Pop music
Spice overkill
Marcus Berkmann
Well, so much for Girl Power. There's no spectacle quite like a pop backlash at full pelt, racing across the salt flats as though driven by Andy Green. Once it has started, no power on the earth can possibly stop it, although, to be fair, it's not as though anyone seems to have tried.
The Spice Girls are enduring what so many instantly successful pop acts have faced over the years: the abrupt withdrawal of the goodwill that created that success in the first place. Sales of the new album are, at this stage, relatively disappointing. The new single stayed at No. 1 for only one week. Their manager, Simon Fuller, who apparently took too much pleasure in being constantly described as a `Svengali', has been sacked. Gary Glitter, recently unwigged as perhaps the wrong sort of Internet enthusiast, may or may not have been edited out of the forthcoming Spice Girls movie. Geri Halliwell, or Ginger Spice, who may or may not be 25 — all people currently sitting in a pub believe her to be at least twice that — has taken over the band's management. The cracks are showing, and most journalists are doing their best to widen them. It's what we're for, and it's too good an opportunity to miss.
The Spice Girls have certainly made enough mistakes. The list of terrible prod- ucts personally endorsed by the quintet lengthens by the hour, to the point that any fizzy drink or cardboard snack product they haven't waved at a passing camera could be said to stand out from the crowd. Fuller also kept them permanently busy on pro- motional duties, when all instinct showed that a month or two without Spice activity would have been, for most people, a blessed release. We need our stars to come and go because, to be brutal, we get bored of them. But Fuller's management policy seems to have been based purely on the short term. Grab as much money as you can now. Keep it going as long as you are able. You don't know how long it's going to last.
The overkill probably reached its apotheosis with ITV's An Audience with the Spice Girls, broadcast last Saturday to moans of agony from across the nation. This format best suits ageing comedians who haven't much left to offer but are so universally loved that no one minds. Younger performers usually look out of place, as though they've been handed some lifetime achievement award before they have had the lifetime to achieve anything. The poor Spices were pitifully out of their depth. That they should have been set up for such humiliation was beyond belief. Fuller was sacked the day after the record- ing, which may have been 24 hours too late.
So let's look at it another way. The album may have been slow to start, but most of its target audience (the under 12s) will be getting it for Christmas, so watch sales rise in the second half of December. The single (which I rather liked) spent only one week at No. 1 but that one week made the Spice Girls the only act ever to reach No. 1 with each of their first five singles: not an unimpressive feat, however you spin it. The new album's negative reviews bal- ance the first album's excessively positive reviews: they are both much of a muchness, in fact, but that is not so interesting a story. And Svengali Fuller is out of the door, with a rumoured £10 million in his pocket, a pay-off that will seem like a bargain if the Spices, under their own steam, manage to prolong their career much beyond mid- February.
Nonetheless, the damage has been done, and it will be fascinating to see whether they survive it. For the moment, the back- lash continues to pick up speed. Only a brave man (or woman) would stand in its way.
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