Spice is The Spice Girls' debut studio album which was released on September 19, 1996 by Virgin Records.
Album Background[]
In February 1994, Chris and Bob Herbert (who together with financer Chic Murphy) traded under the business name of Heart Management, placed an advert in The Stage magazine, which asked the question: "Are you street smart, extrovert, ambitious, and able to sing and dance?"
The management received hundreds of replies, but eventually reduced their search down to a final group of five girls: Victoria Adams, Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Geri Halliwell and Michelle Stephenson. The new band was originally called Touch and moved to a house in Maidenhead. Emma Bunton was the last to join the group after Stephenson dropped out when her mother became ill.
The group felt insecure about the lack of contract and were frustrated by the direction in which Heart Management was steering them.
In October 1994, armed with a catalog of demos and dance routines, the group began touring management agencies. They started to meet with producers, musicians and other business executives, among them were composer Tim Hawes, and writers Richard Stannard and Matthew Rowe. Hawes worked with the group and watched the evolution in their singing and writing abilities.
Together, they composed a song called "Sugar and Spice", which served as the inspiration behind the change of the group's name to "Spice." Eventually the name was changed again to "Spice Girls" due to an American rapper using the name "Spice" at the time.
On March 3, 1995, because of the group's frustration at their management's unwillingness to listen to their visions and ideas, they parted from Heart Management. The group stole the master recordings of their discography from the management offices in order to ensure they kept full control of their own work.
Recording[]
The group were supposed to meet with producer Eliot Kennedy the week after they left their former managers, but the meeting was arranged by the Herberts weeks before their departure, but without access to Herbert's address book, they knew nothing of Kennedy's whereabouts other than he lived in Sheffield.
Brown and Halliwell drove to Sheffield the day after the departure from Heart Management and looked for the first phone book they came across; Eliot was the third Kennedy that they called. That evening they went to his house and persuaded him to work with them. The rest of the girls travelled to Sheffield the next day.
Kennedy commented about the session: "None of them played instruments, so I was left to do the music and get that vibe together. What I said to them was, 'Look, I've got a chorus—check this out'. Then they were throwing lines at us. 10 minutes later the song was written. Then you go through and refine it. Then later, as you were recording it you might change a few thing here and there. But pretty much it was a real quick process."
Four tracks were composed in that session: "Love Thing", "Say You'll Be There", "Step to Me" (which was released later) and "Strong Enough."
In the following months, the group continued to meet with producers, wrote new songs, prepared demos and searched for a new manager.
They met again with the writers Stannard and Rowe. They had previously worked with the girls in January 1995 before their departure from Heart Management; that was the group's first professional songwriting session, held at the Strongroom in Curtain Road, east London.
In the first session with Stannard and Rowe, they wrote "Feed Your Love", a slow, soulful song which was eventually recorded and mastered for the album, but not released because it was considered too rude and racy for their target audience.
Similarly, "C U Next Tuesday" (a song initially meant for the album) was never released supposedly due to the initials of the song's title spelling the word "cunt" which is considered by many to be vulgar.
Having completed that session, the girls wanted to write something more uptempo, so they started to write the song that would be the lead of the album, "Wannabe", which was recorded in under an hour—mainly because they had already written parts of the songs beforehand.
The next song they recorded was a slow ballad and the third track on and single from the album, "2 Become 1". The song was inspired by the special relationship which had developed between Halliwell and Rowe during the session.
The song, "Mama" was written by the Spice Girls with songwriting partners Matt Rowe and Richard Stannard. In an interview about the writing process between the group and the duo, Rowe credits Mel B as the one who came up with the song's concept.
During the writing process, each member wrote a small verse in a different corner of the recording studio, while the chorus was finished around the piano with a guitar. Then, the producers added a gospel choir filled with the group's harmonies at the end of the song.
In May 1995, the group was introduced to Paul Wilson and Andy Watkins, the songwriters and production duo known as Absolute. Watkins commented about their first meeting, "They played us a few tracks, which we didn't particularly like. So we thought, this is OK. We can work with this."
A songwriting session was booked within the next few days at Absolute's studio located on Tagg's Island near Chertsey, but the musical association between them did not seem to go well at the beginning. Wilson remembered, "When they started to sing it was never quite right: from our point of view. It was very poptastic."
Watkins recalled: "After two sessions we phoned our managers and said 'This just ain't happening'." It was at this point that Watkins and Wilson heard "Wannabe" for the first time. When speaking about the song, Wilson said, "We listened to it and we didn't get it at all. It was so different to what we were doing. We thought is this going to work?"
The next session was the definite one; either they would continue to work with the group or break up their relationship. Wilson recalled, "Every previous time we'd met up with the girls we had prepared a backing track. This time we had nothing."
Watkins also said, "They said they wanted to do something up and a bit of fun, so we just off the top of our heads started to come up with a full-on disco backing track, which became 'Who Do You Think You Are'."
Wilson said of the song, "The thing is when they wrote it, they were also writing the dance routine, constructing the music video, all at the same time as writing the song. And that's when the penny dropped."
The girls went on to write "Something Kinda Funny", "Last Time Lover", "Naked", "Bumper to Bumper", "Take Me Home", "One of These Girls", and "Baby Come Round" with Watkins and Wilson, none of them singles, but all of them tracks which lent a touch of classy R&B feel to the Spice album and singles.
Absolute also produced all of these songs as well as the three tracks penned with Eliot Kennedy: "Say You'll Be There" "Love Thing" and later "Step to me" giving the duo a guiding hand in six of the ten tracks that eventually ended up on Spice. The tracks that Absolute produced were recorded for the most part at Olympic Studios in Barnes.
