In 1997, while the Spice Girls were busy filming their debut cinematic opus Spice World, songwriting and production duo Richard “Biff” Stannard and Matt Rowe were sat in Abbey Road studios in London twiddling their thumbs. In need of ideas for the band’s second album, but with the group themselves away on set, they started to venture outside the world of pure pop. “I’m a massive New Order fan and there’s a frog [sound] on their Low-Life album and I remember thinking: ‘I really want to put frogs on this song’,” Stannard told me when I interviewed him for my book Reach for the Stars, an oral history of 00s pop. Sure enough, odd ribbit sounds are peppered throughout the verses of the band’s disco-tinged Never Give Up On the Good Times.
While Posh, Sporty, Scary, Baby and Ginger were generally involved in their songwriting, and worked in a small creative bubble, the boom that the Spice Girls instigated in UK pop meant that for a while there wasn’t generally much scope to deviate from the era’s dominant sounds: saccharine pastiche (Steps, S Club 7) and clean-cut pop-R&B (Five, Blue). Songwriting teams would often be writing to suit the tastes of powerful A&Rs keen to keep things decidedly mass-market. “We would basically be writing for Simon Cowell rather than the particular artist,” former Westlife and Shayne Ward songwriter Savan Kotecha told me. “He had a very specific pop taste.”
