Collectors of the world: spice up your life!

The UK has released Spice Girls stamps, and I have to blog about them because it’s like this issue has been AI-designed to attract my attention. So here we go. Chicas to the front.

I didn’t think it would be difficult to write this piece. Pop culture on stamps is my bread-and-butter, and I’ve covered a bunch of these UK music issues before.

But I’m really struggling to nail a consistent opinion. I want to say that this issue embodies so much of what I detest about the Royal Mail’s stamp policy. I also want to say that it’s exactly what we should have more of. Can 2 become 1? Let’s find out!

Power of 5

Firstly, congratulations, I guess, to the Spice Girls. They were extraordinarily popular during the 1990s, and they’re remembered with enduring affection. Even now, the grandeur of any event held in the UK is judged not by whether the king shows up, but whether the Spice Girls totter in for a reunion.

The numbers don’t lie: they sold over 100 million records worldwide, making them the biggest-selling female group of all time. They earned nine #1s in the UK, which is pretty impressive, given that they only released two good studio albums plus another one.

Congratulations also to Millennials! You’re now so old that Royal Mail thinks you’re making enough money to want to spend it on stamps of your favourite band.

Because that’s how these Music Giants stamp issues work, innit. They’re not really being sold to go on the mail. We know that because, in an era when no one writes letters anymore, there are no less than 15 first-class stamps in this issue. Ordinary people do not need 15 stamps in one hit.

And sorry, stamp collectors, but they’re not aimed at you, either. At the time of last year’s Stampex – the biggest philatelic event in the UK – the Royal Mail decided not to take a stand “following a strategic review,” which says everything about where stamp collectors figure in the Mail’s priorities.

The real strategy is: in a delusional fever dream that it’s still 1996, the Royal Mail is salivating over the thought that millions of Spice Girls fans will flock to the nearest post office and pay £18.75 for the basic set (that’s about €22 / $US 24 / $AU 36 / ₹1,980), perhaps adding an overpriced collectable (Spice Girls platinum miniature sheet, just £199.99!), and treasure them forever as mementos, alongside the cassingles, the ticket stubs, and the platform sneakers. Selling stamps for a service you’ll never have to provide is called making a profit, and that’s why corporates in suits get paid the big bucks by postal authorities.

The Spice Girls is the first band featured in this ongoing Music Giants series whose fan base would be mostly Millennials. Previous issues have been largely Boomer-bait, with a couple of later artists that Gen-Xers might be into if they weren’t so damn apathetic about everything.

That’s one of the things I like about this issue. As long as we have stamps, then some of them should be relevant to a young-adult market. And if the Royal Mail wants to hang onto the younger collectors who started to poke their heads up during the lockdown era, it really wouldn’t hurt to have a few issues that aren’t the 150^th Anniversary of the Birth of Winston Churchill, or some sitcom our grandpa watched fifty years ago.

One of the things I don’t like is the general idea of putting living people on stamps. I could start a topical collection of war criminals, drug cheats and disgraced royals to demonstrate why. I also don’t like crass commercialism intended to shift units. But those battles were lost a long time ago. And since the bar has been irrevocably lowered, then why not have Game of Thrones or Warhammer or – what is it now, about thirteen Harry Potter issues? At least the Spice Girls have a clear connection to the issuing nation, which is more than can be said for some issues we’ve seen as cash-hungry post offices race each other to be the next Equatorial Guinea.

Tell Me Why

But assuming profit is the aim, I have to wonder how these Spice Girls stamps will sell. They didn’t release an enormous body of work over 30+ years, like most of the other Music Giants, and that’s what it usually takes to inspire lifelong commitment. As fondly as they’re remembered, are they the kind of band whose fans – now heading towards their 40s, loaded up with kids and mortgages – remain so connected that they’re going to find meaning in buying some stamps? It might make older generations’ heads explode, but I’d wager that a decent percentage of Spice Girls fans would never have even used a postage stamp. Reader, do you know any grown-up Spice Girls fans who aren’t stamp collectors? Would they bother with this? Have they even heard about it? Report back to me, thanks.  

This issue also sure broadens the qualifications to be a ‘Music Giant’. Pedants grumpier than me might object to the Spice Girls as ‘Music Giants’ on the basis that they had help from composers and producers when it came to writing their songs. If that’s your quibble, first go and tell the Americans to recall the Elvis stamps. Let me know how that goes.

