Smash hits

So Mel C thinks Geri H is untalented, does she? When girl bands break up,
says Caroline Sullivan, the pops get personal


So friendship never ends, eh? Not if you listen to Melanie Chisholm, now
known as Loose Cannon Spice after uncharitable remarks about the other Spice
Girls appeared in the new issue of Q magazine. According to Sporty, Posh's
wedding was "OTT" [1], some days she "doesn't even bother" to talk to
Scary [2] and she sees the band as little more than a hobby, anyway.

Well, that should put her bandmates firmly in their place. But she saves the
best for ex-Ginger. Admitting she hoped Geri's Schizophonic album would be
terrible [3], she dismisses her former friend as untalented, musically hollow
and (ooh, miaow) "cotton wool" [4]. Maybe you'd better settle this outside,
girls.

There can't be many of us who haven't hoped a rival would fall flat on her
face. But it's the relish Mel took in expressing it [5] that makes you wonder
what happened to Girl Power. It could be she was stirring things up to draw
attention to her own solo album, which is expected in the autumn. It's more
likely she was indulging in the bitching that afflicts most female groups,
who spend years saying how hard it is to make it in the male-dominated pop
world, then turn on each other. Diana Ross was guilty of most unsisterly
behaviour toward her fellow Supremes, alleges Mary Wilson in her 1986
autobiography, Dreamgirl. She undermined them, Wilson says, taunting
Florence Ballard about her weight. Years later, performing at a Motown
reunion, she physically pushed Wilson to the back of the stage. "Strangely,
I still love her and am proud of her," muses Wilson, who then avenges
herself by saying that Ross had an affair with Berry Gordy and anyway, her
real name is Diane.

More recently, one Simone Rainford sold her story of life as an original All
Saint, which apparently ended because Melanie Blatt was mean to her.
Meanwhile, Geri Halliwell claims she was picked on by Mel Brown. Brown says
Chisholm snores. Really, ladies, if you can't say anything nice, you
shouldn't say anything at all.

Conversely, despite the Robbie Williams/Gary Barlow slanging match, male
bands incline toward discretion when nursing grudges. When, say, John Lennon
was cross with Paul McCartney, instead of calling the latter a fat wuss, he
wrote a song, How Do You Sleep? Much more constructive - not only did he get
it off his chest, he got royalties.

So while the men are comporting themselves with relative restraint, women
are reverting to the kind of behaviour supposedly left behind with puffball
skirts. One of the Spice Girls' aims was to refute the idea that women see
each other as rivals, as witnessed by the supportive slogans on the sleeve
of their first album ("I'm a girl, I can do it" etc). Who'd have guessed
that three years later ...

Let us not forget, though, that the Spices and All Saints are stage school
girls who have been taught to lunge after fame like guided missiles. Girl
Power was a very convenient launchpad but, having broken through pop's glass
ceiling, it's time to look after oneself. Mel C probably feels she deserves
it after spending the best years of her life singing the spewy 2 Become 1.
Who can blame her?

But there was a band who embodied true girl power before the term existed:
Bananarama. Don't laugh. Realising none of them had much talent to speak of,
Siobhan, Keren and Sarah stuck together with a devotion unmatched by today's
bands. They formed during a drunken night out (none of this audition
business) and lived together in a London highrise out of friendship rather
than because a manager forced them to. When Siobhan left for a more
glamorous existence as Dave Stewart's wife, neither of the others said a
word against her - not even when, later, she topped the charts with
Shakespear's Sister. Now, that's loyalty.