The People vs the solo Spice Girls discography

Ladies and Gentleman of the jury, you have heard the evidence presented to you and yet I am duty-bound to go over it one more time so that you are aware of the heinous crimes that have been committed.

When the Spice Girls split, it created five solo careers. Five very different and yet equally awful solo careers. We have had to endure the outputs of these solo careers for over three decades now and it’s about time each and every one of them is brought to justice.

Let’s start with the best of the five, Emma Bunton. Apart from that weird one where she starts singing about sucking you off all night and that sub-par cover of Downtown, Bunton remains the least offensive. She has a warm voice and her discography is a lot better than it should be. ‘Maybe’ remains a genuinely decent song. There are a lot of singles from her past that aren’t anything to be embarrassed about.

The same, however, cannot be said for Mel B. The only reason she isn’t higher on this list is because of the frequency of her singles is significantly lower than some others. Absolute stinkers like ‘Want You Back’ and her stitched together with string and cellotape cover of ‘Word Up’ by Cameo stick long in the brain and not for good reasons. Perhaps she knew that singing wasn’t her strong point and thus gave up quick sharpish. The over polished American R & B smear that appears on most of her singles makes her sound like every other R & B singer during that era. Time has not been good to our Mel.

The same also cannot be said for Victoria Beckham. Less a singer and more a millionaire’s daughter who decided she wanted to be a singer one day, if you don’t count the autotuned-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life ‘Out of your Mind’ with True Steppers and Dane Bowers, she only has three singles to her name. Do you want some really sh*t rapping over a ballad? Becks has you covered with ‘A Mind of it’s Own’. Are you interested in someone singing a terrible Kylie b-side at you? Try ‘This Groove’. Every single feels as though they made the video first and cobbled a song together around it. You have to stick to what you know. It’s a good job she’s a fashion icon and also has a millionaire husband otherwise she’d be bored senseless.

We’re down to the dregs and you know where we’re going. She has eight (count em’) albums to her name although I doubt any of you would have heard anything past the second one. Mel C almost almost took the crown from you know who because her crimes are numerous. On her first album she covered as many genres as possible including rock (Going Down), pop (Northern Star), twinkle-shafting R & B (Never be the Same Again) and Ibiza club nonsense (I Turn to You) without mastering any of them. She then went a bit alternate with the second album, probably doing an Avril Lavigne thing, which was the style at the time. If we could give an award for trying then Mel would get it. I’m sure if we had enough time there’s probably a lot to like in her later stuff and she does seem like a lovely person. Still, strength of character is not on the stand today. Personality is not being judged here. What’s being judged is keeping Bryan Adams in the public consciousness and ‘When You’re Gone’ continues to dominate certain easy listening radio stations. That cannot be forgiven. Canada thinks we’ve forgotten, but we haven’t.

I’m going to come out and say it; Geri Halliwell’s career is the worst. Think I’m joking? She only has nine singles to her name. Nine singles! It feels like more because they’re that terrible, ladies and gentlemen. Once you get past the go get ’em sassiness of first release ‘Look at Me’ you’re left with disturbingly bad anglo-Spanish your mum’s holiday video ‘Mi Chico Latino’, so unmemorable and by the numbers you’d think it was written for an advert ‘Lift Me Up’, feminist anthem but nobody was listening ‘Bag it up’, I left my switchblade on the bus but I’ll happily cut off my ears with this oyster card before I ever touch this again cover of ‘It’s Raining Men’, my five year old wrote some words on a paper that rhyme so make it a song ‘Calling’, another Kylie b-side but worse than Victoria’s if you can believe it ‘Ride It’, Emma’s doing a 60’s thing so I’m going to copy her shamelessly ‘Desire’ and the puke-inducing generic song about driving and probably talking about sex too ‘Scream If You Wanna Go Faster’.

I need to sit down. It’s all too much for me. Remembering is fun but not today. I hereby condemn all five Spice Girls solo careers (okay, we’ll let Emma Bunton off).

Wang Four Stars

Years ago I used to sometimes get the train home from Blackfriars station. This was around the time they were just starting the process of completely rebuilding it, and one of the first things they did was take the light-up advertising poster frames off the walls. Behind them were lots of paper posters, presumably the last ones to be put up before the frames went in. They all seemed to date from the late 1980s.