At this time, 1995, the Auto-Tune facility had yet to come to the market and most of the vocals were recorded with few adjustments made afterwards.[15] Absolute told Simon Fuller about the group they had worked with and asked whether he would consider managing them.
Fuller received a demo of "Something Kinda Funny", one of the songs the group wrote with Absolute. He showed interest in the group, began a relationship and decided to sign them at 19 Management in March 1995.
In September 1995, the group signed a deal with Virgin Records, and continued to write and record tracks for their debut album while touring the west coast of the United States, where they signed a publishing deal with Windswept Pacific in November.
The Spice Girls were fully involved in the writing of all the songs. Halliwell in particular was clearly a fund of ideas for songs, arriving at sessions with her book of jottings, notes and miscellaneous scribblings which often produced the starting point of a lyric or a song title or just an agenda for the day's work.
Watkins commented, "Geri [Halliwell] would come up with the concept for a song. Typically, she'd sing one line and the girls would pick up on it or we'd pick up on it and construct around it and then Mel C [Chisholm] and Emma [Bunton] would be very active. They'd really like to sit and sing melodies and go off and come up with little sections."
They "conceptualised" and sang bits of melody and wrote the lyrics. But in musical terms it was not a partnership of equals.
Rowe commented: "We had to kind of steer it. It was very different for different tracks really. Some of them were when we were all jamming in the room. We'd just put up some drum sounds and start making things up. On other tracks me and Richard [Stannard] would prepare something beforehand and play it to them. We'd have some lyrics and make them write the second verse."
The Spice Girls introduced two key innovations that have had a lasting impact on the way which modern pop acts go about their creative business.
Firstly, they introduced the idea of songwriting identity; this was a familiar concept in rock bands like Queen or the Sex Pistols, but not in the world of "manufactured pop", where the credits of songwriting would be divided out strictly in accordance with whoever had written the song.
The Spice Girls recognised their solidarity as a group which depended on maintaining parity in all departments (including the songwriting credits and the resulting royalties). They share the songwriting royalties on all the songs irrespective of what any member of the group had or had not contributed to any particular song.
The second thing the Spice Girls established from the outset was a straight 50–50 split between them and their various songwriting collaborators. Here they anticipated one of the key developments in the pop industry since the 1990s, namely the increasing importance of publishing royalties as opposed to royalties payments made for the performance of the song on the record.
Tracklisting[]
- Wannabe 2:52
- Say You'll Be There 3:56
- 2 Become 1 4:00
- Love Thing 3:37
- Last Time Lover 4:11
- Mama 5:03
- Who Do You Think You Are 3:59
- Something Kinda Funny 4:02
- Naked 4:26
- If U Can't Dance 3:50
Chart Performance[]
The commercial success of "Spice" was unprecedented and drew comparisons to Beatlemania (it was dubbed "Spicemania") due to the sheer volume of interest in the group.
The album debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart with first-sales of 114,000 copies, spending 15 non-consecutive weeks atop the chart. It was certified 10-times Platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) on 1 August 1997; as of October 2019, it had sold 2,984,879 copies in the United Kingdom.
In Europe, "Spice" became the biggest-selling album of 1997 and was certified eight-times Platinum by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) for sales in excess of eight million copies.
The album reached number one in France and was certified Diamond by the Syndicat National de l'Édition Phonographique (SNEP), triple Gold in Germany by the Bundesverband Musikindustrie (BVMI), and 10-times Platinum in Spain for one million copies sold.
"Spice" also made a huge impact in Asian countries, selling two million copies in Japan and Southeast Asia by 1997, peaking at number seven in Japan and certified four-times Platinum, with sales of 718,432 copies by March 1997.
In the United States, the album debuted at number six on the Billboard 200, eventually peaking at number one for five weeks and selling 1.46 million in its first 12 weeks of release. It became the biggest-selling album of 1997, with 5,302,000 million copies sold by the end of the year.
On 19 May 1999, "Spice" was certified seven-times Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). As of May 2017, it had sold 7.5 million copies in the US, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
In Canada, the album peaked at number one on the Canadian Albums Chart. It was certified 10-times Platinum (Diamond) by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) for shipments of one million copies.
The album sold 10 million copies worldwide in its first seven months. In total, "Spice" has sold 23 million copies worldwide, becoming the biggest-selling album by a girl group in music history and one of the most successful albums of all time.
Following the "Spice World Tour" announcement, the album re-entered the UK Albums Chart at number 94 on 16 November 2018 and in number 84 on 16 June 2019, again on the charts 20 years later.
Critical Reception[]
"Spice" received generally mixed reviews from pop music critics.
AllMusic's reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it "immaculately crafted pop" that is "infectious" and "irresistible", adding that "Spice doesn't need to be original to be entertaining" and that "none of the girls have great voices, but they do exude personality and charism."
Ken Tucker from Entertainment Weekly called the album a "devilishly good pop collection", and said that the lead single "Wannabe" is "perky yet tough, catchy yet melodically surprising."
Lois Alter Mark from the same magazine called the Spice Girls "Go-Gos with attitude" and described the content of the album as "PG-rated fantasies and come-ons", adding that "the girls may not be ideal role models."
LAUNCHcast's Dev Sherlock called the album "pure upbeat ear candy" and that it was "one of the most fun and exciting pop releases of the year", adding that their Girl Power philosophy is "a well-balanced manifesto for young women everywhere that is neither twee nor riot grrrl-angry."
Christina Kelly from Rolling Stone called the group "another bubblegum pop group" that "offer a watered-down mix of hip-hop and cheesy pop balladry", adding that the Girl Power concept is just a "pro-woman posing", and that "the girls don't get bogged down by anything deeper than mugging for promo shots and giving out tips on getting boys in bed."