Sean Smith - Spice Girls

From the point of view of the future Spice Girls, his most important involvement was with the Three Degrees, the popular UK girl group of the seventies. The trio, modelled more or less on the Supremes, were originally part of the Philadelphia stable, a rival of Motown in the US. They had their biggest hit in the UK, however, in 1974 topping the charts with the disco favourite ‘When Will I See You Again’ before Melanie Brown and Emma Bunton were born.

The public profile of the Three Degrees increased greatly when the media decided they were the favourite group of Prince Charles. This might not have done wonders for their musical credibility but took them off the pages of NME and Melody Maker and into the columns of the national newspapers. They became much more famous. Prince Charles invited them to perform at his thirtieth birthday party at Buckingham Palace in 1978, and they were subsequently guests at his wedding to Lady Diana Spencer three years later. It would not be the last time the Prince gave an all-girl group the oxygen of priceless publicity.

By the end of the seventies the Three Degrees were moving inevitably towards the cabaret circuit. They were still very popular, though – the sort of act that always gets work – and throughout the eighties Chic Murphy had been a familiar figure at their gigs. Bob Herbert, who did all the accounts for the nightclubs, became part of the group’s management team and forged a long-standing alliance with Chic.

If Bob and Chic had decided things, the new band would have been the Spice Boys. The initial conversation in the offices of Heart Management was about putting a boy band together. In late 1993 Take That were everywhere, with three number-one singles in a row and the platinum-selling album Everything Changes . The entire music world was looking to jump on the bandwagon of their popularity.

Fortunately, for five ambitious young women, Chris Herbert had a better idea: ‘A boy band seemed like the obvious route into the market but I wasn’t that keen on it because I thought we were sort of late to the party. There were loads of them.’ As well as Take That, there was East 17, Bad Boys Inc and Worlds Apart, with the prospect of another arriving any minute, like a double-decker bus in Piccadilly. Chris explained, ‘My feeling was that boy bands of the time were only really appealing to 50 per cent of the market – a female audience. I wanted to put a girl band together that was a bit feisty, sexy and sassy so that they could appeal to both a female and male audience. The girls could relate to them and aspire to be them. The guys would just adore them.’

Bob and, in particular, Chic took a lot of convincing that a girl band was the way forward. Chris observed, ‘They were kind of following the market and it just seemed fairly radical that we should be doing the absolute opposite of that.’ The first thing they wanted to know was the strength of the opposition. It was anything but strong. An all-girl group called Milan were signed to Polydor in 1992 and looked promising for a couple of years, featuring a teenage Martine McCutcheon before she found stardom playing Tiffany in EastEnders . They opened for East 17 on tour but a few singles failed to set the charts alight and they folded in 1994.

Eternal represented more serious opposition. They had already achieved a couple of top-ten singles and their first album Always and Forever peaked at number two. Chris, however, did not see them as direct competition. Despite being very glamorous and including the lads-mag favourite Louise Nurding, they were basically a soulful vocal group specialising in R&B. ‘They were pretty slick and smooth,’ observed Chris. ‘I felt we needed more character.’

Eventually he got his way. ‘My dad was probably the first to come round to the idea, Chic less so. His approach was “Well, OK, go out and see what you can find and we’ll reassess it.” Actually, Chic was like that all the way through. He kind of let me out on a rein to go and do it and then was slightly cynical but I suppose he was prepared to see what turned up.’

At first, it seemed as if it was going to be a hard slog – until he paid £174 to place his own advertisement in the Stage . The now famous ad that would eventually lead to the formation of the Spice Girls appeared on 24 February 1994. It read:

R.U. 18–23 WITH THE ABILITY

TO SING/DANCE

R.U. STREETWISE, OUTGOING,

AMBITIOUS & DEDICATED

HEART MANAGEMENT LTD

are a widely successful

Music Industry Management Consortium

currently forming a choreographed, Singing/Dancing,

all Female Pop Act for a Record Recording Deal.

OPEN AUDITION

DANCE WORKS, 16 Balderton Street,

FRIDAY 4TH MARCH

11.00 a.m.–5.30 p.m.

PLEASE BRING SHEET MUSIC

OR BACKING CASSETTE

On the day, more than four hundred young hopefuls queued on the stairs of the studio off Oxford Street to impress the ‘panel’, consisting of Bob, Chris and his fiancée Shelley, who was a stylist. The girls were divided into groups of ten and put through their dancing paces to the sound of Eternal’s début hit ‘Stay’. The numbers were reduced to fifty before they were asked to do an individual song.

The panel kept rudimentary scorecards that would judge the girls on four categories: singing, dancing, looks and personality. It was the best and quickest way to whittle down the possibles into a short list. Melanie Brown performed her now regular audition song, ‘The Greatest Love of All’ by Whitney Houston. Chris gave her eight out of ten across the board.

She obviously stood out. It wasn’t just that she fitted his vision for the make-up of the group. She had a personality and charisma that shone. Chris recalled, ‘For me, she was the one who walked in and seemed the full package. She was good but she also just had the look. Her image was on point. She could sing and she had a big personality. On the day, I immediately thought, We have found one.’

Melanie had enjoyed the experience so much that she decided to skip the afternoon audition for the cruise ship, preferring to chat to some of the other girls before making her way back to Victoria station to get the coach home. Chris had told her he would be in touch and Melanie was confident she’d got it. She was right.

Victoria Adams-Wood, as she was calling herself then, carried herself differently from the other hopefuls at the Danceworks audition. She was a curvy nineteen-year old, strikingly dressed all in black, with a crop-top showing off her very tanned midriff.

On his mood board back at the office, Chris Herbert had been toying with the idea that one of the group should appeal to the more mature man. He was looking for a young woman who might turn the head of a male consumer with a dash of discernment. You don’t need to be posh to have a touch of class and that was the quality Chris was seeking.

Victoria came from a North London working-class background. Her dad Tony Adams, the son of a factory worker, had been brought up in a two-bedroom house in Edmonton that had no bathroom, an outside toilet and no heating. These were the austere years that followed the end of the Second World War when money was rationed just as much as food had been during the conflict.

In 1957 when Tony was eleven, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously said, ‘Most of our people have never had it so good,’ which was small consolation for the youngster hanging around outside the pub waiting for his father to finish his pint. Sometimes he would be pressed into collecting cigarette butts from the overflowing ashtrays for his dad to smoke. Truly, Edmonton was a place to aspire to leave in order to make something of yourself in the world – and that was what he did.