[Harry!]

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/

The Spice Girls have been blamed for the ladette culture but what is the real legacy of girl power? Our writer says they touch the wannabe in all of us

A week ago I was standing in the O2 arena watching Led Zeppelin, with goose-bumps up my arms and my mouth literally hanging open in admiration.

I’m there again tonight, but I have remained seated (despite the forceful and repeated entreaties of the bloke next to me, who is gay, thirtysome-thing and northern, works in the health industry and is absolutely hysterical with excitement), and if my mouth does fall open once or twice, it is only with the realisation that the Spice “Girls”, now all women in their thirties, haven’t got any better in the decade since their heyday.

They still can’t sing - poor old Sporty, still forced to dress like a lesbian games teacher, has a powerful set of vocal cords, but isn't what you might call easy on the ears, and the less said about the others, the better, though full marks for trying (and for self-belief).

They are all wearing Roberto Cavalli - whose designs Donatella Versace might sneer at for being a tiny bit common - and there's more than enough fake tan, fake nails, fake bosoms and fake hair to go round. Victoria Beckham has no sense of rhythm whatsoever: she can’t dance, and she can’t walk in time to the pounding beat either.

She moves her limbs robotically, woodenly, as if they couldn’t bend, and strikes self-conscious, semi-hilarious poses like a poor man’s Erin O’Connor. In her corset, her bosoms are literally up by her collarbones. She looks like a cyborg, and I can’t stop staring. Every time she has a solo line to sing, the whole auditorium erupts with wild cheering, drowning her out and even causing her to crack the odd smile. The bloke next to me bellows: “I love her! I love her! I want to be her!”

At this point, confusingly, I get out my camera and start taking pictures of Posh, for no reason. What’s that about? I don’t want to be her, and I don’t love her, either: I don’t understand what she’s for. But here she is, practically within touching distance, waving at the crowd stiffly and smiling, and some strange part of me thinks: “Ah, bless.”

Even when the other Spices perform solo tracks and Victoria, who doesn’t have one, sashays down the stage instead, pretending to talk on a pretend mobile while posing for pretend paparazzi, I think: “Good on you.” (At the same time, obviously, as thinking: “How absurd.”) I assume she is being self-deprecating - “Yes, I know I can’t actually do anything, but look, if I walk like this, 20,000 of you will cheer. Who’s stupid now?” - but I’m not sure.

I also assume the rather brilliant rubbishness of the whole show - flashy, camp, stuffed full of tricks and gimmicks to detract from the fact that our protagonists aren’t terribly good - is a sort of in-joke, an acknowledgment of the whole ethos of girl power, which is “It doesn’t matter if you’re rubbish - be determined”. But I’m not sure about that either: maybe both the Spice Girls and the audience really think they are, and deserve to be, global superstars.

Anyway, here is Victoria, posing in front of the seats where her three sons are seated, along with Mel B’s daughter (“That’s Phoenix Chi,” my excitable neighbour yells). Later, during a rendition of Mama, all the Spice Children are brought onto the stage - Posh’s three boys, not looking entirely comfortable, Phoenix, and Mel B and Emma Bunton’s new babies, the latter wearing huge ear-phones to drown out the noise.

“Our greatest achievement,” Geri Halliwell says, gesturing to the children (hers isn’t here). Mel C dances around trying to look like a groovy maiden aunt. It may be as cheesy as a Christmas stilton, but it’s a neat encapsulation of the fact the Spices have grown up with their audience – until you realise that 20,000 people are whooping with amazed delight at the fact that the Spice Girls have functioning ovaries.

The uncharitable view is that the Spice Girls, during their heyday a decade ago, are directly responsible for the avalanche of talentless inanity that followed - for encouraging young girls to pursue their dreams of stardom regardless of ability, which soon translated into getting your kit off and trying to land a footballer, which in turn evolved into a national obsession with Wagdom; for incarnating a morally bankrupt “culture” and paving the way for the Paris Hiltons of this world, who made doing nothing into a multi-million-dollar industry; for, in Posh’s case, taking vulgarity to new heights and inventing a whole bizarre idea of “style”, where stylishness bore direct relation to expenditure.

