Spice Girls: 1. Wannabes

Eras

This episode explores the foundational years of the Spice Girls, tracing their journey from a series of disconnected auditions to a global p

Key takeaways

• Chris Herbert used a casting approach similar to the TV show 'Friends' to ensure a diverse range of characters in the band.
• The group originally performed as 'Touch' before rebranding to 'Spice' based on their first song, 'Sugar and Spice'.
• A calculated ruse involving a fake flu allowed the members to bypass Heart Management and attend a crucial session with Elliot Kennedy.
• Annie Lennox played a significant role in helping the members refine their specific stage personas, such as Baby Spice.
• The group's transition to Simon Fuller's management marked their evolution from a musical act to a global commercial brand.

Main topics

• The formation of the Spice Girls
• Audition processes in the 1990s
• Escaping Heart Management

Notable quotes

We made a lot of people eat their and words.

Conclusion

A nostalgic and detailed account of how strategic branding and individ

Transcript preview

Speaker 8 (0:00) This programme contains adult themes. In Speaker 7 (0:06) a few minutes time we have some work to do first of all and we say hello to the Spice Girls. Hello girls of Spice. Speaker 7 (0:18) You've very helpfully written down your names on a piece of paper. You're going to hold them up. So left to right. Melanie, see the one who likes football. Hello, Melanie. Speaker 2 (0:25) Gerry. Speaker 7 (0:25) Gerry, hello, Gerry. Speaker 2 (0:27) Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. Speaker 7 (0:29) Can you just talk one at a time? It's getting very confusing in radio land. Speaker 8 (0:32) It's the summer of 1996 and five young women are having the time of their lives. And Speaker 5 (0:38) now for the ball for week at number one, brace yourself for some genuine right of girl power. Speaker 1 (0:42) Yes, those crazy Spice Girls are top of the pops. Speaker 8 (0:49) Their first single has put them on the map, literally. They're topping charts all over the world. Girl group? Speaker 1 (0:56) Don't think so, never were. We made a lot of people eat their words. Speaker 8 (1:03) It's the beginning of a wild, unpredictable, sometimes overwhelming adventure. One that will transform these ordinary 20-somethings into a global phenomenon. Nobody had seen anything like that before. I mean, the Beatles had felt like 100 years before. Speaker 5 (1:19) This was new. It was exciting. Speaker 2 (1:28) They'd become fashion icons. I went to Wembley Market to buy a fake pair of platform trainers, a la Emma Bunton. Business moguls. They were on crisp packets. Speaker 8 (1:40) They were on lollipops. And an inspiration to generations of artists to come. Speaker 8 (1:48) It gave us a lot of Speaker 2 (1:49) happiness and the songs were just so incredible. In Little Mix, they were the benchmark of what to do and how to do it. Speaker 5 (1:58) Having a group like that to follow and obsess over was very important to me and my young gay boy identity. Speaker 8 (2:04) Baby me saw that and probably got the idea to do this. My name is Rosie Ramsey, and like just about every girl who grew up in the 1990s, I've spent countless hours singing these songs into a hairbrush in me mirror, experimenting with Union Jack adorned clothing, and debating which Spice persona I'd be best qualified to take over, I mean, should the opportunity ever arise. In other words, I've been training for this moment my whole life, and I cannot wait to go on this journey with you. Speaker 8 (2:36) Over the next four episodes, we're taking you inside the world of Spice, the story of those hectic, unstoppable years as told by friends, fans and the girls themselves, courtesy of some rare gems from the BBC archive. This is E-Rez, Spice Girls. Episode one, Wannabes. Speaker 8 (3:07) Take yourself back to 1994. Britpop is heating up and Cool Britannia is just around the corner. There's a sense that things are changing, but between swaggering guitar acts and boy band heartthrobs, it's still a man's world. Speaker 3 (3:22) The market for girl bands at the time when I was forming the Spice Girls was fairly non-existent. I was sort of looking at the landscape and identifying a gap there. Speaker 8 (3:33) That's Chris Herbert. Speaker 3 (3:35) I'm the founder and first manager for the Spice Girls. Speaker 8 (3:39) Back then, he worked with his dad, Bob. Together, they were heart management. And in the early months of 94, Chris was on a mission. Speaker 3 (3:47) form a girl band which was full of character, sassy, sexy, cool, that would kind of appeal to all members of the public, really. It Speaker 8 (3:58) was a new concept, one with some unlikely inspiration. Speaker 3 (4:07) At the time, mid-90s American sitcom Friends was massive. And I was kind of looking at that and going, actually, the way that's cast, they're almost like misfits. You wouldn't normally put all those characters in one room together. If you can cast a girl band with the same approach, then you can really cast the net wider. It will have a broader appeal. Speaker 8 (4:29) So in a time before social media, in a world where everyone's just a little bit disconnected, how do you put that group together? Speaker 1 (4:37) You know, there was a newspaper called The Stage magazine, so we'd all get our information for dance auditions, singing auditions, from this one magazine. Now you can go online and audition for whatever, whenever, but it was just this one hub that you went to to get your information. If Speaker 8 (4:56) you had showbiz ambitions, open auditions were a fairly democratic way to chase your dreams. journalist Miranda Sawyer remembers. It Speaker 5 (5:03) was a way of seeing people who had maybe a talent. I think people forget, because people were quite sniffy about Spice Girls at the beginning, it's actually they're all really talented. They can sing, they can present themselves, they've got charisma. And that is something that can be spotted in an open Speaker 8 (5:17) audition. Long before the Spice Girls were the Spice Girls, these were the chilly rehearsal rooms in warehouse studios where they first found each other. Speaker 5 (5:26) And I was asked by Q magazine to go along to an open audition for the film Tank Girl. So there was like a massive queue outside and I joined the queue diligently. And I was standing next to somebody that in the end turned out to be Victoria Beckham. And she was this really lovely girl who just said, I don't know anything about Tank Girl. She's like, I haven't got a clue. So I was like, OK, well, she's like, this is quite feisty. When I left. There was just loads of obviously young women sitting around and I saw Victoria and I said, oh, hi, I'm, you know, I'm going. And she was sitting down with this other girl who I realised later was Geri. And she was like, ah, Speaker 8 (6:05) did you have a good time? Around the same time, Chris Herbert was putting together his own audition. Speaker 3 (6:11) It's been widely reported that I put an advert in the stage newspaper. Yes, I did that, but I was reaching out in other ways as well. Wherever there were young, talented singer-performers, I would be there with my flyers and trying to recruit girls to come along to an audition to see whether we could get the numbers up in Speaker 1 (6:32) the Speaker 3 (6:32) hope Speaker 1 (6:33) that we could sit for some gold. And so we kind of knew each other from being on the scene, all of us. When we went to one particular audition, which was for a girl group called Touch, I was so happy to know that Mel C was there and Victoria was there. This Speaker 8 (6:46) story really begins on a side road. just off Oxford Street in London, and a studio called Danceworks. Speaker 3 (6:57) Dance Works was the first big audition that we did. I had a few hundred girls turn up to that, and the girls were queuing literally from outside along the street, up the stairs, past all the other studios. Before the audition started, I thought, you know, I'll just go and have a little recce and go down the stairs and have a look and see whether there's any standouts. And as I walked down, I saw this girl who later was known to me as