There was all sorts of old advertising on display, some older than others, but this one caught my eye. It’s for an event called Wang Four Stars.

Yes, charity was the winner back in June 1988 at this event hosted by Jimmy Tarbuck and Terry Wogan, and sponsored by, er, Wang.

Presumably large numbers of people were expected to make the journey to Moor Park to watch celebrities play a round of golf. Maybe there wasn’t much to do in 1988. Other big names teeing off for a good cause included Cliff Thorburn, Sean Connery, Kevin Keegan, Russ Abbot and Shakin’ Stevens.

The poster is at pains to point out that there will be professional golfers, leading “personalities” and excellent catering facilities.

And, as it also makes clear, it’s all thanks to Wang.

Logical Dreamscape: that Rachel Stevens dream

Right, it’s about time we find out what’s going on here.

For too long I have wept in the shadows from the trauma of that Rachel Stevens dream from some twenty-seven (possibly) years ago. I need to take the bull by the horns and try to interpret what my brain was trying to tell me at the time in my life. I was young, hormonal, somewhat deranged, floating in a puddle of filth.

When I need explanations I turn to the friend we all need; dreamdictionary.org. Let’s have a brief recap as to what happened:

“I’m somewhere on Garforth main street when I meet Rachel Stevens from up-and-coming pop group S Club 7. She’s a little bit alluring, somewhat flirty but mainly pushy. She’s very, very pushy.

She takes me up a flight of stairs to a fairly plain corridor with only one door and a wooden chair outside. She makes me sit on the chair and goes into the room behind the door. When she emerges, she has a plate of salad and a fork in her hands. She then proceeds to angrily eat the salad making constant eye contact with me throughout the whole experience.”

I hope I haven’t misremembered what could be a pivotal turning point in my life. Anyway, let’s turn to the dictionary for an insight into the troubled mind of a teenage youth.

First, let’s pick out the main points:

Street, celebrity / singer, woman, stairs, corridor, wooden chair, salad, anger

Now let’s see what the dream dictionary says:

Street – walking along on the street could imply our current life’s path. Take note of what is around you and write down all the symbols because it may have hidden gems that might help you out (I don’t remember anything).
Celebrity – this represents our own desires to be noticed or unacknowledged potential that needs to be explored.
Woman – According to Jung, a man dreams of his anima; the feminine within the masculine psyche that needs to be integrated. In dreams a women represents wisdom, love and protection.
Stairs – there is nothing for stairs.
Corridor – there is nothing for corridor.
Wooden chair – when we dream of a chair it symbolises our need to take it easy. You need to take a break from you busy schedule and rest. You are working yourself to the bone and this dream is your unconscious tell you to calm down.
Salad – there is nothing for salad, there is nothing for lettuce (I remember there was a lot of lettuce in that salad).
Anger – there is nothing for anger, I also tried looking for ‘rage’.

Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

So, by meeting a celebrity woman on a street it meant that on my life path I wanted to be noticed. I don’t think Rachel Stevens represented wisdom, love or protection because she was so enraged with my very presence. If I was doing GCSEs or A levels around that time then the idea of taking it easy would make sense. Wanting to be noticed too does make sense because, shocked as it may be to hear this but, I wasn’t very popular during secondary school.

Huh. Maybe there is a little truth buried beneath the absurdity of it all.

Memory Flash: celebrities

When you were watching television as a kid did you ever notice a person or persons who seemed to be everywhere? I watched a lot of TV when I was young. I drank it all up at all times of the day. I would watch kid’s programmes very early on, mundane game shows and special interest programmes during the day and films that were definitely not for my age group late at night.

Those interest programs and gameshows though, they were something else. You’d be watching something like ‘Noel’s House Party’ and a particular someone would be there, and then they’d also be on ‘Blankety Blank’, and then you’d see them later on in the week on ‘Crosswits’. This person would always be there, no matter what you were watching on what channel. They still flash into my mind every now and then and the majority of them I have no idea why they’re famous. I thought it best to therefore look into the CVs of a select group so that we can all remember why

Lionel Blair

Lionel Blair was an actor, dance, choreographer, tap-dancer (I remember this about him the most, don’t ask me why) and television presenter. When he father died when he was thirteen, he became the breadwinner for the family and took to the stage to earn money. He briefly took on a career as an actor before deciding dancing was for him. His dance troupe appeared on a number of TV programmes in the 1960’s. He also appeared in the Beatles film ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and was one of the team captains on the game show ‘Give us a Clue’ from 1979 until the early 1990s. Later on in his years, he earned up to £100,000 for a six-week run doing pantomimes. This is but a brief insight into what must have been a very illustrious career.

