Everything Nice

The boundless optimism of the Spice Girls.

- By Amanda Petrusich

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In 1994, Heart Management—the father-son team of Bob and Chris Herbert, with the financier Chic Murphy—placed a classified ad in the Stage, a British trade rag founded in 1880 and still devoured, more than a century later, by aspiring performers looking for a shortcut to fame. The producers were hoping to assemble an all-female pop group as a counterpoint to the windswept boy bands (Take That, Boyzone) then topping the U.K. charts. The scheme was not novel, or even particularly nuanced: a gang of cute, vivacious girls, some choreography, a few rousing choruses. “R.U. 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance? R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious, & dedicated?” the ad asked. The trio auditioned some four hundred women, chose five, and soon decreed them the Spice Girls. The new group moved into a three-bedroom house in Maidenhead and began the sort of rigorous yet artless performance training that’s now a hallmark of the pop-band origin story. Each member (Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell, and Victoria Adams, later Beckham) assumed a descriptive moniker (Scary Spice, Sporty Spice, Baby Spice, Ginger Spice, and Posh Spice). Chris Herbert, who was then just twenty-three, later spoke about the process as though he were creating a children’s cartoon. “The main thing was to get really good, sassy, colorful, bubbly characters,” he explained in the 2001 documentary “Raw Spice.”