25 Years of Swygart – 1998 – Spice Girls, “Viva Forever”

It’s strange, innit, how girl-group split rumours always seem more prevalent than boyband ones. Think: how many times are Girls Aloud meant to have broken up over the course of their existence? How often have you seen it written that Sugababes are capable of tolerating each other’s company? Should we even bother mentioning All Saints? (It was never really a problem with B*Witched, of course, but that’s mainly cos in order to have personality clashes the individual members would have needed personalities first)

This was the last song the Spice Girls released with Geri Halliwell. It starts well. Their voices melt into violins, and slow, weird space-synths coast in… then the flamenco guitar. There has, probably, been a half-decent British pop single with a flamenco guitar on it, once (maybe “Oblivious”?), but most of the time it’s one of the most dreadfully dull cliches the music industry can throw up. Horrible images of men in black v-neck long-sleeve t-shirts with chin-fuzz and sandals in the tent at Glastonbury doing exclusive acoustic live sessions live while Jo Whiley zzzzzz

Sorry, yes. Anyway, the problem is that it sounds as though they were aware Geri was fucking off and therefore decided that going through the motions would be plenty. Geri’s own vocal at the end is a prime example – presumably put there to suggest that the split was entirely an amicable thing, Friendship Never Ends etc., but she sounds like she’s slung herself an octave too low and now has no idea what to do other than buzz like a fridge for a bit. Mel C is allowed to squawk all over the chorus, as tended to be her wont (see also the outros for “Goodbye” and “Say You’ll Be There”, for instance), and more than ever it sounds like over-compensation. This is meant to sound tender and regretful, but they’ve just taken that as shorthand for “a bit quiet”. Sentiments get mumbled. Someone goes “haaa-staaa man-yaaa-naaa”, and that bit seems to happen more than the other bits, so maybe that’s meant to mean something, cos otherwise one would imagine they’d not be doing it so often.

This is goop, basically. Nothingy, nothingy goop. I don’t believe or care about any of it, nor, I suspect, do they. It happened, it was number one for two weeks, and is possibly preferable to listening to Boyzone’s “No Matter What”, which succeeded it at the top.

If nothing else, though, it did set the precedent for the remainder of the Spice Girls’ singles. First, there was “Goodbye”, wherein they tried and failed to act like they definitely missed Geri and were still totally cool with her, and Mel C squawked all over the chorus, and it got to number one; then there was “Holler”, where they tried and failed to act like they were delighted to be working with Rodney Jerkins and were still totally cool with each other, and it got to number one and spawned one of the worst album sleeves ever:

See? Totally enjoying being in the same room. They’d definitely not be holding hands if they weren’t. See how far Mel B’s stretching in order to clutch one of Mel C’s fingers? That’s commitment, that is. That’s togetherness. That’s Friendship Definitely Not Ending.

And then… “Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)”. The reunion. Totally they were all delighted to be there. Would there have been an accompanying BBC documentary entitled “Spice Girls: Giving You Everything” otherwise? Would the chorus have decided that “Friendship Never Ends” would be the lyric to be lifting from their past?

It got to number 11, and so their career ended with their first ever single to chart outside the top 10. In with a bang, out with a whimper, then back with a damp, damp fart. “Viva Forever” is the sound of dreams slowly and pathetically dying.

If I were American, this would have been:

Brandy & Monica, “The Boy Is Mine” – as UK number ones started to have shorter and shorter runs at the top, this reigned o’er the Hot 100 for 13 weeks. Brandy and Monica find the most fantastic way to express their enmity – taking their assigned words and lobbing in additional notes and syllables so that they wind up extending all over the top of each other’s parts. They could run the Olympic 100 metres final in the time it takes Monica to sing the word “took”. Never mind that Brandy has the charisma of a J-Cloth; this is so far out of “Viva Forever”’s league that it ain’t even funny.

American Me: 8
Actual Me: 6

Other notable UK number ones of this year:

Between them, Cher’s “Believe” and the Jason Nevins remix of Run DMC’s “It’s Like That” spent a quarter of the year at the top of the charts, getting seven and six weeks respectively. Apart from that, though, the year was characterised by increasingly brief tenures of the number one spot, with 26 other singles getting a slice of the pie. This led to Usher, All Saints, Robbie Williams, Billie, B*Witched, Jamiroquai, Another Level and The Manic Street Preachers getting their first ever number ones. Somehow it doesn’t feel quite right that Texas aren’t in that list, but never mind.

Anyway, the high turnover also resulted in this getting to number one:

I rushed out and got the album in anticipation of similar stuff, then discovered that actually, Cornershop sound like this:

But that is also cool.

Britain found out that Aqua sounded a bit different sometimes, too:

And The Tamperer got to redefine flashing up lyrics on the screen, sort of:

Actually, from that clump we mentioned earlier, “Never Ever” is pretty great, really:

I’ll add links for some of the other stuff later. Anyhow, that only tookfive days to get round to, and 1999’s up next – only 10 left! It’ll all be over by Christmas. Possibly.