E4: Thatcher Spice Transcript

Oct 11, 2021

[Cold Open]

Cheryl: It speaks to something that I find really tragic about when Spice Girls became famous. Everything they did still ended up on the internet, but they weren't aware that the internet was going to haunt them forever.

 

Spice Invaders Theme Song: [over trumpet music] It’s got theme song vibes. Like danceable, funky. [Laughter]. So 90s. Girl power. Spice Invaders.

 

Steph: This week, what are we talking about? 

 

Cheryl: Well, we're covering December 1996 to February 1997. But because history is messy, we're only covering select events during that time, and they all feature weird British stuff. 

 

Sinead: Yeah, so as the girls continued their ascent, at the end of ‘96 and into ‘97. The machinations of their team are really coming together. Fuller and the Spice Girls media strategy is essentially that they want to talk to everyone: weird conservative magazines, lefty newspapers, tabloids, the works. According to Matt Fitzgerald, who was their press officer at Virgin, he said “if a story in a market leading tabloid such as the Sun can reach 30 million people, well, there were 30 million reasons why we wanted the girls to feature there” 

 

Elyse: Did you say the person's name was Muff Fitzgerald?

 

[laughter]

 

Sinead: That is correct.

 

Elyse: No further questions.

[laughter]

 

Sinead: So, yeah. Further to this strategy in December of 96. The girls did an interview for Spectator, which is an upmarket right wing political magazine in the UK. The journalist who conducted the interview, Simon Montefiore, had a bit of a reputation for getting celebrities to admit to unfashionable political opinions, and according to David Sinclair in his biography about the band “Wannabe”, “the result was a masterful piece of political and social satire. The overall effect of the article was not only to caricature the girls as a bunch of celebrity airheads, sounding off on subjects far beyond their area of competence, but also to lampoon the notion of the pretentious journalist over-interpreting his interviewees opinions.” So for this piece, a caricature was created of the girls in the political cartoon style. If you have your Spice Girl recording chat open.... This was the political cartoon they ran to accompany the article. 

 

Group: Oh my god. 

 

Elyse: This is offensive, like as a woman, and as a person with eyes. It's terrible.

 

Steph: I don't even know where to begin. So all the girls are wearing little skimpy shorts and various platforms. And their boobs are just - just ginormous.

 

Elyse: That was the word that was going through my mind too.

 

Steph: Just truly like, various shape water balloons put on a pencil drawing, it's a pencil drawing of the girls. And they all like, their legs are kind of drawn as though they have a nasty case of rickets too.

 

Elyse: They do look rickety! They’re so weird. And I think another interesting thing is they really emphasize their mouths, which I mean, like, one, could be like a sex thing. But also, if they're getting criticized for being too loud and too outspoken, it would make a lot of sense. 

 

Cheryl: See what I also found really bizarre. But this image, especially if you do character work, like the Spice Girls are a gold mine, but the only way you can tell who the five of them are in this image is their hair. 

 

Elyse: That is so true.

 

Megan: I just find it really upsetting. 

 

Elyse: Yeah, what do you find upsetting about it?

 

Megan:  It's just, it's dehumanizing. Sort of like, I don't know.

 

Steph: It kind of….it's weird because it's taken away all of their characters that they built. And they're all just these like pencil drawn whatever's with different hair. It's just taken away their entire person. 

 

Megan: Sinead, did this ever hit mainstream media? Like do we have any responses? Anyone else to this?

 

Cheryl: Oh yeah. So while this piece was technically meant to be a caricature, this is the piece where the girls make several shocking political pronouncements. They admitted reportedly with enthusiasm that they were eurosceptics, so the prototype for sort of the pro-Brexit voter and proud Thatcherites. Geri was quoted as saying, “We Spice Girls are true Thatherites. Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology, girl power.”

