Quite amazing, really, that we've heard so little from her for so long. At the
start of the 21st century, Geri Halliwell was unavoidable. She was
everywhere: as pop star, charity campaigner, professional celebrity and
all-round media rent-a-mouth. A few years on, and where on earth is she? Has
she opted for early retirement, been quietly dropped by her record company,
gone off to have babies?
None of the above, as it turns out. Since she turned 30 in 2002, Geri
Halliwell has been having, if not a makeover, a bit of a rethink. And now
here she is again, more than ready to speak out about, oh, lots of things.
Early on in our conversations she announces that she is "a compulsive
communicator". It later transpires that she doesn't just mean by this
that she can talk for England; though she can, on topics ranging from Alan
Bennett's "faaan-tastic" play The History Boys, which she has seen
twice at the National Theatre, to the super-cool temperament of top tennis
players such as Roger Federer. Nor is this communicative sort remotely
interested in plugging her own books. Geri Halliwell may be one of the very
few 32-year-olds on the planet to have authored two autobiographies — 1999's
If Only, and Just for the Record, which followed in 2002 — but she never
mentions either of them in my hearing.
Her need to communicate is something else. As we sit at the dining table of
her new managers' tranquil house on the banks of the Thames in Wallingford,
Geri goes off on one, unprompted. Since turning 30, she says, her "libido
went through the roof", which was a problem because living in LA, as
she was from early 2002 to March 2004, and not being in a relationship or
inclined to casual sex — "because I'm not promiscuous" —
these urges made her a bit fidgety.
Until she discovered vibrators, that is. Geri has quite a collection. She
explains that to avoid personal hassle they were mainly purchased on her
behalf by friends and assistants. Then she expands on how she feels
genetically split, having inherited her late father's untrammelled sex drive
and her mother's Spanish-Catholic cautiousness where sex is concerned.
Nobody around the table — her publicist, female co-manager and myself — can
think of much to say to this. But that's okay because Geri has moved on to
her difficulties with PMT — "I've got it a bit today, actually"
— and now, crikey!, she's talking about her bowel habits. These have been a
preoccupation since she was a child, when her fondness for sitting on the
loo for long periods led her mother to nickname her Cacitas, which Geri says
is Spanish for "little poos".
The importance of regular motions in her life she relates to a broader
emotional issue. The gist of it is — it's not good to hold things in. And in
the bathroom as in life, holding things in isn't her style. There's a TV
documentary about her — the second she's had devoted to herself in her solo
career — coming up on Channel 5. She thinks it should be titled God Sex Poo,
and if it covers any of the ground we've visited during this chat, then that
doesn't sound such an inappropriate idea.
The reason for all this filming, lunching and talking is, lest we forget, the
thing that made her famous in the first place: pop music. Geri is about to
release her first album for four years. Whether the world is ready for this,
or would rather view her as a flame-haired pop relic, a prototype of the
modern celebrity-without-portfolio and forerunner of the reality-TV-show
wannabes, remains to be seen. But it's still a significant event for her,
because it marks her recognition that writing and singing songs is, after
all, what she really, really wants. "I put my music on and it fills me
right up," she says. By way of illustration she starts singing The Best
Is Yet to Come, by Frank Sinatra. "Frank's the soundtrack to my life.
You put that on and you feel wicked. My own music does that to me. I write
anthems for myself."
She says she is now "at a place where I feel I have a career", by
which she means that she is in music for the long haul and no longer needs
success on the scale to which she became accustomed during her first five
years in the limelight. She points out that Elton John's career took a dip
in the late 1970s after a spell of world domination. When she heard him play
last year at the christening of Victoria Beckham's sons Romeo and Brooklyn,
she felt inspired: "What a talent!" The new Geri aspires, with
typical chutzpah, to become a similarly mature artist.
Geri Halliwell didn't always feel so passionate about music. In her late teens
and early twenties she sought attention by other means, like topless
modelling. In her first autobiography, If Only, she vividly describes the
low point at which the idea of singing first occurred to her, at the age of
22. "What about music? If I could have a hit single, on the strength of
that I could get a presenting job or become an actress. I could change my
life."
Once her life had been decisively changed, after she joined the Spice Girls,
Geri seemed more engaged by the band's message than their music. She it was
who most fervently talked up "girl power". This powerful marketing
tag wasn't, as she acknowledged, her invention. "It had become one of
those hip phrases on the street, and I liked what it stood for." It
suited her. As maybe the least conventionally attractive member of a group
whose appeal lay, initially at least, in their girl-next-door ordinariness,
Geri was the perfect mouthpiece for a slogan that promised the world to
young girls with none of the usual conditions attached. Forget beauty, wit,
academic qualifications or a great singing voice: all you needed was desire
and drive and you could be, well, just about anything. You could be Geri
Halliwell, one-fifth of the most commercially successful pop group of the
1990s, and the most popular band, in terms of their international appeal,
since the Beatles.
