Although their cultural impact is sometimes understated, those who lived through the era remember that, from 1996 onwards, the Spice Girls were the dominant force in chart music. As Britpop lost its momentum, Sporty, Posh, Ginger, Scary and Baby Spice reminded millions of the joyful, life-affirming fun of pop.
But what some might have perceived as a carefully planned phenomenon was no contrivance. Without a series of tough decisions from the five, the Spice Girls might have been nothing more than a half-forgotten name, lost in an ocean of underperforming ‘90s pop acts.
Initially though, the assembly of the group that would become the Spice Girls was, in fact, entirely directed by the father-and-son management team of Bob and Chris Herbert.
Their company, Heart Management, was looking for a troupe of girls that could go toe-to-toe with the seemingly endless slew of boy bands that appeared to be popping up out of the ground every other week.
“At the time, boy bands saturated the market. The formula worked. Dad and our backer wanted to go down that route, but I wanted to reverse it,” Chris told Clic. “I thought a girl band – sassy, sexy and well put-together – could be more successful because it would appeal to female and male listeners. You’d double your audience.”
Uniformity wasn’t the objective. The Herberts planned to put together a team of girls that would each have a distinctive, standalone character and thus intrigue different sections of the market.
Eventually, after upwards of 400 hopefuls tried out for a place, the final selection of Geri Halliwell, Victoria Adams, Melanie Brown and Melanie Chisholm was locked in. Emma Bunton would replace the team’s initial pick of Michelle Stephenson as the fifth and final member.
Originally called Touch, the group would later be rechristened as Spice and then, eventually, the Spice Girls.
The five girls were all in. Moving in together to a three-bedroom house in Maidenhead just outside of London, the soon-to-be Spice Girls spent every day learning and revising a roster of pre-prepared songs and tightening up their dance routines.
Crucially though, the house-share forged an unbreakable friendship.
Being the oldest, Geri soon became the head of the household…
“[It] was lots of fun, albeit at times tricky,” Geri told Marie Claire. “I was the oldest at 22 and had already experienced living away from home, so the other girls probably found me to be quite bossy. Emma was the youngest at 18; she was like the little sister I never had, and I adored her immediately. Mel B and I became partners in crime, always getting into trouble together. Victoria and I had an equal, quite adult relationship. And Melanie C and I shared a childlike fascination for pop music and had big dreams of making it.”
Out of everything, it was this bond that was the most important outcome of the girls’ time living together. They soon realised that their collective strength was more than a mere marketing ploy. And so, a formidable decision-making machine was born.
Before long, the five girls seized the reins themselves, and began to dictate to their management what they wanted from them.
The road to Wannabe began when the girls pushed Heart to put on a showcase for the industry, in the hopes of securing a label contract and reeling in new songwriters.
The showcase was held at Shepherd’s Bush’s Nomis Studios in December 1994. Fortuitously, songwriter and producer Richard ‘Biff’ Stannard – then riding high after the success of his recently-penned Steam for East 17 – was also at Nomis that day for a scheduled meeting with Jason Donovan.
Catching wind of the showcase, and being intrigued by the chaotic energy of Melanie Brown (aka Scary Spice), he was lured into Spiceworld…
“When I got there I bumped into Chris Herbert who was the Spice Girls’ original manager,” Stannard told Music Week. “Next thing I know, Mel B was there, like, ‘Who are you?’ and she jumped on my back, and that was it! I mentioned I’d done Steam and the girls all sang it, dragged me into a room and did a three-song set just for me [Laughs]. It was love at first sight. As a gay man, too, what I saw in them wasn’t sexual, which I think was refreshing for them.”
Stannard was besotted by the Spice Girls, and rushed to tell his songwriting partner Matt Rowe that he had landed their dream project. The girls were promptly invited to Stannard and Rowe’s studio at London’s Strongroom to start working on new material. It was here that the group’s explosive first single was penned.
