Emma Bunton: Bringing up baby
It's the time of year when critics and disgruntled fans sharpen their
knives - the release of yet another album from a former Spice Girl.
Just one problem, Emma Bunton's latest mature pop offering truly
rocks. She talks to Paul Sexton about backstabbers and stalkers,
deals and disappointments - and, shock!, making music
01 February 2004
Emma Bunton was never posh, her hair wasn't ginger and she certainly
wasn't scary. She could be sporty, but that vacancy was taken. So
Bunton played her appointed role as Baby Spice, the young innocent
who smiled a lot, looked virginal but potentially naughty, and wore
Topshop even though we knew she could afford Prada.
The ensuing story of five wannabes who turned girl power into 45
million record sales, was the defining showbusiness fantasy of the
1990s. Now, however, Bunton is about to find out whether she is to be
allowed back into the playground of pop on her own. And it's a
playground that, seven and a half years since that worldwide
explosion, looks very different.
Two years ago, Bunton realised that her record label, Virgin, the
company that launched both the Spice Girls and her own first stab at
a solo career, had gone lukewarm on her future prospects. Despite the
number-one success of her 2001 single "What Took You So Long", Bunton
and Virgin decided it was time to part company; just as Mel B,
Victoria Beckham and Mel C all had, despite also notching up numerous
hits, including several number ones.
"They [Virgin] came to me and said, 'Let's do a demo thing for the
second album.' And I thought, 'Hold on a minute.' Not a lot of people
know this, but I actually walked away from it. We put so much into
it, and when they don't give you that support anymore, it's quite
heartbreaking," says Bunton. "I said, 'Thank you very much for the
demo idea, but I want to take this where I know people are going to
be right behind me and work as hard as I do.'"
No longer wanted by the label, Bunton was determined to fight for her
place at the pop table. But in the short time that she had been gone,
someone had rearranged the place settings in favour of a younger
brigade of stars created entirely by television. That someone was the
very man who made the Spice Girls their first million, Simon Fuller,
emperor of 19 Entertainment and latterly the creator of the global
Pop Idol franchise. And also, ironically, the very man who would come
to her rescue with a new record deal within weeks of her divorce from
Virgin.
The media has not always been kind to the Spice Girls; but even if
their media profile went downhill from "Spice Girls Made My Boy Walk"
(Daily Star, 1996) to "She has crow's feet and a bum like an old
couch" (Arena, 1998), Emma Lee Bunton has only just turned 28, and
she's not about to give in because of her critics. After two hits in
2003 and a new single, "I'll Be There", due to land in the charts
today, next week she will release Free Me, her second solo album, and
her first under Fuller's guidance.
With the close attention of A-list co-writers - most famous of which
is Cathy Dennis (Kylie), but also Mike Peden (Liberty X), Ray Hedges
(Cher, Boyzone) and Henry Binns of the ice-cool group Zero 7 - Free
Me is an album shot through with real instruments, real tunes and a
sensibility that gleefully staples the sound and spirit of the 1960s
to the 21st century. Judging by early reviews, Free Me will surprise
people. It's certainly one of the strongest British pop albums of
recent years. Something has gone seriously right here.
"If you read interviews I did years back, when people asked me what
music I liked, I would always say 1960s, Motown, that's what I was
brought up with," she says. "When we did 'Stop', with the Spice
Girls, I had a big influence in that. For this album, I kept
saying, 'I love Motown and the 1960s feel and the liveness; I'm going
to bloody do it.' It was a bit of a risk. The producers were
like, 'Oh, OK, now we've got to get musicians in here and do it all
live.'"
We meet in Hampstead - close to her current home and not far from her
birthplace in Finchley - at Bunton's favourite, subtly lit, upmarket
restaurant-bar. She is seated in the corner on a leather sofa; she's
casually dressed and wearing little make-up. It's two days before her
birthday. "Doesn't mean anything, 28, does it? Not an important one,"
she says.
What's tonight's plan, then?
"Just go and get drunk, I expect."
On her nights out on extended play, there are still plenty of photo-
opportunities for Emma and her pre-fame girlfriends (though how drunk
she would get is questionable: she told one magazine last year, "As
soon as I feel myself losing control, I switch to water. My friends
say I'm a bit of a control freak.")
Unattached now - she had a long on/off relationship with Jade Jones
of pop group Damaged - she seems confident in her sexiness, full of
life, a young veteran catching up for the years spent making her
fortune. She is quoted in one of the endless flimsy books that
accompanied Spice mania as saying she lost her virginity at 16, but
her mother still came along to her first-ever meeting with Victoria,
Geri and the Mels. Indeed, she was still living with her mum and
driving a beaten-up Metro when the unknown five-piece started going
for auditions with record labels.
Soon our conversation is straying away from the past and into unusual
territory for a Bunton interview: her music. It's a topic she admits
she rarely gets to discuss with journalists. Most of the time,
there'll be the starters about the sexy new look, the boyfriends and
the boozy nights. A main course of Mrs Beckham, here own appearance
in Ab Fab, and a quick nudge-nudge about her mate Justin Timberlake.
