While Posh Spice faces off with Kylie on the singles chart this week and Emma “Baby Spice” Bunton attempts to hold her own with her latest effort, HELLO! readers tell us who they really really want – The Spice Girls.
The girl power group notched up a whopping 11,450 votes in our on-line readers poll to earn the title of Best Girl Band Ever. And while Eighties stalwarts Bananarama were close behind, amassing more than 1,000 votes in the final day alone, their 11,043 votes just couldn’t bridge the gap. The ladies of TLC scored 1,639 votes, edging out the Supremes and All Saints for a distant third in the eyes of the hellomagazine.com readers. When the last vote was clicked, the Spices proved sauciest.
The Spice Girls burst onto the scene in 1993 after Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Emma Bunton, Victoria Adams and Geri Halliwell answered an ad that read, “Do you want to be famous?”. Little did they know how famous they’d turn out to be.
With the inescapable hit Wannabe, suddenly Scary, Sporty, Baby, Posh and Ginger were everywhere. See Geri pinch Prince Charles’s bottom! See the girls at Wembley! Buy a Spice Girls lunch box!
Yet after releasing three albums and a decidedly campy movie, it seemed the public desire for all things Spice had waned. Geri saw the writing on the wall and struck out on her own in the summer of 1998 while the group continued as a foursome. Somewhere along the way the spice mix changed and while the group is still officially together, the girls have of late concentrated their efforts on solo projects.
Those solo albums are now facing off against their girl band competition on the charts, including Destiny’s Child, whose 378 votes in our poll proved less than, shall we say “bootylicious”. Atomic Kitten may be riding high with the success of Whole Again, but in the grand scheme of girl pop they’ve barely made a dent, notching up just 107 votes. At the bottom of the barrel we find Eden’s Crush, the US answer to Hear’Say. The quintet may have scored a hit on their home turf, but their place in history is nowhere near that of their biblical namesake.
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
