It was the editor of Top of The Pops magazine who named them Ginger, Scary, Sporty, Baby and Posh and thus they became exactly what they wanted to be - an all-in-one brand with five separate identities. They were only delighted!
"Our job was to sell and the product was the Spice Girls. Not in a tarty way but in a doncha-want-to-be-in-our-girl-gang kinda way." Having gelled well, with only one dropout, the girls appear to have acted on the Marxist principle that the workers really should control the means of production. Instead of meekly signing contracts that might have stitched them up for years, they boldly took their precious demo tape right from under the noses of the two men whose ad in The Stage - "R U 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance? R U streetwise, outgoing, ambitious, dedicated?" - had brought them together in the first place, the mitigation plea being that Victoria's dad, having been in a couple of 1960s groups himself, had suffered the consequences of contracts he couldn't get out of.
Now the girls were free to bounce in and out of various management offices doing their Wannabe routine, searching for the perfect person to help them in their ambition to conquer the world. Victoria, nothing if not brand conscious, described how Simon Fuller, their first manager, looked to the famous five on the day of that auspicious encounter:
"He had on a pair of jeans, not any old jeans - Armani. And a Comme des Garτons shirt the colour where purple meets lilac, perfectly ironed. Everything about Simon was very clean, very well pressed, more studied than spontaneous, like his polished DMs. Smart watch - Patek Philippe. The overall impression was casual but wealthy, underlined by a bit of a double chin, more a sign that he could afford the good life than that he was going to seed." Perfect credentials in a business where social camouflage is a lethal weapon.
In no time at all he'd signed them to Virgin and was chasing sponsors. This may explain why they debuted in Japan. Pepsi are big in Japan.
Girls who dream of MTV and boys longing for that throaty roar as they hare up the tunnel out on to the Wembley turf will be begging their parents to buy this book. Mummies and daddies ought to give in gracefully - after the kids have cleaned their bedrooms and mowed the lawn of course - for young Mrs Beckham has produced an absolute paean of praise to determination, perseverance and those good old family values that any parent of an ambitious child would approve of. Indeed, this book could have been ghosted by someone like Mary Kenny, though we know from endless interviews in Hello! that it's all Victoria's own work. Talking into a tape recorder and having someone type it up counts as proper grown-up writing these days, particularly if your first single was number one in 27 countries, some of which you hadn't even heard of. Except these weren't real countries, these were Venues. Airports, limos, hotels, appearances and home again to the bosom of her family. And what a family. Her dad, a workaholic like herself, not to mention her mum "who would completely go without for me and my sister and brother to have something". Health Warning: You'll never match up to her folks, folks! Her first boyfriend, Mark, kicked out of his own family, comes to live with hers. They even subsidise him:
"For my 18th birthday they paid for him and me to go to Eurodisney and stay two nights in Paris at a really nice hotel. It should have been romantic but he totally ignored me. I kept asking 'what have I done?' So what do you do when someone treats you like shit? You get engaged. I never for one moment thought I would marry Mark: getting engaged was just getting engaged." Her mother, saint that she was, even baked them a cake. Mind you, Victoria didn't really like Mark. After her fantastic first week with the girls - "a complete adrenalin rush", even though Geri couldn't dance - "however you look at it, a few months as a podium dancer in Magaluf just isn't the same as 10 years at the barre" - she comes home and there he is "like a black cloud in my new blue sky". When she tells him they are going to conquer the world he has the nerve to say (reminiscent of that old story about groups with guitars being on the way out): "Girl bands, forget it. A complete waste of time."
Luckily their manager was a Man Utd fan and kept pestering her to go to matches. Though she was going out with someone else when she first met David Beckham, it wasn't a set-up, honest. She knew, she just knew this was IT. And, dear reader, it was. Not only does he rise politely when she leaves the table to go to the loo but he once threw his arms around her mother and cried, when Victoria refused to believe the tabloid story about him mucking around when she was away on tour just wasn't true!
Recently Michael Parkinson, contrasting Beckham with George Best, tried describing the difference 30 years has made in the world of professional football. "What we're talking about now is the athlete as pop star, fashion icon, sex symbol and commercial product."
He's right. Terrifying how trivial life has become. Together Posh and Becks are greater than the sum of their parts and since the demise of Diana, sheer bliss to the snappers. So even though literature this is not, who am I to argue against a 27-year-old telling the tale of her rise to mega-stardom in an age when celebrity is celebrated as an end in itself? A lifetime achievement award after four years in the business and a glossy magazine forking out a million for her wedding pics might seem a touch bizarre to the rest of us but it all appears perfectly natural to the girl who, right from the start, wanted to be as famous as Persil Automatic.
I wonder if I'm the only reviewer over 30 who's actually read the whole 374 perplexing pages. Perplexing because it's hard to credit someone so young taking such fiendish pleasure in documenting every last detail of a story that could be told in 10. Thirteen-year-olds will be riveted because of the Happy-Ever-After ending, but us bowed and bloodied oldies find it hard to believe in happy endings any more. Our loss, I'm sure. We need more happy endings and your daughter, whether or not you put her on the stage Mrs Worthington, could do a lot worse than taking Posh Spice as a role model. Even Victoria, young and all though she is, appears to know nothing is forever. In her dedication she writes: "And Brooklyn, when you're old enough to read this book, you'll see that Mummy and Daddy were really famous once".
Jeananne Crowley is an actress and writer