And to finish with, that old favourite - a Spice Girls reunion. *
But Bunton's surprise at hearing someone asking her questions
specifically about her album is probably the same as mine at wanting
to ask them. "It's been so nice talking about this," she says,
sounding as if she means that if she carried on giving interviews
long enough, eventually the subject of music might crop up.
She tells me: "People basically talk in interviews about me being
pictured out one night. But music's why I'm here. I would say I'm
quite different from a lot of artists out there, because I'm on the
creative side."
It's a featherweight jab, and about as controversial as she
gets. "The going out and getting pictured, if it happens, fine,
because I know that's part of it. But I don't quite understand why
people want to know so much about that when there's so much to talk
about on the other side."
Unlike many media-savvy celebrities, with Bunton you get the distinct
feeling that what you see has an uncommonly close resemblance to what
you get. She's pugnacious to a degree; as she has been since her days
of bouncing back from failed auditions for EastEnders and inglorious
early work in commercials - one for toothpaste and another for a
building society where she was a bridesmaid on a giant wedding cake.
But ultimately, there's an instinctive breeziness about her that's
more than just an interview tactic.
Even when she tells a dark story about a stalker who found out where
she lived, she does it with the ever-attendant smile. "He always
seemed very polite, then one day I got this call from security. He
said, 'She's expecting me, you've got to let me in.' It all kicked
off, we got the police, and he had a knife on him. It was so scary.
My friend was with me, she said, 'Don't worry, it's fine.' Then I
caught her locking all the bloody doors."
There is a woman-child blend of steel and innocence here. When Bunton
met the other four future Spice Girls for the first time that day,
she wore a white dress, white knee-socks and trainers. "She was the
youngest, said Victoria Beckham in her book Learning To Fly, "but she
had more working experience than the rest of us put together."
"All of them were so hard-working," says Paul Conroy, boss at Virgin
Records during the girls' triumphant years. "But Emma's not so fixed
in musical areas, she's more flexible. I couldn't say anything to put
any of them down, but you can see first hand how we suffered from
people who just didn't want them to succeed. And it's very hard when
you've been in such a big outfit to then be taken seriously.
"Emma is radio-friendly, but it's transferring that to album sales,"
adds Conroy, who left Virgin shortly before Bunton. "We're pretty
brutal in our industry, these acts are expensive to market and you've
got to feed the machine. If you don't get the album sales, all the
goodwill and all the radio-friendliness and all the singles success
is pretty much a waste of time."
It may have been seeing her parents separate when she was 11, or
watching over a younger brother, but during her adolescence Bunton's
innate determination was supplemented by a deceptively tough hide.
"When I think about us and what we did," says Bunton, "we got up on
stage not knowing what the hell we were doing, we wore Topshop stuff
and we were loving it. We never said that we were soul divas, but we
all had fun.
"The difference with today's pop music is everything is very
controlled. If they haven't got the new Gucci dress on or they're not
a number one, they're failures. Sometimes I watch the telly and
think, 'Where's your spark? You're not enjoying it.' I still get so
nervous and really excited, that whole adrenalin rush still kicks in
as soon as I get on stage. It's frustrating when I can't see that
passion in some people."
Many would lay some of the blame for this state of affairs at the
feet of Simon Fuller. But Bunton sees things differently. "He really
looks after every artist he works with. He's always on the end of the
phone, we're always talking about the next step. I know he does that
with all the others. I'm good friends with Will Young [another Fuller
signing] now and he's writing, he's come a long way as well.
"The good thing with Will is people saw on the show [Pop Idol] that
he was an intelligent young man, he wanted to get on. When he sings,
I just see passion flowing out of him, he's still so excited about
it, which I love."
And yet, always there in the shadowy background is the feeling that
all of this - the 6am photoshoots, endless interviews and elaborate
video storyboards to further the solo career - won't ward off the
inevitable: the reunion.
"All of the girls have been very definite about their solo careers,"
says Conroy, "but everyone sees this as an in-between before the
Spice Girls reform again. I must admit I always thought there was an
inevitability of them getting back together at some stage. It's one
of those things, money and circumstances usually make those things
happen."
Should Free Me be the success it deserves to be, however, Bunton may
not be as willing to rejoin the Spice Girls circus as Conroy
thinks. "Even the other day," she leans over and whispers, "someone
said, 'I can't believe it, it wasn't until I looked on the back of
the new CD and saw your name on every song...' But you can't sit
there and shout at everyone, 'I bloody write the songs!, And also,"
she adds, "I love being in the studio... no make-up, in your
trackies, eating like a pig. Bottles of wine come in about six
o'clock. Love it."
Emma Bunton's single 'I'll Be There' is out now on 19/Universal. Her
album, 'Free Me', is released on 9 February
|
|