We all know the Spice Girls by their actual names of course, but it's the band nicknames that made the group so awesome during their nineties heyday. Everyone wanted to be either Scary, Baby, Ginger, Sporty, or Posh in the playground - the names made them almost like characters.
But you may have wondered HOW the girls got their nicknames - did they choose them themselves, or was it the creation of their pop mogul manager? Neither - it was a "lazy" magazine editor - according to Mel B.
Speaking to HuffPost Live, Mel B said:
“It was actually a lazy journalist that couldn’t be bothered to remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames, and we were like, ’Oh, well, that kinda works. I don’t mind my name. Do you like your name? Baby? Posh?’ We were like, ’Let’s just go with it.”
The "lazy journalist" was actually Peter Loraine who ran Top Of The Pops magazine in the 1990s, and devised the nicknames for a feature that ran in 1996.
“Posh was the first one to be thought up because Victoria looks pretty sophisticated. The rest were pretty easy really because the girls’ characters were already really strong,” he reportedly said.
“The names jumped out at us. We laughed the most when we came up with Scary. Jennifer Cawthron, who was also from Leeds, came up with that one because Mel B was so loud and had tried to take over our whole photo shoot.”
Mel B also revealed she's up for a reunion in 2016: “There’s nothing officially being said right now because, we’re still — we’re talking...So I’m hoping things will hurry along and [we] can get this going.”
YES Mel B - get your Scary on and make this happen!