[sigh]

 

Cheryl: And I think we need to take a moment and talk about what a fucking stupid move this was. It's remarkable that it did not destroy their career. As we still know today conservatism is historically super uncool. It's a bit like someone today saying they're a diehard Trump fan or Trump supporter.

Margaret Thatcher was so hated for a bajillion reasons but one that stands out is that she presided over the death of British manufacturing, a sector that employed millions of people, while actively trying to antagonize and destroy unions and other groups that were trying to protect it, using British police and troops to antagonize union actions and beat up workers. Mass unemployment followed, especially in northern manufacturing cities like Glasgow, Liverpool and Sheffield. And while this was going on, her party was also continually cutting social services which was compounding the dire conditions for working class families.

 

Sinead: She also dabbled in racist rhetoric, famously stating that British people were afraid that their country was being “swamped by people of a different culture”, which is a deeply ironic sentiment coming from a leader of the British empire.

 

Elyse: So in the wake of that Spectator article, apparently the girls were like, really, really furious with her. So like Geri felt that she was very much in her element declaring that Margaret Thatcher was the original Spice Girl because she rose from humble beginnings, like Thatcher did to Prime Minister, that she really sort of thought that it was emblematic of women rising against the odds, but she says the other girls were extremely angry at being labeled conservatives, “particularly Mel C, who was an out and out labour voter from working class Liverpool, Victoria leaned further to the right than me, Emma was apolitical, while Mel B came across as a complete anarchist.” So clearly, it was not a popular view within the group. It was pretty divisive. 

 

Megan: If they didn't all agree, why would you want to be on record saying it?

 

Sinead: I think there was, I think they were caught off guard, I don't think that they were prepared for the interview that they were going to have. It was part of that strategy that we mentioned earlier, which was just that they were trying to be interviewed by everyone.

And Victoria and Geri were quite eager to talk about politics, whereas the rest of them weren't really as much. So like, the Girls reaction was pretty mixed. They didn't allege that any of the quotes were inaccurate, but they said that they didn't like the way the journalists had framed them. He had tried to present their opinions as representative of the whole group, when in actual fact, the most damning quotes were supplied by Victoria and Geri alone. Emma contributed very little to the interview, and she later insisted that she had no intention of voting either way in the upcoming election, and Mel B, like Geri said, in her biography, described herself at the time as an anarchist, said the piece was, “twisted beyond belief”. And while the journalist who wrote this piece claimed that he had deliberately sidelined Mel B in the interview, because, “she didn't know anything about anything, so I had to tell her to shut up”

Sooooo that some misogynoir, and so yeah. Mel B in that interview, absolutely did dissent, and she was just ignored, and they just went, I think they wanted to mess with the band as much as possible, because they looked down on them. I mean, that caricature is a perfect example of them, like not seeing them as human beings or valid. And yeah, they wanted to put them in their place and just be like, look at these dummies, and they knew that them saying they loved Thatcher, like it being represented like that would cause a much bigger scandal than if they had said, Well, two of them like Thatcher, and the rest of them don't. That's not a good headline. 

 

Elyse: I think it's so interesting, too, because in that interview, it's not like they just talked about Thatcher. They also asked, should Britain ever join a single European currency? What is the future of the monarchy? What do you think of the class system? And yeah, it's just like, Why on earth would you talk to them about that? And obviously, it was the intent of the piece, but really in depth questions. 

 

Megan: Do you think his goal was to create like, a scandal just for more views? Or was he actually trying to like, bring down the Spice Girls by fixing them into a negative? Do you know what I mean? Like did he hate them that much? Or was it all just for clicks? 

 

Elyse: Like it's an interesting question, because I saw the way that he positioned to the article, at least to their publicist was that he wanted to take a tongue in cheek look at British politics and international affairs through the eyes of five young women who he reasoned, knew nothing about it, which on the one hand, you're like, okay, that could be interesting. It's basically getting a lay person except the lay person has a lot of celebrity clout. But that official pitch is obviously, I think, really different from his actual intent. That's the spin. 

