Let’s hear it for the Girls

If you’ve paid even passing attention to early reports of the Spice Girls comeback tour, you will be aware of problems with the sound, the car parking, the lax and/or overbearing security checks, the bad weather, bad tempers, bad karma, bad you name it…

Some of it may even be true. But having observed the Spice Girls sashay through a maelstrom of fake news since long before the phrase was invented, I was not altogether surprised to discover that the show was far better performed and produced, and certainly a lot more fun, than the media mavens would have us believe.

No one would describe the Ricoh Arena in Coventry as a place of visual or acoustic beauty. A 40,000-capacity bear pit, identified by FourFourTwo magazine as the worst of the 92 stadiums in the English football leagues, it is a forbidding destination in every regard. And yet, by the end of their second night there, the Spice Girls had successfully rebranded the vast impersonal bowl as a gaudy monument to the enduring appeal of girl power.

The group, who once declared themselves, in a historic interview with this magazine, to be ‘true Thatcherites’, nowadays tailor their sloganeering to fit a more ostentatiously inclusive agenda. As the show began, the screens around the stage flashed up a ‘Welcome to Spiceworld’ message that embraced ‘all ages, all races, all gender identities, all countries of origin, all sexual orientations, all religions and beliefs, all abilities’.

As fireworks shot into the air, the Girls appeared at the front of a huge, semi-circular stretch of stage that extended out into the audience. With the dress code ranging from superhero to Disney princess, they started with a full-blooded salvo of ‘Spice Up Your Life’, ‘If U Can’t Dance’ and ‘Who Do You Think You Are’.