by and for Spice fans, to glean the impact they continue to have on some admirers. Currently, theres a lively discussion about whos to blame for a much-rumoured Spice reunion falling through. Amid much toing and froing, a disconsolate individual called Mads writes: It was meant to be a happy anniversary, and now its becoming the saddest anniversary ever. Not only we dont get a reunion, but apparently some of them are having arguments because of this anniversary.

Few fans are still invested to that extent, but they acknowledge the bands importance to their adolescence. Ciara Green was a tracksuit-wearing 11-year-old on an estate in Belfast and remembers her delight at seeing Sporty in Adidas get-up. Ginger, though, spoke to her most clearly: She was loud and obnoxious, and there werent many women like that on TV. I knew to an extent that I was a lesbian but I wasnt sure I had an affiliation with loudmouthed, tomboy women, and Geri was quite loud and had the qualities associated with men. Women werent allowed to be like that in public and to see them on Live and Kicking and getting completely arseholed seemed funny and brilliant. That ladette culture they were part of helped me to accept the way I was.

Joe Parry, a music publicist in London, remembers them helping him to acknowledge he was gay. I think it was the sense that they didnt care what other people thought. When I was a kid I was quite loud, and people didnt know how to take me because I was obnoxious. But the Spice message was about access and equality and liking your mum, and all that meant something to me. I wouldnt say they implicitly helped me to come out, but the underlying message of acceptance and empowerment did help, in a way. I was a fan until the very end.

Many fans deserted the band before they split in 2000. Halliwell had departed acrimoniously in 1998, exposing the friendship never ends bedrock as perilously brittle. It was the worst day of journalist Tina Edwardss childhood: I burst into tears and asked my mum to tell me it wasnt true. I was bawling my eyes out all the way to school. She followed the subsequent solo careers out of habit, but felt no emotional engagement: what was broken was broken. George Pringle, now a photographer, echoes the betrayal she felt when Ginger exited. I unquestioningly loved them, but maybe their only success is that they taught us about sisterhood, she muses. It was about sisterhood, but they couldnt even get along when Geri left was when the spell evaporated.

Yet all these fans confess to still knowing the words to the songs, and see the Spice years as formative. Because it all happened before social media, which enabled girls to organise into fandoms, there are no Instagram or Vine clips documenting gaggles of girls bawling along to Wannabe outside hotels and airports, but the memories will be with them for life.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/07/the-spice-girls-at-20-women-werent-allowed-to-be-like-that-in-public

The discrepancy between what nutritionists say is healthy and what the general public believes comes from our susceptibility to clever marketing

Many of the discrepancies between what the public sees as healthy and how experts define it can be attributed to marketing.

Take granola and granola bars. They are made of things that we can all agree are healthy: oatmeal, nuts, fruit. And there are endless commercials to remind us of this. Think wholesome farmers standing in sunny wheat fields, or well-coiffed moms feeding their grinning toddlers. What the commercials never share with us is that the thing that makes our favorite granolas form crunchy clusters, or hold its shape in the form of big, thick, uniform bars, is sugar.

I suspect that this gap between messaging and reality is whats behind the results of a New York Times-led study this week showing that there are many foods where normal Americans and nutritionists diverge in terms of assessing how healthy they are. In surveying 672 nutritionists and 2,000 registered US voters, the polling firm Morning Consult asked the question, Is _____ healthy? and filled the blank with 100 different foods.

For certain foods the answer was obvious: kale, olive oil, almonds, carrots and apples are healthy, everyone agrees. Others were uniformly considered unhealthy, like soda, cookies, french fries and ice cream. But there were a lot of foods where opinions differed. Marketing appears to have confused things so much that theres disagreement over what it even means for a food to be healthful. Does it mean we could lose weight while eating it? Does it mean it wont give us diabetes if we consume it often? Does it mean it supplies nutrients to us in sufficient quantities?

Perhaps if we relied less on ads and more on actual information from actual experts, we would have a clearer picture.