The Krankies

This was a husband and wife duo, Ian and Jannette respectively, where the latter dressed as a schoolboy called Wee Jimmy and the former was their umm paternal figure. Unusual setup aside, they began their comedy career performing on the circuit during the 1970s and were given a big break with a spot on the Royal Variety Performance. They released a series of pop singles and an album, they had roles on several television shows including Crackerjack (?) and the Joke Machine (??). In 2003, Wee Jimmy Krankie was voted ‘the most Scottish person in the world’ by readers of the Glasgow Herald. The most interesting aspect of all of this me looking at Wikipedia is that in 2009 they were invited onto the Paul O’Grady show for the pantomime special of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in which Janette played a hooker and Ian played a rampant camel. Yes, you read that right. I’m sure that’s not the strangest part of their careers but hey ho.

Gary Wilmot (who?)

Wor Gazza needs no introduction. Already adept at singing and performing, his big break came in 1978 when he featured as part of a comedy double act with Judy McPhee (?) on ‘New Faces’. This then led to numerous appearances on ‘Copy Cats’, ‘Knees Ups, Cue Gary’ (??) and ‘The Keith Harris Show’ (???). In addition to co-presenting the kid’s quiz show ‘So You Want To Be Top’ (I’ve never heard of any of these things), he hosted something called ‘Showstoppers’ where wor Gaz would sing songs from musicals with special guests, although the main point of the show was for celebrities to learn and perform a song in ten days. Nobody cared about that mind. Gary was so popular that his original sixty dates taking the performance on tour had to be increased to one hundred and sixty due to phenomenal demand.

We all know his marvellous music career including such classic albums as Double Standards, The Album and, of course, Love Situation.

Gaz has dabbled in theatre too playing numerous roles in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, ‘The Pirates of Penzance’, ‘Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’. I personally remember him being the guy man in ‘Chicago’ when it was showing in Leeds around maybe 2010. Not because I actually went to see it but because I saw the poster in Leeds train station and took a photo of it (and I still have it somewhere).

I also saw him recently on Richard Osman’s ‘House of Games’ which was only showing last week however I can’t remember if it was a repeat or not.

There you have it. A comprehensive insight into the world of people who were around when we were growing up. It’s not too much of a understatement to say that there’s a lot going on here (especially for Lionel Blair, who knew?) and I would thoroughly encourage everyone to go do their own research.

Also, what happened to Rowland Rivron?

Long-awaited outcome

I was recently reminded that this exchange had happened while Ian and I were talking about gingerbread.

1 May 2025 was three weeks ago and I can confirm with pleasure that it was a fairly normal day. I was at work, where among other things I dealt with some emails about election coverage and logged a call with our facilities helpdesk to have a carpet cleaned following a minor water leak.

As a result I am pleased to confirm that my ability to see precisely five years into the future is working nicely. Or at least it was five years ago. If you want to know whether it’s still working now you’ll have to wait another five years.

Newsboost – unused material (part one)

You may or may not remember the Newsboost Twitter account that I started back in 2014. It was a way of force-feeding mega news into the public subconscious via a steady stream. I ran it for roughly a year before abandoning it as one of those Beans side projects that didn’t quite work out as well as we’d hoped.

I still have the same notebook that I jotted ideas in. Most of them were used but there were some that didn’t make the cut, possibly because they were too “radical” for the time or, which is much more likely, because they were utter nonsense that popped into my head for a moment and there was nothing I could do with it.

Anyway, here’s a short list of what could’ve been:

A good chair shouldn’t be sat upon
Portable sarcasm
Pointy beard serving posts (?)
Credit card gifts to children for irresponsible parents
Broom jacket
Aliens have given up on earth
Drive by serenades
Recycling man caught littering
Skeleton career guidance
Polar bears stealing chips
Tub Barsley promises a marrow for every household
Backwards cutlery for dieters
THE NOSE IS THE FACE ON THE BODY OF THE FACE
Chicken on drums
Slowest tortoise keyboardist fired
Big ass television comeback
Growling slippers
New number set to debut this Autumn
Chronic pigs

I’ve listed this as ‘part one’ because after turning over the page there’s so much more and one month where I’m not particularly feeling it, I can whip this out again for a quick win.

