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?!?

X is for King’s X

The video for Wannabe was supposed to be filmed in Barcelona, but when planning permission fell through the group decamped to the then-unused Midland Grand Hotel in London’s King’s Cross.

“The idea for the video was to recreate the same energy and dynamism that we showed when we crashed into record companies and did the frenetic hard sell,” Geri later wrote. “We invaded places and left people breathless. We had to bounce through the place singing Wannabe and sweeping away the cobwebs.”

The all-night shoot was freezing cold. If you look closely, you can see the band’s breath turning into condensation when they sing. The temperature had other effects too – the video was banned in some Asian countries because of the prominence of Brown’s nipples.

Virgin asked for it to be re-shot… but the band refused on the logic that they’d already spent £130,000 and “you can buy a house for that money”.