Take SlimFast, one the most widely recognized weight loss shakes ever to hit the market. The number of Americans who believe SlimFast is healthy outnumber the experts two to one, according to the study. That might sound strange milk, water, sugar, oil and a thickening agent are the top five ingredients until you remember that SlimFasts last reported marketing budget was around $17m. Thats a lot of money, all intended to convince the buying public that being slim is the way to be healthy. (Spoiler: not necessarily.)

Also, consider frozen yogurt, the success of which has less to do with TV commercials and more to do with the number of shops selling it across the country. Marketed as a ubiquitous healthy alternative to ice cream, fro-yo shops have popped up everywhere not because theyre healthy, but because theyre cheap to open and can earn five times what it cost to produce a single serving. And why is it so cheap? Because fro-yo isnt actually frozen yogurt at all, in the traditional sense. Its often sugar, powdered milk and artificial flavoring.

Weve been allowing fluffy, sponsored media pieces and pervasive ads to dictate the public perception of healthy food for far too long. Thats why healthier dinner options, like quinoa, sushi and hummus, which lack corporate marketing machines, havent caught on nationally while winning the love of experts nationwide. Just because Good Morning America hasnt touted a foods health benefits doesnt mean its not worth adding to your repertoire.

Its time to truly develop an appreciation and a value for what food is and what it can and should do: provide us with energy, nourish our bodies to thrive, and be a healthy way to bond with our loved ones. And we need to prioritize those qualities over taking pretty packaging and slick advertising at face value, by remembering that what we see on TV is intended to sell us an image in hopes of profit, not educate us in hopes of giving us strong, healthy bodies.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/06/healthy-diet-nutritionists-mass-marketing-advertisements

Image copyright Alamy

On 7 July 1996, a single from five unknown girls – Victoria Adams, Mel Brown, Emma Bunton, Melanie Chisholm and Geri Halliwell – was released and made them household names around the world.

The Spice Girls’ Wannabe was the UK number one single for seven weeks and in February 1997, topped the US Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks. Two decades on, the group’s influence continues to be identifiable in popular culture – and in some unexpected ways. From how TV and newspapers cover music, to the way stars brand themselves, the Spice Girls influenced many of the rules for 21st Century pop stars.

Before 1996, manufactured groups were expected to obey management and music label orders. Even though the five were put together by Bob and Chris Herbert, the group soon decided to replace the father-and-son management team with Simon Fuller. And against record company advice, they also chose their first single.

“If they decided they wanted to do something, then that’s what was going to happen,” says Wannabe’s co-writer Richard “Biff” Stannard.

Visual artist Liz West, a Guinness Book of Records entrant for the world’s largest collection of Spice memorabilia (nearly 5,000 items), agrees.

“When it was suggested to people what their first single should be, they had already chosen it,” she says.

Wannabe’s release came the year after the battle for chart dominance between the all-male Britpop groups Blur and Oasis. Timing was ripe for an opinionated girl group, says Paul Gorman, the first writer to interview them for Music Week.

Image copyright PA

“Britpop was a bunch of blokes going through their dads’ record collections,” he says.

Wannabe’s nursery-rhyme-style hypnotic chant secured a broad coalition of fans including those hard-to-get pre-teens who the music industry had previously considered as a small market.

And in the following years, in the run-up to the millennium, the influence of the Spice Girls on this audience, led to the emergence of other acts aimed at a younger market. As a result, acts such as S Club 7, B*Witched, Aqua, Hanson, Steps and Billie Piper started to top the charts.

Kim Glover, the manager of girlband B*Witched, who had four number one singles in the slipstream of Spice success says: “They were very different from what had gone before them. Wannabe jumped out the radio – from the very first bar, you were hooked.”

Image copyright Reuters

The single was a springboard for 80m global album sales, and the now ingrained slogan “Girl Power”.

Yet not everyone was convinced. Girl Power, according to Gorman, was “in many respects an empty phrase”.

“But it did mark a change in the way strong young British women saw themselves in the ’90s and reflected the rise of ladette culture.”