I’m thinking more about the quality of the output. Bubblegum pop has never been my thing, so I’m trying to keep my snobbery in check here, but… will Spice Girls tunes stand the test of time? I think ‘Stop’ is a near-perfect commercial pop song, but will history place it in the musical canon right alongside the Beatles’ ‘Something’ or Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’? I suspect not. I hope this doesn’t usher in an era where chart sales alone qualify a band as a ‘Music Giant’, because most British pop is utter balls. Here’s an idea, though: get through all the legit Giants, then start a category called ‘Musical Memories’. Then they could feature any one-hit wonder that the Royal Mail still thinks has enough living fans.

…But then, there’s this. You could play an endless game of ‘Shouldn’t ‘band X’ have received Music Giant stamps first?’ and believe me, I did. I defy you to play that game and not end up with a list that’s 95% dudes. Is that because men write all the good music? Don’t be that guy. This is the insidious echo of sexism throughout history. Composers and performers have always been treated differently according to their gender, from education and employment opportunities through to marketing and creative control of their output, not to mention the same issues that affect every woman in every workplace. That’s probably why only 8.4% of inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame are women. That said, it still doesn’t feel quite right to me that the Spice Girls are feted as ‘Music Giants’ on any level other than sales when Dusty Springfield, Annie Lennox, Kate Bush, Petula Clarke, Bonnie Tyler and the British half of Fleetwood Mac are right there.

On this note, shoutout to Sophie Ellis-Bextor, whose 21-year-old hit ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ recently topped worldwide Spotify charts after a memorable appearance in the film Saltburn. Sophie once lent her childhood stamp album to Stampex, so she deserves a stamp issue for service to philately alone. Her music was always a class above the Spice Girls anyway. Unfortunately, in 2014, she did write that stamps were too serious and that she’d taken up doll collecting instead, but that just means she was hanging out with the wrong stamp collectors. I’m sure she’ll be back once she finds the cool kids and realises that she could kill two birds with one stone and collect dolls on stamps and then she wouldn’t have to settle for the clearly second-rate option of collecting actual dolls. You heard me, Sophie Ellis-Bextor. If you think you’re gettin’ away, I will prove you wrong.

Back to the current issue, and after all that, I’m going to officially declare that if we can get past the idea that living humans can be depicted on British stamps despite the inherent reputational risk, lifelong achievement is no longer a prerequisite, the number of stamps in any given issue can bear no relevance to postal requirements, stamp subjects are chosen more for sales potential than for objective quality of creative output, and it’s OK to monetise a nation’s postage stamps as a platform for licensable product thereby conferring upon them all the dignity of a school lunchbox… then hey, why not celebrate the Spice Girls?

Image & Likeness

So it’s shame then that the stamps themselves are a bit disappointing. The Spice Girls were such an integral part of 1990s Cool Britannia: they had positivity, fun, and cheek in spades. Throw in the band’s signature ‘Girl Power’ and their fun-feminist response to the lad culture of the time, not to mention their total and utter world domination, and there’s plenty to suggest that this could have been a riotous stamp issue.

Instead, what do we get? Ten concert photos (shown above), and a bland fan-card of each band member. It looks like twenty minutes’ work combing Getty Images with a credit card.

In fairness, their album cover art isn’t much use to a stamp designer. But I wish the stamps had captured a bit more spark. It might have been tricky to clear a photo of Ginger Spice pinching then-Prince Charles’s bum, but some of the images that have been used in the collectible prestige stamp book would have made for some much more engaging stamps.

At least we have Geri Halliwell’s iconic Union Jack apron dress. But I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want: the Spice Bus from the movie.

I’ll end with a lament on the timing of this issue. My collection of ‘every 20^th-century decimal Australian stamp on commercial cover’ included a cover that I was kinda fond of. It was an item of fan mail – Australian, but addressed to the Spice Girls, c/o their label in the UK. I really don’t know how I came to own it. The address was scrawled by a young fan in lovingly-applied multi-coloured felt-tipped pen, with decorations. Set off by its 1990s stamp, the cover reeked of its era and brought a touch of surprise and delight to an otherwise pretty staid section of that album. But I recently downsized the scope of that collection to just a few favourite issues, and I think the Spice Girls cover might have gone into a bargain box that I sold at my local club. It was a cute envelope, but the stamp didn’t cut it.

That’s what it takes… if you wanna be my cover. Zig-a-zig-ah!

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