Proof that not every idea is a good idea (but every invention is a good invention).

Letting the new year in

We are about to find ourselves in 2025, the quarter-way mark of 21st century, a bewildering thought for those of us who still think of the 21st century as some weird new thing and the 20th century as a kind of default.

Since 2025 is going to be rung in nationwide with the traditional combination of drinking, forgetting the words to Auld Lang Syne and feeling like new year never lives up to the hype, it feels like a good moment to look back at the moment, 25 years ago, when we rung in the new millennium.

(harp music, screen goes wibbly, pictures turn black and white)

You join 16-year-old Chris at his aunt and uncle’s house, this being the venue for the family’s new year celebrations at the end of 1999. Most of the family is here, at a big house in a village near Selby. Music is playing, drinks are flowing, and every conceivable surface is creaking under the weight of bowls of nibbles and snacks.

My family has a longstanding tradition – much beloved of my grandma, who is here somewhere, probably on one of the La-Z-Boy recliner chairs in the living room with a glass of Bailey’s – that the new year must be “let in”.

This tradition stipulates that good luck will befall the family for the coming year if the first person to open the door and cross the threshold on the first of January is a tall, dark man bearing symbolic gifts. Should anyone else be the first to open the door and “let the new year in” – a chubby ginger toddler, perhaps, or a fair-haired woman of merely average stature – the year would be beset with problems. My grandma often told a cautionary tale of the year she absent mindedly unlocked the front door and went into the house first, only to find she had let the new year in herself. Nothing went right that year.

For many years my grandad was nominated to let the new year in. He was an imposing figure, a senior policeman over six feet in height with a no-nonsense jawline and black hair. Luck was always on their side when he turned the door handle. But over the years the duties were shared out. Once he had grown up my dad got to do it sometimes, or his brother. At my aunt and uncle’s house my uncle – not easily described as “tall”, but certainly dark haired and a man – would do the honours.

Anyway, the millennium was considered a special event. I was 16, and to my surprise was asked to let in the new year. The news was broken to me in hushed tones, a coming-of-age moment and a sign that I was joining the grown ups.

At about ten to midnight, I put my coat on and was handed the gifts I was to bring in. There was the shiniest coin anyone could find, to bring wealth; a match and a piece of coal, to bring warmth; and some food, to bring food or plenty or something like that. And with my pockets duly stuffed, I stepped out of the door.

Not much was happening outside, so I walked round to the living room window, where I could see everyone inside and could make out the Hootenanny on TV. The cat was sitting on the windowsill so I gave him a scratch under the chin. After a while, the moment arrived, there was much cheering, and inside the house glasses were clinked and hugs were exchanged. In the distance some fireworks started to go off. I then made my way to the front door to let myself and the new year in. It was locked. Nobody had put the Yale lock on the sneck, so when I went out it had locked itself.

I knocked on the door. Nobody was in the kitchen. I rang the bell. Nobody could hear it over the music. I went back to the living room window. Nobody was looking. Eventually, when there was a lull in the music, I banged on the double glazing, someone finally saw me, and there was a stampede to the door as it dawned on the party that one of their number had been standing outside since the previous century.

When the door finally opened, I’m not sure whether it was me or the cat that actually let the new year in. But I can make the claim that, 25 years ago, I saw in the new millennium standing on my own, in a front garden, and holding a match, some coal, a slice of white bread and a 50p piece.

(harp music, screen goes wibbly, glorious Technicolor returns)

This year I intend, once again, to be safely inside a warm house when the fireworks begin. Having tried the alternative I recommend it. Wherever you are, have a very happy new year. And don’t forget your lump of coal when you step through the front door.

Nine million minutes ago

It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been slightly more than nine million minutes since the first time Kev travelled down to London to visit me in my poky Mortlake flat. (If you prefer more conventional time measurements, like some sort of idiot, that equates to 6465 days, or 17 years, eight months and 13 days.)

Obviously we used our time together extremely profitably. Among our many intellectual and sporting pursuits, we found time to spend quite a while – several hours, in fact, judging by the timestamps – taking pictures of ourselves with my iMac’s photobooth software.

Here are some highlights of a couple of very youthful idiots having a laugh nine million minutes ago.