Ellie Blow
I was eight years old. The Spice Girls had just released ‘Wannabe’ and set feminism back twenty years with their own personal brand of “Girl Power”, which apparently mostly involved wearing very tight dresses, making peace signs and hobbling about in platform trainers. I was standing in the playground with my friend Vicky, whose mum had taken her to see Take That twice, and who was therefore the closest thing we had to a goddess.
“Bagsy being Posh Spice,” she announced, apropos of nothing.
To my eternal shame, I thought she was speaking in code. I sniggered sycophantically – even more so when Other Vicky (not as cool as the first Vicky, although her mum let her stay up past eight o’clock) replied, “I wanna be Baby!”
They looked at me expectantly. There was a long silence. “What are you on about?” I asked, eventually.
“Don’t you know about the Spice Girls?” Vicky said disdainfully. “She doesn’t know about theSpice Girls!” As though I’d just admitted to not knowing how to read, or what pants were for, or about sex.
At the time my dad, through whom my music taste had been mostly filtered, was listening to The Verve and Pulp: I knew all the words to ’Bittersweet Symphony’ and could do the dance from the ‘Common People’ video. This could’ve been my defining moment - a chance to establish early on my indie cred, becoming an ahead-of-my-time cool-pioneer like the Rolling Stones or Galileo.
Instead I went home and cried.
I got the Spice Girls’ Spiceworld album for my next birthday and studied it as though I was going to be tested (which, to be fair, wasn’t far off the mark – I had some catching up to do). I regained a bit of my playground cool through being the first one to learn the dance to ’Stop’, and lost a lot of respect from my father for consistently swapping his Urban Hymns cassette with Spiceworld in the hope that he’d press ‘play’ without noticing and experience a spiritual conversion. (He never did.)