 

Cheryl: I also think that like, at this point in time, having the Spice Girls in your magazine period sells issues. Having your December issue, which is a fairly big time for advertisers, you want your December issue to sell. His goal here is to sell papers, if he already has a reputation for getting unsavory political opinions, then like so be it if that's what happens. 

 

Sinead: And I also definitely think there was like, they were above them kind of attitude from him from the paper from much of the coverage following the first meta-piece talking about this piece in The Times of London as a response called the girls, “queens of the bare midriff and pierced nostril”. And that the “pouting group undermined any credibility they had talking about Thatcher”.

Elyse: Wow, that is so dismissive and diminutive.

 

Cheryl: It's also frustrating because like, it's serious enough to cover as news. But it's not serious enough for us to say, like, take these young women seriously. You know, so we get this thing where we're like, we get to laugh at them being dumb, but like, they're also like serious and therefore it's like newsworthy, and it's really damning, I think, for both ways is that like, they’re either smart enough to take seriously or not. You're failing both ways. 

 

Steph: I feel like 25 years later, the same shit is still happening to female artists. 

 

Megan: Oh, that quote is pretty much just like they're a body without a brain in it.

 

Cheryl: This article actually sends them into like stratospheric levels of public consciousness. They go from this band, but like teen girls have posters up in their rooms. And you know, it's really popular with the under 25, set to proper movers and shakers who are being discussed by, you know, major news columnists and elected officials. One Labour MP Michael Connor de fer Falkirk East was quoted as saying “perhaps the Spice Girls are the last vestige of at self interest and self gratification”. And it also causes a lot of MPs to chase them down.

 

Sinead: It's interesting, like, what happened actually, that really pushed this issue further was during the Brit Awards, which is just a couple of months after this article comes out, Melanie C ended up seated next to a high profile member of the Labour Party, this guy named Peter Haines. Mel got into conversation with him and insisted they were labour voters, which prompted Hanes to invite the band for a tour of British Parliament. And so this was announced to the media following the Brit Awards, and the girl said they wanted to encourage their younger fans to get involved in politics. Hanes when asked directly by the Daily Mail for comment said “The girls didn't want to be seen as Thatcherites or as conservatives”. 

 

Elyse: I do wonder if what they said had any impact on sort of the political zeitgeist at the time, like if there were any votes changed, if there were any, you know, young women that heard that the Spice Girls loved Thatcher and reexamined. Like I have a hard time believing that that would be the case, but I'd be curious to know if it had any actual impact outside of their careers. 

 

Sinead: Well, it's kind of hard to say because Tony Blair, and the Labour Party ended up winning in a landslide very shortly after those comments were made, but I don't think that was reflective of their influence one way or the other. It was reflective of how much Thatcher was just hated and also that the conservatives had been in power in the UK for a long time when they lost that election. I think their core fans, when that article came out, were too young to even vote would be my supposition. But what happened is then all of a sudden, their parents and grandparents and just older adults, all of a sudden were as aware of them and this comes at a time where they're shooting to fame, like this is two months after the Spice album is released, like they're doing so well on the charts. They're everywhere like commercially, and then now they're also in  the political papers, it just solidified they're like the beginning of their reign.

 

[Music]

 

Sinead: At the end of February 1997, the girls were back in the spotlight in the UK again, this time at the Brit Awards. Similar to the Grammys, these awards are given through a vote by industry peers and it's like a super glamorous event, so obviously they brought their tabloid A-game. Before the show the Brit pop / teen pop rivalry which we have talked about before added fuel to the fire with notably violent Liam Gallagher of Oasis. He told the press he wouldn't attend the BRIT Awards if the Spice Girls were in attendance because he'd smack them and if you don't know about Oasis... Liam and his brother Noel are infamous for their feuds and antics particularly with each other but also with other people and they definitely like to get violent sometimes so...not an illegitimate threat…. given the source. 

