That Was Then, This Is Now

Geri Halliwell approaches the topic of her departure from the Spice Girls, well, gingerly.

“If you’re in a marriage, things don’t always work out,” explains the 26-year-old singer, who catapulted to global fame as Ginger Spice, one-fifth of the Spice Girls. “I fell in love so deeply with those girls. . . . It’s an emotional thing leaving.”

This Monday--yes, Memorial Day--marks the first anniversary of the Great Spice Split, the day that Halliwell hung up her famed Union Jack mini-dress and walked away from the sunny, sassy (and lucrative) cartoon Spiceworld.

Don’t expect to find Halliwell crying, however. Instead, the artist formerly known as Ginger is giddy over the buzz building around her first solo album, “Schizophonic,” which is already a hit in England and is the first fruit from her $3.2-million, three-album deal with EMI Records UK.

While the single “Look at Me” is hovering near the top of the U.K. charts and is already getting airplay here on radio, MTV and VH1, industry insiders say it’s no sure bet--the U.S. market may be burned out on the once-ubiquitous Spice Girls, and the group’s fans may not connect with the “new Ginger.”

Indeed, officials with Halliwell’s U.S. label, Capitol Records, sense a challenge getting “radio gatekeepers” to view Halliwell as a distinct new artist, says label President Roy Lott.

“The Spice Girls connection might be a real negative for us with radio,” says Lott, although he also points out that the Spice Girls fans of 1997 may be ready in 1999 to embrace a new, more mature sound from a familiar face.

In the meantime, Halliwell is finding new ways to expose herself. “Geri: The Girl Can’t Help It,” a documentary film of her life after the Spice split, debuted this month to mixed reviews in England. “It’s a fantastic portrait of fame,” Halliwell says, “but it’s very hard for me to watch. It slashes down those walls.”

Image and fame are also central to “Look at Me,” a winking, lounge rave-up that both mocks and celebrates glamour: “Cold-blooded, hot gossip, superficial expectations, look at me,” Halliwell sings. “You can take it all because this face is free. Look at me, I’m a drama queen if that’s your thing, baby. I can even do reality.”

The campy song evokes a woman who is “playful, sexy and strong,” Lott says.

“It’s Ann-Margret in 1999, absolutely,” Lott adds. “It’s ‘Viva Las Vegas.’ It has a strength in it, like Peggy Lee in the ‘50s or Ann-Margret in the ‘60s. . . . If the Spice Girls had girl power, this has woman power, people power.”

The “girl power!” rallying cry of the Spice Girls became part of the pop culture lexicon when Ginger, Baby, Scary, Sporty and Posh exploded on the scene with “Spice” in 1996 and their follow-up, ‘Spiceworld” in 1997, albums that sold almost 12 million copies in the U.S. alone.

The group became a pop juggernaut with its own film and a global Spice trade of video games, toys, clothing, etc. It also led a youth pop revival that transformed the music market, according to Geoff Mayfield, director of charts for Billboard.

“I don’t know if you can credit them with blazing a trail or if they were fresh faces in the right place at the right time,” Mayfield says. “Either way they helped galvanize a core of young music shoppers who were not as interested in buying music during the modern-rock era.”

The youth pop trend feeds a hunger for fun music, Halliwell said, but the downside can be overly disposable music.

“Music can be lazy, do you know? I don’t want that. I tell people I want my music to . . . poke you in the eye but also make you dance,” she said. “Pop music doesn’t have to be crap, it doesn’t have to be candy shop.”

While critics would likely lump the licorice sounds of the Spice Girls into that candy shop, Halliwell is careful not to speak ill of the group or its music. Two of the remaining Spice Girls are working on solo projects and the quartet will likely reunite for an album to be released sometime in late 2000.

Halliwell says she quit “within hours” of being notified that the group’s schedule would not permit her to do an interview to promote breast cancer awareness.

In the months since, she has devoted her time to that cause, to her role as a United Nations goodwill ambassador and to creating a new musical identity. Gone are the platform shoes and thick makeup. Now she wears black, in part to mourn a friend.

“Ginger was a part of me,” she says. “I had a ball doing it but everybody needs change . . . [but] sometimes it’s strange. I look around and say, ‘Oh God, it’s only me now.’ There’s no one else to lean on.”