THEY sang loudly and proudly, though not always tunefully, about sex, empowerment and the importance of friendship.

The Spice Girl’s brand of female empowerment – or “girl power”, as it would become known across the world – earned the group status as pop culture juggernauts. The five-piece appeared on the cover of hipster Rolling Stone magazine, fronted Pepsi ads and sold out gigs across the world in the space of a few whirlwind years.

When the group announced a long-rumoured comeback at the end of last year, it took minutes for tour dates to sell out. Even being down a member – Victoria Beckham, aka Posh Spice, declined to join the reunion – did little to dampen worldwide sales or the enthusiasm of the thousands of fans heading to Murrayfield to see them perform tonight.

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So is it pure nostalgia filling a dozen stadiums across Europe, or does girl power still have a place in 2019?

Mel B, also known by her alter-ego Scary Spice, described the 90s feminist catchphrase as “about spreading a positive vibe”. Geri Halliwell – now Geri Horner – echoed her sentiments years later. “Girl power was a mission,” she said in 2016. “It was like, ‘We feel like this, and we believe there is a whole generation of girls who feel like this, too’.”

Their message was obvious in music, a string of fun, confidence-laden number one singles. “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends, make it last forever, friendship never ends” became a mantra for a generation of young girls growing up in the 90s.

The group became known for anthems of self-assuredness: “I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want” and “Who do you think you are?” were a breath of fresh air to mainstream charts at the time.

The Spice Girls also celebrated the notion that you could be any kind of woman you wanted to be. 

Everyone had a Spice they identified with most (I was a Sporty, while my pal was more of a Baby).

For many, they also provided a first brush with feminism for girls and young women in the 90s. With Germaine Greer and Simone De Beauvoir not nearly as accessible, or cool, the Spice Girls inspired confidence and prioritised friends over boyfriends. 
Older adolescents were given sex-positive, body positive messages.

Of course, not everyone embraced girl power. Critics were more cynical, seeing it as a male-made marketing tool.

Garbage’s Shirley Manson said she found the Spice Girls “abhorrent”. “I always hated the term girl power,” she said in 2016. “It was pretending to be women taking control, but none of them took control, they weren’t writing, they weren’t producing, they weren’t playing… I found it a sham.”

She perhaps has a point: the band was initially brought together by men, advertising for a “street wise” female group.

But, despite the group’s slick PR machine, Horner maintains that there was authenticity behind the forming of the group.

“When I met the other girls, I was pursuing a career as a solo artist, but it suddenly occurred to me that there was something so powerful in the idea of ‘we’ – when women, or people in general, really support each other,” she told Vice.

In 2019, the tone of feminism has taken a more serious turn. The MeToo movement is at the forefront of public consciousness, while the Instagram age is synonymous with a decline in mental health. But its core remains the same.

A profile of the group by Kathy Acker for The Guardian in 1997 urged the Spice Girls to grow with feminism.

“I am speculating, but, perhaps due to Margaret Thatcher – though it is hard to attribute anything decent to her – a populist change has taken place in England,” she wrote.

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“The Spice Girls, and girls like them, and the girls who like them, resemble their American counterparts in two ways: they are sexually curious, certainly pro-sex, and they do not feel that they are stupid or that they should not be heard because they
did not attend the right universities.”

The profile added: “If any of this speculation is valid, then it is up to feminism to grow, to take on what the Spice Girls, and women like them, are saying, and to do what feminism has always done in England, to keep on transforming society as society is best transformed, with lightness and in joy.”

Feminism has carried on and the reviews of Spice Girls’ reunion tour may be ‘been there, done that, bought the t-shirt’. But, two decades later, for one night only, most of us wouldn’t mind wearing that old t-shirt again – even if it doesn’t fit anymore. 

Geri herself said there were “braver voices before the Spice Girls and braver voices after”.  

Pop culture love affairs may be fleeting, but girl power is forever.