The first song the group worked on was the R&B-leaning Feed Your Love. However, the girls began to feel that the track was too adult in tone to serve as their launch single. Biff would have to bring something fresher to the table…
Stannard had noted the girls’ fierce and unashamed confidence. After all, it was one of the very things that had sold them to him in the first place. Watching them closely across the three-day writing session, he began to understand that their friendship was core to what the Spice Girls were.
The launch single, he concluded, should express the unstoppable power of the five when united.
“I think the only pre-planned thing with Wannabe was wanting to represent them as a band as well as the essence of what they were: that fearless, headstrong, fantastically intimidating essence,” Stannard told The Telegraph. “They were outspoken, right from the start.”
With this in mind, Rowe and Stannard conjured a backing track to try something out with. With a relatively straightforward chord sequence in B major, a staccato, Summer Nights-inspired central piano riff was built atop a 110bpm drum loop sequenced on Matt’s Akai MPC3000. Presented to the girls, they were given carte blanche to work out their respective lyrics and vocal melodies.
“They made all these different bits up,” Rowe told David Sinclair for his 2004 biography Wannabe. “Not thinking in terms of chorus, bridge or what was going to go where – just coming up with all these sections of chanting and rapping and singing. And then we just sewed it together. Kind of a cut-and-paste method.” By all accounts, the writing of Wannabe’s lyrics took under 30 minutes.
Wasting no time at all, Wannabe kicked off with the abrasively infectious ‘I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want’ section, welded to the jaunty riff. This tight, groove-driven intro then blossomed into the verse. A relatively stripped-back arrangement allowed the spotlight to be firmly held on the girls themselves.
As well as specifically introducing the five’s personalities and attitudes, the song expressed strongly the broader value of friendship over romance. The chorus stated directly to a prospective partner that their friendship was more important – and was something that no boy could get in the way of…
If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends
Make it last forever, friendship never ends
If you wanna be my lover, you have got to give
Taking is too easy, but that’s the way it is
As a song, Wannabe did two things: it cemented that the Spice Girls were essentially a five-headed hydra – they were a singular entity that was, almost paradoxically, made up of unique but inseparable individuals. On top of that, the song had a message that would resonate strongly with children.
While the more teenage-angled end of pop and R&B was often too complex and perhaps too sexually-charged, 8-year-old girls (and boys!) could directly relate to Wannabe’s straightforward expression of the value of friendship. After all, for kids, having loyal friends was the most important thing in the world.
It was also confidently female, and the very opposite of submissive. Here were five girls demanding prospective partners meet their requirements. The Spice Girls’ adoption of the feminist slogan of ‘Girl Power’ as a central mantra (which the world would become very familiar with over the next few years) was imbued within the lyric.
As the song neared its conclusion, Mel B devised a rap which directly introduced the Spice Girls’ particular quirks and focused the lens of the song’s bigger theme directly onto this friendship group…
So, here’s a story from A to Z
You wanna get with me, you gotta listen carefully
We got Em in the place who likes it in your face
You got G like MC who likes it on a
Easy V doesn’t come for free, she’s a real lady
And as for me, ha you’ll see
“I think [the lyrics] of Wannabe were written in about 15 minutes, we were just dicking around and as soon as we heard it we were like ‘This is us,’” Mel C told Vevo. “It’s an introduction to who we are as a band and the kind of chaos and mayhem that we create everywhere we go. So once we had that song we kind of knew we found our identity.”
By all accounts, the energy in the studio when making Wannabe was similar to the spontaneity of punk, as Stannard told The Telegraph, “It’s quite anarchic. There are a lot of critics who consider it a punk record because it’s quite wild, and the way it was recorded and written was like a punk song. It was in no way a contrived, crafted pop masterpiece that we sat down and specified. It was nothing like that – just a case of ‘these girls are bonkers and I love them. Let’s just record and listen and write a song and see what happens.’”