As long as being a Spice Girl meant mouthing off at press conferences or on
television, and doing cheeky things like snuggling up to Nelson Mandela or
touching Prince Charles's bottom, Geri seemed to have found the perfect job.
Once the Spice Girls hit the road, however, performing their music night
after night in big arenas, things began to unravel. For all their high-tech
gadgetry, modern pop concerts can be gruelling for those who front them.
Even when it doesn't matter if you hit the right notes — because all the
backing tapes require of you is to "lip-synch" in time — there are
frenetic dance routines to keep up with, amid the baking heat of a light
show and the hysterical racket of the crowd. Geri barely lasted three months.
In May 1998, on the eve of the American leg of the world tour, she bailed out.
Three years later, something similar happened to her while she was promoting
her second solo album, Scream If You Wanna Go Faster. Things had begun
promisingly when the single It's Raining Men, which was featured in the
first Bridget Jones movie, topped the charts across Europe. Then, suddenly,
Geri felt it was all going wrong. "When I'm being a famous performer I
stop being a human being, and that's what makes an artist stale and sterile,"
she says.
So she flew to LA to be with her friends George Michael and Robbie Williams.
Robbie has been an important figure in her post-Spice life. "It's a
healing experience to meet someone like me, who's left a successful band to
launch a solo career. He was a great mirror for me. I hate using the words
Ôlow self-esteem' but there are times when you have to borrow other people's
faith and love."
She insists that Robbie and Geri were never the item the gossip mags imagined
them, briefly, to be: "We were just friends." On her new album,
there is a song called Loving Me Back to Life, which loosely describes her
overcoming her 21st-century blues, which she wrote with Robbie's musical collaborator
at the time, Guy Chambers.
Shortly after finishing that song, Geri left her house in Kensington and
hightailed off to LA. She says she found "peace, anonymity and space to
breathe there". She additionally loved "the weather, the valet
parking and the false waiters who give you nice smiles. I can deal with that".
On arrival, she stayed with George Michael and his American boyfriend: "We
were like a sitcom. I was Girl about the House!" Then she rented a
house on Mulholland Drive, and for two years — the longest gap since the
Spice Girls landed in 1996 — the world heard not a note of music from Geri.
It did, however, take delivery of a detailed account of her lifelong
struggle with eating disorders, Just for the Record.
The view from her record company back in London was that what had really
discouraged her was her dwindling popularity. The man entrusted with the job
of overseeing Geri's recordings is Chris Briggs, a genial senior A&R
executive with EMI who also takes care of Robbie Williams's output. He
identifies 2001 as the year in which a mighty backlash against all things
Spice set in. "It happens with pop music that people wake up one day,
as if after mass hypnosis, and say, ÔWhy did we ever like that?' The truth
was, they had adored them too much."
The situation in 2001 was made worse by the arrival of solo projects from all
five Spice Girls. "You felt you were pushing a large weight up a hill,"
Briggs recalls. The music, he thought at the time, was no longer being
listened to. "If we'd put the same songs in Kylie's mouth, the reaction
would have been totally different." Unlike the media-canny Ms Minogue,
the Spice Girls had been overexposed for years, their images employed to
sell everything from crisps to scooters, and in the case of Geri, sometime
UN goodwill ambassador, to promote awareness of breast cancer.
By 2002 her ambitions seemed to be reverting to those of her 22-year-old self.
Though she denies she went to LA to become an actress, you do wonder. Around
the time she got there, Geri fired her then manager, Andy Stephens, a
record-industry veteran whose main client is George Michael, and appointed
Jenny Frankfurt of Handprint Entertainment, which specialises in film and TV
people. She took an acting course which she says "de-conditioned me".
Curiously, given her what-you-see-is-what-you-get demeanour, she believes
actors are "more real than pop stars, as there is no armour with good
actors. For me it was like, ÔTake off that cloak.'" But with or
without that cloak, there was no acting work for her in LA. She is fine with
that, she says, firstly because "music's always been my passion"
and secondly because "being a pop star you're the director, whereas as
an actor you are one of many".
She came back to England in March 2004 to finish an album that, according to
Chris Briggs, was hardly started; then, by her own admission, "drifted
into staying". Briggs believes she really has changed: "She's
rediscovered music." He is also keen to allay the suspicion — partly
fuelled by her own flightiness — that Geri is a musical dunce with a talent
for little more than self-publicity. "She writes all her own lyrics and
will usually get a top-line melody worked out. She is far more proactive in
her music than most people with her background are given credit for."
