Spice Girls forever WE DID IT OUR WAY!

How 25 years ago, fi ve fi erce females conquered the world with girl power

Zig-a-zig-ah! The Spice Girls never need much of an excuse to throw a party, but the supergroup has a special reason to pop the bubbly this month – it’s 25 years since they exploded onto the world stage with their first single Wannabe.

“It seems unbelievable,” confesses Mel Brown – aka Scary Spice – from her UK home in Leeds. “We were these five girls who didn’t fit any typical pop mould. We were determined to do things our way. It’s pretty emotional now when we think back to what we did, how far we went.”

Mel B and the rest of the gang – Geri Horner (née Halliwell, Ginger Spice), Melanie Chisholm (Sporty Spice), Emma Bunton (Baby Spice) and Victoria Beckham (née Adams, Posh Spice) – took the fast train to stardom when they answered a newspaper ad in 1994 asking for “streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated” young women to audition for a manufactured pop group.

Selected from 400 hopefuls, the novice pop stars spent a year preparing for their big reveal as a group called Touch, but things went sour when they were told by their management they would be required, among other things, to wear identical outfits.

In a moment of pure “girl power,” a mantra they would later spread around the globe, they walked away from the promoters and went rogue.