For the iconic ‘Zig-a-zig-ah’ line, Mel C told Billboard that “You know when you’re in a gang and you’re having a laugh and you make up silly words? Well we were having a giggle and we made up this silly word, zig-a-zig-ah. We were in the studio and it all came together in this song.”
Ahead of the completion of Wannabe, things were moving quickly behind the scenes. Growing industry buzz gave the girls the confidence to finally leave Heart Management and instead sign with artist manager Simon Fuller. Fuller was a shrewd tactician and, in July 1995, a five-album deal with Virgin Records was secured.
Virgin were sceptical, however, about the girls’ insistence that Wannabe should be their first single.
Its very unusualness – which would, in part, be a factor in its success – was too much of a gamble.
Perhaps a tweak to the mix would resolve their issues?
American producer David Way had a stab at remixing, but Way’s mix pivoted the track into R&B territory, far removed from the anarchic, stripped-back sound that the group had loved about the original demo. It was, in Halliwell’s words, “Bloody awful.”
Thankfully, Mark ’Spike’ Stent was able to corral the original mix into the version we now know and love.
“When they asked me to mix the Spice Girls’ Wannabe, others had already mixed it about five times,” Stent told Sound on Sound. “The problem was that the vocal balance hadn’t been quite sussed. It’s a very quirky pop record, and there’s not a lot going on with it, and my work was all about getting the vocals to sound right. It was quite tough to do, even though it only took six hours.”
Although still dubious, Virgin relented to overwhelming pressure from the group, held their breath, and put Wannabe out first.
They wouldn’t second-guess them again.
“Wannabe was either a hit or a miss, love or hate. It would either do everything or nothing. We felt, well, if nobody likes it then we have got other songs up our sleeves, but that was the one we wanted to release,” Halliwell was quoted as saying in Spice Girls: Real Life, Real Spice.
“I don’t think the label understood Wannabe, they wanted something else as the first single but the Spice Girls’ deal meant they had creative control,” Stannard told Music Week. “That’s quite a profound bit of information that I don’t think has been mentioned an awful lot. But I always loved Wannabe. I’m always eternally proud of it, but I ended up worrying I was going to be defined by it. For a few years, I was literally having A&R people say, ‘We want Wannabe 2’ – that’s not A&R! What they meant was they wanted something unique and special.”
A key ingredient in Wannabe’s success was its immediately iconic, Johan Camitz-directed video, in which the girls terrorise the upper-class guests of the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras, London. The one-take video was the definition of chaotic. It showcased the punk-like ferocity of the Spice Girls unchained, and perfectly matched the song’s spirit.
“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 said. “We invaded places and left people breathless. We had to bounce through the place singing Wannabe and sweeping away the cobwebs.”
Following its release on July 8th 1996, Wannabe would eventually top the charts in 37 countries, becoming the biggest-selling debut single for a girl group in chart history. Virgin breathed a sigh of relief, before going back to counting their earnings.
Selling seven million copies, Wannabe spent an incredible seven weeks at number one in the UK and four weeks atop the US charts. The Spice Girls had well and truly landed, and pop would never be quite the same again.
Wannabe’s enduring legacy has resulted in continual radio play in the three decades since its release, instantly recognisable as the Spice Girls’ signature song.
In 2014, research involving the University of Amsterdam and Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry ranked Wannabe as the most instantly recognisable song in its study. More than 12,000 participants took part in the Hooked On Music experiment, with listeners recognising the track in an average of just 2.29 seconds. Not bad for a song written in under 30 minutes. More information on how they were able to do that can be found here.
Thirty years on, and Wannabe is still as popular as ever.
“Wannabe was catching a moment and sharing it,” Halliwell told Marie Claire. “From the minute I met the other girls, I knew I had found my tribe. My passion for music and success was ignited and amplified; it was unified and strengthened with four other girls into world domination. We all had different strong points and personalities, yet we were so similar. This must be what girl power feels like.”
