Spice (album) - Recording and Production

Recording and Production

The group were supposed to meet with producer Eliot Kennedy the week after they left their former managers, but the meeting was arranged by the Herberts weeks before their departure. But without access to Herbert's address book, they knew nothing of Kennedy's whereabouts other than he lived in Sheffield. Brown and Halliwell drove to Sheffield the day after the departure from Heart Management and looked for the first phone book they came across; Eliot was the third Kennedy that they called. That evening they went to his house and persuaded him to work with them. The rest of the girls travelled to Sheffield the next day. Kennedy commented about the session: "None of them played instruments, so I was left to do the music and get that vibe together. What I said to them was, 'Look, I've got a chorus - check this out'. Then they were throwing lines at us. Ten minutes later the song was written. Then you go through and refine it. Then later, as you were recording it you might change a few thing here and there. But pretty much it was a real quick process." Two tracks of the album were composed in that session: "Love Thing" and "Say You'll Be There".

In the following months the group continued to meet with producers, wrote new songs, prepared demos and searched for a new manager. They met again with the writers Stannard and Rowe. They had previously worked with the girls in January 1995 before their departure from Heart Management; that was the group's first professional songwriting session, held at the Strongroom in Curtain Road, east London. Having completed that one, the girls wanted to write something more uptempo, so they started to write the song that would be the lead of the album: "Wannabe", which was recorded in under an hour - mainly because they had already written parts of the songs beforehand. The next song they recorded was a slow ballad and the third track on and single from the album, "2 Become 1". The song was inspired by the special relationship which had developed between Halliwell and Rowe during the session. In May 1995, the group was introduced to Paul Wilson and Andy Watkins, the songwriters and production duo known as Absolute. Watkins commented about their first meeting, "They played us a few tracks, which we didn't particularly like. So we thought, this is OK. We can work with this." A songwriting session was booked within the next few days, but the musical association between them didn't seem to go well at the beginning. Wilson remembered, "When they started to sing it was never quite right: from our point of view. It was very poptastic." Watkins recalled, "After two sessions we phoned our managers and said 'This just ain't happening'." It was at this point that Watkins and Wilson heard "Wannabe" for the first time. When speaking about the song, Wilson said "We listened to it and we didn't get it at all. It was so different to what we were doing. We thought is this going to work?".

The next session was the definite one; either they would continue to work with the group or break up their relationship. Wilson recalled, "Every previous time we'd met up with the girls we had prepared a backing track. This time we had nothing." Watkins also said, "They said they wanted to do something up and a bit of fun, so we just off the top of our heads started to come up with a full-on disco backing track, which became 'Who Do You Think You Are'." Wilson said of the song, "The thing is when they wrote it, they were also writing the dance routine, constructing the video, all at the same time as writing the song. And that's when the penny dropped." The girls went on to write "Something Kinda Funny", "Last Time Lover" and "Naked" with Watkins and Wilson, none of them singles, but all of them tracks which lent a touch of classy R&B feeling to the Spice album. Absolute also produced all of these songs as well as the two tracks penned with Eliot Kennedy: "Say You'll Be There" and "Love Thing" giving the duo a guiding hand in six of the ten tracks that eventually ended up on Spice. The tracks that Absolute produced were recorded for the most part at Olympic Studios in Barnes. At this time, 1995, the Auto-Tune facility had yet to come to the market and most of the vocals were recorded with few adjustments made afterwards. Absolute told Simon Fuller about the group they had worked with and asked whether he would consider managing them. Fuller received a demo of "Something Kinda Funny", one of the songs the group wrote with Absolute. He showed interest in the group, began a relationship and decided to sign them at 19 Management in March 1995. In September 1995 the group signed a deal with Virgin Records, and continued to write and record tracks for their debut album while touring the west coast of the United States, where they signed a publishing deal with Windswept Pacific in November.

The Spice Girls were fully involved in the writing of all the songs. Halliwell in particular was clearly a fund of ideas for songs, arriving at sessions with her book of jottings, notes and miscellaneous scribblings which often produced the starting point of a lyric or a song title or just an agenda for the day's work. Watkins commented: "Geri (Halliwell) would come up with the concept for a song. Typically, she'd sing one line and the girls would pick up on it or we'd pick up on it and construct around it and then Mel C (Chisholm) and Emma (Bunton) would be very active. They'd really like to sit and sing melodies and go off and come up with little sections."

They "conceptualised" and sang bits of melody and wrote the lyrics. But in musical terms it was not a partnership of equals. Rowe commented: "We had to kind of steer it. It was very different for different tracks really. Some of them were when we were all jamming in the room. We'd just put up some drum sounds and start making things up. On other tracks me and Richard (Stannard) would prepare something beforehand and play it to them. We'd have some lyrics and make them write the second verse."

The Spice Girls introduced two key innovations that have had a lasting impact on the way which modern pop acts go about their creative business. Firstly they introduced the idea of songwriting identity. This was a familiar concept in rock bands like Queen or the Sex Pistols, but not in the world of "manufactured pop", where the credits of songwriting would be divided out strictly in accordance with whoever had written the song. The Spice Girls recognised their solidarity as a group, which depended on maintaining parity in all departments, including the songwriting credits and the resulting royalties. They share the songwriting royalties on all the songs irrespective of what any member of the group had or had not contributed to any particular song. The second thing the Spice Girls established from the outset was a straight 50 – 50 split between them and their various songwriting collaborators. Here they anticipated one of the key developments in the pop industry since the 1990s, namely the increasing importance of publishing royalties as opposed to royalties payments made for the performance of the song on the record.