 

Ashley: I just think it's so funny because this is the band that did Champagne Supernova and like, Wonderwall. Chill  stoner hanging out with your friends like after the bar or whatever music and it's like no, they're like threatening to assault the Spice Girls. Okay guys.

[laughter]

 

Sinead: Because they don't like pop like, there's actually no reason for like, not like I said they're both  infamous for getting into feuds with other musicians. But in this particular case, I mean with many cases with them, there's literally no reason they just don't like that they're successfully making pop music 

 

Steph: Which is funny because like Wonderwall is just as popular as Spice Girls music in that regard, we all like Wonderwall.

Megan: Yeah, like he's on some musical high ground with Bach and Mozart.

 

Steph: Yeah exactly...it’s the same shit

Sinead: Honestly, the Gallagher's absolutely think they’re on the same level of Bach and Mozart just to be clear, they absolutely believe that.

Um, so yeah, when the girls took home their second award of the night for Best British Single for Wannabe, which is a huge award, Mel C told him in front of the entire British public: “Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.” That was her acceptance speech. And I think we have a video of it that Ashley has queued up.

[Audio plays of the Spice Girls’s acceptance speech at the BRIT Awards]

 

Victoria: Wow. Once again, we wasn't expecting one award, let alone two, but once again a big big thank you to everybody out there, thanks very much.

 

Emma: I’m absolutely gobsmacked, but now we know that pop is back!

 

Mel B: Right, well I want to say a big thank you to Matt and Biff out there, and everybody that's been involved with the Spice Girls and you know, you never know what's gonna happen.

 

Emma and Mel B: And Absolute!

 

Mel B: Peace.

 

Geri: I think I'd like to thank all the independent small radio stations out there, cuz they’re the ones that played our records, so thank you very much. Without you and the fans, we’re nothing.

Mel C: I just want to say, Liam, come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!

 

Mel B: Yeahhh!!

 

[laughter]

 

Ashley: I love her little cheeky expression for that too.

 

Sinead: I love Geri having the most pragmatic thank you, which is that she's like “I have been building this band and I know that those independent radio stations are what helped us get here.” Like it's so, she's absolutely right.

Also at the BRIT Awards, they won Best British video for Say You’ll Be There. And unfortunately, Geri had a wardrobe malfunction. When she was accepting the award, she slipped on her sparkly red strapless gown, which exposed her breast to the host and to some of the audience. And obviously this became a feeding frenzy for tabloids. There were headlines like, quote: “Spice Girls when two big ones at pop super show.” And according to the Sinclair biography about the band, quote: “Every paper, whether tabloid or broadsheet, ran a picture of Geri or of the Spice Girls front page the next day.” When you zoom on this picture, it's not super clear, but we think that they may have ran it uncensored, like showing her actual breast, in the newspaper?

 

Elyse: Oh, I think so. Yeah, I think you can definitely see her breast. 

 

Sinead: Which I thought was like illegal, but I guess not?

 

Elyse: Not in the UK, UK is full nips all the time.

 

Ashey: It's also odd, on the far left, the picture of her from behind. 

 

Steph: I think you see some butt cheek. 

 

Elyse: Yeah, you do. 

 

Megan: Yeah. 

 

Cheryl: Yeah. And this is the back of Geri’s iconic union jack dress. That dress actually got the most press of anything that evening. Geri had been originally meant to wear a plain black dress. Originally Gucci, which is at this time led by Tom Ford as a creative director. But she thought this dress was too boring. Her sister helped her sew a Union Jack tea towel onto it. 

 

Elyse: How is it a tea towel? I don't understand. It does not look like a tea towel. It is the largest tea towel in the world. How?

 

Sinead: I also think this every single fucking time I see the tea towel comment. I know it's true. Like that's what it is. But I do not understand. 

 

Steph: I don't think a tea towel goes from boob to vag. 

 

Elyse: Yeah. 

 

Sinead: Is she really small? 

 

Elyse: That's what I'm wondering, she must be tiny!