And yet, and yet. Though he thinks it's full of strong, mainstream pop songs
and immaculately produced — which it is — he says he has "mood
swings" about the new Geri album, Passion. He blames the Spice factor. "On
one hand I think it should just be about how good the record is, but on the
other you feel an irrational resistance to her. The more I think about it,"
he concludes bleakly, "the less comfortable I feel."
Geri is, as Briggs is the first to say, "nothing if not entertaining".
She is also nothing if not full of seesawing contradictions; or as Robbie
Williams once put it, "Geri is mad, but good mad."
She still can't decide whether, having fought for it for so long, being famous
is what she wanted. "Fame is a mask that eats the face," she
quotes, within minutes of our first meeting. Later she downgrades this
celebrity health warning to: "I can handle being famous twice a week
for two hours, at some big industry do, then I wanna go home, put my jeans
on, walk my dogs." She says she loves being back in London, even though
its media circus has just forced her to sell her Kensington house. She was
driven out, she says, by the depredations of a new breed of showbiz snapper
she calls "the dodgy minicab paparazzi". Over the past year these
scoundrels have broken into her car, followed her and shouted verbal abuse
at her. She's now in hiding in a rented flat.
At times she sounds as self-obsessed as any former — and maybe future — A-list
celeb, prone to Californian statements along the lines of "I am a
spiritual being and I'm on safari and I'm going to experience and learn from
it in the short time we're here." Then, the next minute, she is off her
high horse and quizzing me: about what books I am reading, and what I feel
passionate about. Do I have peace of mind? And she actually listens. The
second time we meet, I notice Geri has, in her bag, a copy of a Billie
Holiday biography I recommended to her last time we spoke.
Slightly wearisome as her introspective moments can be, her puppyish eagerness
to engage with big topics — and sometimes bite off more than she can chew —
can be a bit of a hoot: at one point she renders "antidote",
malapropistically, as "anecdote". She knows there is such a word
as "anomaly" and understands what it means but can't get her
tongue round it. In some pop stars this might come across as inept and
pretentious; with her it sounds rather sweet.
There are only two topics upon which Geri will not be drawn. One is how much
she is worth: "I think it's quite ugly to talk about what I've earned."
She will admit though, that "as long as I don't buy a Ferrari every day"
she doesn't need to work again. And if recent reports that her old band-mate
Emma Bunton has squirrelled £10m are anything to go by, Geri, with all her
solo hits and bestselling books, must be good for at least that much.
Comfortably rich, then.
The other no-go area for interviewers is what she calls — oddly for someone
who will talk freely about vibrators, menstrual matters and toilet routines
— her "private life". She means, of course, the men in it. "I've
never divulged anything about my relationships," she says. This is not
quite accurate, since she writes in If Only about a boyfriend, Sean Green,
whom she lived with for a year or so when she was back in Watford trying to
become a glamour model. Since then, there have been flings lasting a few
months but no falling in love. "I've experienced degrees of it,"
she says, and claims she now feels "more open to commitment and intimacy"
than she has for a while. Well, maybe. But the man she mentions more often
than any other is her dad, Laurence Halliwell. Aged 50 when she was born and
dead by the time she was 21, this grandfatherly figure continues to play a
huge role in shaping his youngest daughter's tastes. Any doubts that Geri is
still her daddy's girl are dispelled as soon as you meet her constant
companion, a patagonian dog whose name is — no kidding — Daddy.
It was her car-dealer father who taught her to love fast cars: she now drives
a Porsche Cayenne turbo and a Mercedes sports car given to her on her 27th
birthday by George Michael.
Halliwell senior's favourite music, swing jazz, features on a couple of tracks
on Passion, and Geri says that's where she wants to go next. "I'm
transitioning into that kind of music with my own maturity. My father
brought me up on Judy Garland and Shirley Temple. I love all that old-school
Hollywood glamour because it's such an anecdote [sic] to ordinary life."
While her conversation may pinball skittishly, Geri is stuck on making this
next, tricky career transition work. She says she will listen to guidance
and criticism "but I cannot tell you how much it kills me". And
when she says "I am probably one of the most unmanufactured pop artists
going," you are inclined to believe her.
It was Geri who devised and virtually directed the video for her next single,
Desire. The last time we speak, she has spent the day rehearsing a live
presentation and okaying delivery of the finished album to her record
company. The mixes of the title track — a swing number — kept her awake at
night. Her new management, the seventh to occupy a rather hot seat, she
chose firstly because they are music people whom she's known for years, and
secondly because they listen to what she has to say.
Which is a lot. But just at the point when you think Geri Halliwell could talk
about almost anything until the cows come home, then talk to the cows, she
switches track. "There are different drawers to my personality,"
she says. "Sometimes my ego kicks in and I want to say interesting
things. Other times I think my point of view isn't that important and I hate
the sound of my own voice. And I just think, oh, shut up . . ."
