How Did The Spice Girls Get Their Nicknames? Mel B Breaks It Down - MTV
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Scary. Baby. Ginger. Sporty. Posh.
Twitter bio? Nah, man -- the Spice Girls !
As iconic as the band members' wild outfits and hairstyles were, their nicknames were even more so. We first met Mel B, Emma, Geri, Melanie C and Victoria under those names, which means in our hearts, that's who they'll be to us forever.
Dave Hogan Hulton Archive
But how did they end up that way? Mel B recently told Huff Post Live that a magazine editor christened each of them with their adjectives to make life easier.
"It was actually a lazy journalist that couldn't be bothered to remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames, and we were like, 'Oh, well, that kinda works. I don't mind my name. Do you like your name? Baby? Posh?' We were like, 'Let's just go with it,'" she said.
Peter Loraine, who ran U.K. magazine and TV show Top Of The Pops in the 1990s, apparently devised the nicknames for a feature story on the group that ran in July 1996. The rest, as they say, is history. According to the Spice Girls official timeline, Loraine and his staff came up with them out of convenience.
"Posh was the first one to be thought up because Victoria looks pretty sophisticated. The rest were pretty easy really because the girls' characters were already really strong," he reportedly said . "The names jumped out at us. We laughed the most when we came up with Scary. Jennifer Cawthron, who was also from Leeds, came up with that one because Mel B was so loud and had tried to take over our whole photo shoot."
Mel B also said very bluntly that she's ready for a Spice-centric reunion in 2016!
"There's nothing officially being said right now because, we're still -- we're talking," she said . "So I'm hoping things will hurry along and [we] can get this going."
Us too. And hey, we're only two years away from Spice World 's 20th anniversary. No harm in starting the celebration early.