Background
In March 1994 father-and-son team Bob and Chris Herbert, together with financer Chic Murphy, working under the business name of Heart Management, placed an advertisement in The Stage, which asked the question: "Are you street smart, extrovert, ambitious, and able to sing and dance?" After receiving hundreds of replies, the management had narrowed their search to a group of five girls: Victoria Adams, Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Geri Halliwell, and Michelle Stephenson. The group moved to a house in Maidenhead and received the name "Touch". Stephenson was eventually fired because she lacked the drive of the other group members. She was replaced by Emma Bunton. In November, the group—now named "Spice"—persuaded their managers to set up a showcase in front of industry writers, producers, and A&R men at the Nomis Studios in Shepherd's Bush, London. Producer Richard Stannard, at the studio for a meeting with pop star Jason Donovan, attended in the showcase after hearing Brown, as she went charging across the corridor. Stannard recalls:
More than anything, they just made me laugh. I couldn't believe I'd walked into this situation. You didn't care if they were in time with the dance steps or whether one was overweight or one wasn't as good as the others. It was something more. It just made you feel happy. Like great pop records.
Stannard stayed behind after the showcase to talk to the group. He then reported to his songwriter partner, Matt Rowe, that he had found "the pop group of their dreams". Chris Herbert booked the group's first professional songwriting session with the producers at the Strongroom in Curtain Road, East London in January 1995. Rowe recalls feelings similar to Stannard's: "I love them. Immediately. They were like no one I'd met before, really." The session was productive; Stannard and Rowe discussed the songwriting process with the group, and talked about what the group wanted to do on the record. In her autobiography, Brown recalls that the duo instinctively understood their point of view and knew how to incorporate "the spirit of five loud girls into great pop music".
Read more about this topic: Wannabe (song)
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“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
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—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)