Muse (November 1999)

She was ginger and she was spice but now she's simply Geri. Gary Terratzo has afternoon tea with the reconstructed pop dame's reconstructed pop dame.

Geri Halliwell's breasts have been her fortune. Even before they popped out of the alarmingly tasteless dresses she wore as a Spice Girl, her mammaries gave her a starring role in other ways. The Watford girl's first brush with fame came in the early Nineties when she was a Page Three girl. In the pages of the Brit tabloids her boobs hung like twin dirigibles, there for the edification of the unwashed masses, and no one was to know that their owner would one day become a pop colossus. You might say that Geri Halliwell never covers anything up.

"I just think if you go into a situation with open arms, what can anybody say?" Geri tells me. "When you try to cover things up and sweep them under the carpet, that's when you get caught out. I'm human, we should all remember that. I think it's patronising as hell if you sit there with a veneer and I don't think the media in the 21st century is about that. I so don't believe that."

Geri Halliwell is like any other reconstructed pop dame. She sits primly on the edge of her chair in the penthouse suite of a Dublin hotel looking becomingly svelte, make-up free and dressed in expensive black. She is friendly but slightly guarded. But probe deeper, deeper into the mind of Geri and a different creature emerges.

Steely determination is a cliche that could have been coined for the ex-Spice Girl. Why anyone actually buys her records is a mystery, but it's clear that fame is the spur with Geri and that is what her attraction is - she is pop product made flesh, an entity famous for being famous.

She sang "Wannabe" the loudest and the longest and it's paid off big time. Geri has been out of The Spice Girls for over eighteen months now and it is to her credit that she has become her own woman since being exiled from that hydra-headed, planet-gobbling monstrosity. "At the end of the day I wouldn't like to be thought of as a commodity because that's very dehumanising," she says. "I see myself as an artist first and foremost, I love to write and communicate, I love writing pop music. Pop music has always kept me company, it's the soundtrack to our lives. It gives me the biggest buzz in the world when people sing along to my records."

Geri talks like she's just bought a barrowload of self-help books from a shop on Venice Beach and she also employs the preppy argot of US sitcom Friends at regular intervals. That could be down to the time she spent in hiding in LA last year but the new Geri is philosophical, a world apart from the Girl Power icon of yore. "When you're a teenager, you're full of bravado, cockiness - your mind has opened up slightly so you think you know it all but you can't be experienced, can you?" she reflects. "I think the more you know, the less you know. Geri, you've got so much to learn. You think you know it all now but actually just think of yourself in another ten years. You never stop learning, that's what life is - just one big learning curve."

Now 27, Geri has tried her hand at everything - UN goodwill ambassador, campaigning on behalf of breast cancer charities, starring in her own fly-on-the-cake documentary, singing happy birthday for Prince Charles and even hanging out with fellow diva George Michael. In the end, however, she returned to pop music.

"My confidence after I left The Spice Girls was very low but the one thing I kept on doing was writing. I was in so much emotional turmoil, I was devastated to leave the group anyway - I didn't really want to. I was ready to go back and do an album but actually I act on my heart and the whole UN thing and breast cancer thing was because I felt that I've taken so much from society that I owe big time. You've gotta go and give back girlfriend, get your feet back on the ground, understand what life is really about because you're just about to lose it. The other thing about where I am now - before you get something that you want, you really crave it and you desire it and covet it, then you get it, you indulge it and you think it's fantastic but you don't fully appreciate it until you nearly lose it and I nearly did."

She will categorically not answer questions about her "relationship" with Chris Evans and maybe this is part of the sense of dignity she's searching for. Dignity is a key word for Geri but perhaps her former band haven't been so discreet about the girl who was Ginger. Geri, falling into Friends-speak once more, doesn't "wanna go there." Life is ugly enough she says. "I thought, you know what Geri Halliwell? If your record goes in at No 30 you are so goddamn lucky. I like to think I've got an element of talent but there are also a lot of talented people out there who are playing in pubs in Dublin right now that will never get discovered."

Thank Christ for that, but the difference between all those people playing in pubs in Dublin and Ms Geri Halliwell is that she was born to be famous. Her ambition is what made her. "I absolutely believe that if you look at famous people the similarities you find are unbelievable. The death of a parent for a start - Madonna, George Michael, very driven people. It makes you very aware of your own mortality and of time. It's a craving, a void and it's that insecurity: please like me."

Geri Halliwell is as likeable a pop star as you're likely to meet. Half Ab Fab, half rehab, she is to be admired for snogging Kylie on live TV, not going to Posh Spice's wedding and being a brassy bottle-blonde with brains. Long may she roll.

source: muse