Rethinking the Spice Girls: How Generated Girl Power Got Real


The girls had already made enough noise in the industry that they were in a position to recruit new managers, partly thanks to a showcase they did. They settled on Simon Fuller, who was directing Scottish icon Annie Lennox at the time. They met him in his office in March 1995 and started shouting “Wannabe”.

“It was quite unusual for these five young girls to come into the office confidently and say, ‘You have to handle us, and we’re not leaving until you agree,'” Fuller said in a recent interview. That energy was so contagious.”

“It just clicked,” Chisholm said, from the Girls’ perspective. “When we met her, I felt like she understood.”

Instead of turning the Girls into clones of each other, as the Herberts intended, Fuller told them to focus on who they really are and just flip. “If you love pink and fluffy and your mom is your best friend, go pink 24/7, always fluffy on you. If you’re a rowdy northern girl with no air and no grace, sexy, dominant, and loud, then that’s it,” Fuller explained. This idea came about in Fuller 2014 BBC documentaryHe was inspired by Lennox, who, after meeting the girls, encouraged them to “dough” their personalities.

The approach suits the Spice Girls perfectly.

Chisholm said the group’s “girl power” message also focused on the group: “At first we wanted to make music, have fun, travel the world and do all those fun things. But the messages gave us more motivation. In the mid-90s we were expressing ourselves as young women. It was fueling the fire.”

Their first single, “wanting” was released in the UK on July 8, 1996, and reached #1 in over 20 countries by the end of that year. Released in November 1996, their debut album “Spice” peaked at #1 and was nominated for the prestigious Mercury Award for best British or Irish album of the year.



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