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.
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