 

Chery: She’s short.

 

Elyse: She is short. That's why she wears the huge shoes.

Cheryl: Yeah, and also like it's not really a dress. It's described as a swim costume in one of the interviews she does. So calling it a dress is extremely generous.

 

[Music]

 

Cheryl: So this is what bothers me about this moment. Here's this moment where the Spice Girls are being taken seriously as a fashion and cultural influence with Gucci saying like, I want to dress The Spice Girl or like as a company saying ‘I want to dress the Spice Girls.’ And Geri turns around and she takes this dress that is high end etc. And she treats it like a thrift store item. And I still wonder why would any designer work with you after that? 

 

Elyse: I have a theory. It’s a Tom Ford Gucci tea towel.

 

[laughter]

 

Cheryl: Ohhhhh.

Ashley: Is it actually?

Elyse: Gucci on Gucci on Gucci. 

 

Megan: $800 tea towel.

 

Steph: Gucci or the little Gucci. 

 

Elyse: That's right. 

 

Sinead: In actual fact I think that tea towel is just a high street tourist shop tea towel that they picked up in a moment.

 

Elyse: Oh my god. Maybe the Spice World line “the little Gucci dress or the little Gucci dress”, maybe that is an apology. And that's like a free product placement for them.

 

Steph: Maybe. It is interesting because like in 19, so like 1997, Gucci was like, at it's prime again, but it was pretty shit before. Before that it would have still been good for Gucci to have someone in it on a stage like that, like Gucci stood to benefit from this exposure, whether or not a dish towel was sewn on. I don't think that would have soured the relationship, as much as maybe one thing. Maybe I'm completely off base, maybe Tom Ford is a bit of an asshat.

Cheryl: But that tea towel in particular, yes, it's not just the bold choice because it was iconic, but it was also kind of like a cancelable selection. Like her stylists actually warned her like you shouldn't put the Union Jack on clothing, like it's associated with far right anti-immigrant political parties, particularly in the UK, which is why she added the peace sign to sort of counter that idea. And it was an attempt to showcase how the girls supported all cultures, but like you're still wearing a symbol as something that is tied to some really gross political movements. 

 

Elyse: What a wild coincidence, like, you can see how the combination of her wearing this dress and having so much like photo coverage of this dress. And then shortly following that with a pro Thatcher article, and both of those things really were coincidence, it was a spur of the moment costume decision. And those two things together would have really, really solidified them as trying to make themselves political in a totally accidental way. It's funny because I feel like between this and the Thatcher article, they're just examples of these girls like stumbling and face planting into success, it just seems that they have this pattern of doing things that shouldn't work, and it should be a catastrophe and ruining them. And then it just, they blow up after it. It's such an interesting pattern. 

 

Megan: They were almost too popular to like, not keep, you know, the momentum was going so strong, everything just made it stronger and stronger. 

 

Sinead: Absolutely. And I think when we tie in what we know about the risk Geri took in wearing the union jack dress, it puts the girls in an interesting position, like you say, from the scandals about their politics to using an ultra conservative icon that isn't very popular internationally because of like British activities colonially across the global south, it really could’ve marginalized themselves. And instead, they found themselves in the middle of a totally popular cultural moment, which was Cool Britannia. And as I had mentioned earlier, Tony Blair had won the ‘97 election, which made a lot of people really happy. The success of British cultural exports in fashion and music and sporting really gave people a renewed sense of optimism about their country after a couple of really hard decades.

This cultural moment, though it kind of obscures a little bit of the larger dark side of British history. Abroad, the union jack can be seen as a symbol of imperialism and oppression for so many countries around the world that the UK colonized or in some way interfered with. This sort of renewed optimism in the UK at this moment in time was a feeling that was really only available to citizens of the UK. And it was kind of a whitewash of the legacy of imperialism and sort of why the union jack had become an unpopular symbol to begin with. And that's kind of the thing that makes me feel icky is it does feel like it was kind of a surge of nationalism that was dressed up as a cool aesthetic.. And just like, but there was no real substance behind it. There was no analysis behind it, and the Spice Girls find themselves in the midst of it, and become iconic to this day like that. We've talked about the dress, like that dress is such a massive symbol of the band, and something that I personally as a child thought was incredibly cool. And wanted to wear, like, and I know I'm far from alone. 

