Spice Girls: Forever on CD

It’s easy to judge the Spice Girls‘ third album as a disaster now, but on the eve of its release could anybody have forseen the dire commercial consequences of abandoning the effervescent pop of old?

Of course, that’s history now… as, it appears, are the band themselves. Following the failure of this album to hold on to a chart placing for more than a handful of weeks (it plummeted from an entry position of #2 down to #16 and then clean out of sight not long after that), not to mention the humiliation of coming second to Westlife‘s Coast to Coast on that first week of release, Emma Bunton confirmed to the press recently that there would be no further singles from Forever, and no tour this year either. “It’s All Over Now – Baby Spice” might have been an appropriate headline… with all apologies to Bob Dylan.

So, this is what we are left with, effectively the girls’ swansong. 11 tracks of varying mediocrity. Where once there was an alluring vim and vigour to their sound, a sense of fun, now there are only bland, homogenised R’n’B stylings. The swagger, the bubbly joy of it all, appears to have left when Geri Halliwell called it quits in may 1998. Her “Schizophonic” solo album is, in spirit, the true third Spice Girls record.

Holler is bouncy enough, in a two-stepping way, nothing to distinguish it as a Spice single but plesant all the same, despite its forced rhyming of “Holler” with “follow”. It’s double A-side, Let Love Lead The Way, is a non-descript ballad chock full of lyrical cliches. Like its close relative Goodbye – the 1998 Christmas #1 included here to make up the numbers, it seems – the song is coated in umpteen layers of wispy synth sounds, but at least the latter actually had something (of sorts) to say. Let Love Lead The Way is so vacuous it’s hard to believe this is the same group who took the entire music world by storm just 4 years earlier.

There are three more dull ballads on Forever – Weekend Love, Time Goes By and Oxygen. Unmemorable and devoid of inspiration, they drag the second half of this album into the mire. Lacklustre sequencing here has put just one barely uptempo song among the last 6 tracks, not a smart move when the material is already below-par.

Tell Me Why, Right Back At Ya and Get Down With Me are serviceable grooves with little to set them apart from the procession of faceless pop wannabes who have followed in their wake. Were it not for Melanie C‘s now-recognisable bleatings from time to time, you would be hard pressed to spot any of them as Spice Girls tracks.

If You Wanna Have Some Fun fails to live up to the promise of its title… it’s no Who Do You Think You Are, that’s for sure. Fun is something which Forever is chronically short of, and there is a sense of contractual obligation about the album. With successful solo careers taking off – and the personalities of each member becoming more disparate – the time was surely right to call it a day before this record.

The gang mentality they built their appeal around has long evaporated with the passing of time, motherhood, marriage and so on. That was only to be expected, and perfectly natural. Forever was a rather unnecessary exercise… what did they want to prove? Nobody would have been surprised if they’d let Goodbye stand as their final moment. The cycle had come to an end, they were free to move on.

As it was, their pulling power proved strong enough to just manage one final chart-topping single in Holler/Let Love Lead The Way, but its rapid descent from the summit must have raised a few eyebrows. So too, obviously, would Forever‘s even more abrupt appearance on the album charts.

They started with a bang… and ended with a whimper. A cliche, it’s true, but cliches are the language of Forever.