25 years of Spice Girls #Pinkinourlives #Spiceworld

The Spice Girls at 25: Here’s the story from A to Z

Released 25 years ago, on 8 July 1996, Wannabe spent seven weeks at number one in the UK and four in the US. In the process, it made five unknown girls – Victoria Caroline Adams, Melanie Janine Brown, Emma Lee Bunton, Melanie Jayne Chisholm and Geraldine Estelle Halliwell – global superstars.

So here’s a story from A to Z of how the band started, rose to fame, fell apart and put themselves back together again. Because which member of our LGBT+ Community does not love the Spice Girls?!?

Q is for Quitting

Half-way through the Spice World tour, on Mel B’s birthday, Geri Halliwell unexpectedly quit the Spice Girls.

Officially, the explanation was that she was suffering from exhaustion. But in her autobiography If Only, the singer said she’d been frustrated that the band had prevented her from giving a TV interview about surviving breast cancer in her teens.

“I couldn’t believe it. This was about saving lives,” she wrote. “I knew then it was over with the band. Ginger Spice was no more.”

“It was quite hard,” Emma Bunton recalled in Forever Spice. “We’d done a lot of shows in Europe but we were really quite nervous about [touring] America, so it was a bit of a kick in the teeth, really.”

“Missing Geri is like missing your mum,” reckoned Mel C. “You miss her, but not her nagging.”

And for Victoria, “there was one big plus – for the first time ever, I got to sing on Wannabe”.

Relationships were strained for several years, but the band eventually kissed and made up. Geri even apologised for quitting on the final date of the band’s 2019 reunion tour.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I left. I was just being a brat. It is so good to be back with the girls that I love.”