 

Megan: Oh, totally. And I think actually the cool Britannia seemed out a little bit is like a cultural thing. Again, like no political ties, because people obviously weren't thinking of colonial history. But like, the union jack became popular in Canada in the 90s, in the late 90s. You know what I mean? Like, parts of it like seeped out. It wasn't just like Britain thinking, British pride. It was like other people actually interested in that symbolism again, which is weird. 

 

Sinead: It became popular in the US, and that's fucking hilarious considering the history between the US and the UK. Like, unbidden, people just started wearing union jack shirts around even though they're so proud of their history of making themselves independent of the union jack. Like that was like the pop culture power moment.

But definitely also speaks to the fact that it was very shallow. It was very much about an aesthetic and a moment in time and Geri Halliwell read the room right on that because that was her random choice that ended up being, you know, a hugely enduring icon of the moment. 

 

Megan: So I read this online British poll so keep that in mind, British, but an online poll, it was one of the 10 most iconic dresses of the last 50 years. Not only one of, it was number one. 82% of people on the poll said it was. This is beating out Princess Diana's wedding gown, Marilyn Monroe’s white halter neck dress. And people know that dress was a Gucci dress. So if you remember a dress from 1997, whether there's a tea towel on it or not, everyone's remembering that it was a Gucci dress. Can I say my last dress fact? 

 

Group: Yes!

 

Ashley: Dress facts with Megan.

 

Megan: Okay. In 1998 the dress was sold for £41,320. And at the time, it earned a place in the Guinness World Records book as the most expensive item of pop star clothing dealt at auction. So I'm sure you know 20 plus years later, it's no longer the most expensive but like that was a ton of money, like anytime. 

 

Elyse: Who did it get sold to?

 

Megan: I don’t know.

 

Sinead: £40,000 for a high street tea towel.

 

Megan: I couldn’t find who it was sold to.

 

Elyse: What year?

 

Megan: It was 1998, so the year after. And to this day, the dress has its own Wikipedia page it’s called Geri Halliwells -  What's it called? Geri Halliwell’s union jack dress on Wikipedia.

 

Ashley: Wow. 

 

Elyse: Oh, it was Peter Morton, on behalf of the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas who displayed the piece of clothing as pop memorabilia. 

 

Sinead: Have I walked by that and not known that that was there? Steph, did you know that was in Las Vegas? 

 

Steph: How did I miss that? 

 

Sinead: I feel like I’d remember? I dunno. 

 

Steph: I think I would remember. I was in Vegas with one of my fellow Spice Girl concert people

 

Megan: Oh my gosh, I thought you were going to say with one of the Spice Girls.

 

Steph: Can you imagine?

 

Megan: Vegas with a Spice Girl.

Ashley: Like I was in Vegas with a Spice Girl and she didn't even tell me that Geri’s dress was there.

 

[laughter]

 

Steph: I feel like that's such an Alexis Rose comment like, oh, this time I was with a Spice Girl.

 

Elyse: Guess we're doing an episode in Vegas.

 

[Music]

 

Ashley: That’s our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening. Spice Invaders is hosted by Sinead O'Brien, Cheryl Stone, Elyse Maxwell, Stephanie Smith, and Megan Arppe-Robertson. It's researched and written by Sinead O'Brien and Cheryl Stone, and produced and edited by me, Ashley McDonough. To see any visuals we talked about in this episode, as well as bonus content, be sure to follow us on instagram at @spiceinvaderspod. Thank you to Lukus Benoit for composing our theme song.