You could argue that they killed feminism while wielding the girl-power banner, encouraging young girls to seek fame at the expense of qualifications and resulting in the existence of hordes of teenagers today who, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, reply: “On the telly.” As for that whole girl group thing: far from inventing the genre - girl groups have been around for decades – you could say they were yet another example of desperately ambitious young women being manipulated to stardom by clever male managers.

And yet ... The excitement within arena is undeniable (though there are a couple of hundred emptythe O2 seats). Aside from gay men, mothers with their young daughters and the odd teenager, the bulk of the audience is made up of groups of twenty-something women, Spice fans the first time around. I talk to a few of them and they all say the same thing: a) this is a brilliant girls’ night out; b) they loved the Spices when they were 14 and they still love them now; c) girl power, innit?

When you ask them to expand on c), they say all the Spice Girls have done well for themselves. “I think it’s really cute that they all have babies,” says one young woman. “We’ve got babies too - we’ve grown up alongside them.”

“There’s a Spice Girl for everyone,” her friend says. “Everyone wants to be Victoria, but lots of women are more like Geri - you know, single mums who can’t make their love life work.”

Which one are they most excited about seeing? “Victoria,” is the unanimous reply. The consensus seems to be that seeing Posh in the flesh, as opposed to across the pages of magazines, is worth the price of admittance alone.

I am confused by all of this. We live in a world where manufactured girl bands are two a penny; the difference now is that they can all sing and that the best of them - Girls Aloud, say - bang out pop classics with every single release. We’re used to music, even pop music, sounding rich, complex, multi-layered and satisfying - in stark contrast to the Spices’ output tonight, which sounds incredibly thin and watery, sweetly jaunty though it may be.

We’re also used, pace Britney Spears, to female pop stars who can really do it - sing as well as dance and perform, not stand there woodenly doing karaoke. But for all my bah-humbuggery, the crowd is going wild, and it can’t just be nostalgia.

As I leave, it dawns on me that the Spice Girls weren’t, as mooted at the time, the greatest girl band of all time, but rather a quintet of Eddie the Eagles, a bunch of underdog wannabes who we loved for their determination as much as for their catchy tunes.

They were, and remain, almost extraordinarily ordinary - even Victoria, with her cameo appearance on Ugly Betty, her headlines, her husband, her wardrobe, her mad, empty life. On stage, she’s a girl from Essex who knew she’d do well, and did, and is loving every minute of it.

She’s in on the joke: how could she not be? Here’s Emma Bunton, “Baby”, her post-pregnancy weight cunningly disguised by a series of shift dresses. Here’s Geri Halliwell, with the million-dollar body and the £10 face, still exuding that weird (and very female) mixture of ambition and neediness, and here’s Melanie Brown, recently publicly humiliated by Eddie Murphy, shimmying in leopard skin - because nothing changes in Spice World - reminding me of a latterday Bet Lynch, a great triumphant northern “strong woman”. Melanie Chisholm, she of the lungs, is still rocking out while wearing a track-suit, and still looking mildly irritated at having to carry the vocals for everyone else.

What is it about them that’s so compelling? I think it is that we all know one. We’re all friends with one: the one obsessed by designer handbags, the one who does too much yoga and wonders why men aren’t really into her, the great survivor, laughing in the face of defeat, the tomboy who was good at games.

We might even be one of them. We all know, deep down, that there are prettier, cleverer, more talented people than us out there, but we all think we have a chance of making it anyway. The Spice Girls told us so - and, looking at them tonight, they were right.

Forget making extravagant claims in the name of feminism - that was just clever marketing guff. But they believed in themselves and they did what they set out to do, even though they knew they were just ordinary suburban girls, with nothing but ambition to see them on their way.

Unlike the great divas, unlike Madonna, unlike anyone else and like all of us, the Spice Girls are only human. And that’s why 20,000 people are on their feet as the band perform Wannabe as an encore. The crowd is cheering for the Spice Girls, and for the mirror they hold up to all of us - flawed, human, fallible, a bit rubbish, but trying hard to have a laugh.