“Half of it was a marketing man’s slogan,” says Liz West. “But as an 11-year-old girl, it instilled confidence in me.”

Glover is more positive. “I personally loved it. As a woman in the music business, it resonated with me.”

Many current female stars such as Adele, Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Watson have revealed they were and still are fans.

Radio 1 DJ Jo Whiley told last month’s Radio Times that Adele had Spice Girls photos on her fridge. She sang Spice Up Your Life at her June Amsterdam gig.

“Adele and other female stars would have been brought up in a world where you couldn’t avoid them. Mums, grandparents, the whole family went to the concerts,” says West.

The diverse identities of Posh, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Ginger (as nicknamed by Top of the Pops magazine) were also a selling point, and a departure from previous bands.

Image copyright Alamy

“They had five personalities and you could connect to one or more of them,” says West. “They didn’t dress the same like previous girl bands like The Supremes in their sequinned gowns. Even The Beatles dressed the same when they started.”

Mainstream media were receptive to these personalities.

“UK tabloids were at their zenith,” remembers Alan Edwards, their publicist at the peak of their success. “The Sun was registering a 4.5m daily sale. All five girls grew up with pop gossip and instinctively understood it.”

This media interest would balloon when Adams started dating Manchester United footballer David Beckham. Following Charles and Diana’s divorce, tabloid interest in a Celebrity Power Couple had Edwards working, as he now admits, “around the clock”.

“The mix of pop music and football – the two modern religions – was a potent one. You have to go back to England captain Billy Wright dating Joy from The Beverley Sisters in the late ’50s for anything like it.

“The thrones they sat on at their wedding may have been done tongue in cheek, but Buckingham Palace even received letters from all over the world addressed to David and Victoria.”

Such fascination continues with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Jay-Z and Beyonce and many other high-wattage couples. This dismays some, including Gorman.

Image copyright PA

“They inaugurated the era of cheesy celebrity obsession which pertains today,” he says. “There is lineage from them to the Kardashianisation not only of the music industry, but the wider culture.”

Their girl-next-door appeal predated TV stations’ realisation that they could create instant pop stars with Pop Idol, American Idol, The X Factor and The Voice. Girls Aloud, Fifth Harmony, Little Mix and One Direction were all formed through talent shows.

Stars had used brand endorsements but the Spice brand was the first to propel the success of the band.

Martin Brooks, now a marketing expert at Havas London, explains: “Before, artists like Michael Jackson would see a Pepsi deal as eroding his or her credibility for money. Whereas The Spice Girls’ musical credibility was never an issue. The question was, ‘How can we make as much money as quickly as possible and how can we use brands to drive that fame?'”

There was Spice branding on more than 100 products including cameras, scooters, crisps and a Pepsi promotion where 20 ring pulls collected from cans would earn fans the CD of an unreleased Spice track.

“Such was their power that people would happily spend 8-10 on fizzy drinks to get a free CD,” says Brooks who worked on it. “It was by far the most successful promotion Pepsi had done.”

According to Edwards: “The band was a brand and comfortable with it too.”

West adds that “you could buy their cards at Clintons, their soft drinks at Asda, their magazine at the newsagents, their book at Waterstone’s, their record at HMV and their T-shirt at Our Price.”

This level of product endorsement has since been exploited by other stars such as Beyonce, Justin Bieber and sports stars like Andy Murray and Beckham (both managed by Fuller).

Endorsement is a key way for pop stars facing a decline in record sales to make money. Glover points out that “the Spice branding was a real step forward and is a mega-important marketing stream which I open to my artists constantly”.

For all that modern stars from Katy Perry to Lionel Messi exploit brand endorsements and attract tabloid coverage, the scale of the Spice Girls’ breakthrough in 1996 is unlikely to be repeated – at least not by a music act.

“If someone says the words ‘I Tell You What I Want’ to me they go into the whole song,” says Richard Stannard. “I don’t know if One Direction will have that in 20 years’ time. There will never be something that big again. It was like Harry Potter.”

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