The day that left the Spice Girls’ Australian fans heartbroken

IT’S a decade since one of the biggest pop groups of all time announced they were getting back together — and playing their first Australian concert. How did it all go so wrong?

IT’S a decade this week since one of the biggest pop groups of all time, the Spice Girls, announced they were getting back together and hitting the road for a reunion world tour.

But it’s a bitter anniversary for some, given how poorly the resulting tour played out for the group’s legions of fans Down Under.

June 28, 2007: Amid much fanfare, the Spice Girls’ full five-piece line-up emerged at a press conference in London to announce a brand new single, a greatest hits album, and a full world tour.

Together for the first time in nine long years. Picture: AP

It was the first time all five Spice Girls had been seen together since Geri Halliwell had dramatically left the group mid-tour in May 1998. By 2000, the remaining four had run out of steam and gone their separate ways.

But now, they were back together — and ready to put on a show. Oh, the places they’d go. Los Angeles! New York! Buenos Aires! Beijing! Cape Town! Sydney!

A shiny new website was launched, showing a preliminary world tour itinerary — including a Sydney stop locked in for January 17, 2008:

Girl Power, ready to conquer the globe once more.

While tickets weren’t on sale, fans could enter a ballot to pre-register their interest for the show in their nearest city:

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.

Australia had always been a huge market for the Spice Girls — their first two albums went six times platinum each, and we were the only country in the world to send their Greatest Hits to number one in the charts.

Interest in the Sydney show was especially fierce because, unlike many of the other stops on this reunion tour, the group had never played a single show in this country. Their sole Australian visit had been a brief PR pit-stop in late 1997 to promote their cinema classic Spiceworld: The Movie.

In October 2007, tickets for the initial European and American legs of the ‘Return of the Spice Girls’ reunion tour went on sale. Demand was unprecedented: Their one London show on December 15, 2007 quickly became 17 sell-out concerts in that city alone.

Those newly-added shows ate into the other scheduled stops of the tour — the group would set up camp at London’s O2 Arena for most of January 2008, performing night after night — so fans in Sydney and other far-flung locations like Buenos Aires and Cape Town patiently waited for a rescheduling announcement.

The Spice Girls dazzle at London’s O2 in December 2007. Picture: AFP

And waited. And waited. The reunited group earned rave reviews as the tour played across Europe and the US, performing a hit-packed two hour show — but still, no mention of the other tour dates they’d promised. Finally, in February 2008, an announcement on their website:

“Sadly the tour needs to come to an end by the end of February due to family and personal commitments for Emma, Geri, Mel B, Melanie C and Victoria. It was announced in June that, as well as the Europe and the US, the girls planned to visit Australia, China, South Africa and Argentina. Due to the phenomenal demand for tickets in the UK and the US along with the touring logistics for such a massive production it was not possible to fit everything in. As the girls return to normal family life and the kids go back to school they are reviewing all the options, who knows what the future might bring!”

Ouch. Fans were furious — and the tabloids had a field day, with speculation that the girls had cancelled their tour commitments because they couldn’t stand the sight of each other.

If there was tension within the group, they hid it well: 10 minutes behind-the-scenes footage shared on the group’s website throughout the tour showed the girls mucking about backstage like old friends, Emma giving fans a tour of their dressing rooms while Geri led Victoria in an impromptu German lesson:

Interviewing Scary Spice Mel B more than three years after that tour announcement, the prickly pop star flat out denied they had ever planned to perform in Australia when quizzed about the Sydney show.

“There were no (Australian) dates,” she snapped.

“Our tour started out as a week’s worth of shows at (London’s) 02 Arena, and then we just extended it and extended it. It’s funny when people say ‘you cancelled those dates’, because the dates were never set in stone. And all our kids had to go back to school.”

Ten years on from the Australian tour that never was, the prospect of the group finally performing on our shores looks bleak. Last year, members marked 20 years since the release of debut single Wannabe with a three-piece reunion confined to what looked suspiciously like a hostage video.

Last year’s Spice Girls reunion was, ahem ... underwhelming.

In one final blow to fans worldwide who had been so desperate to see The Return of the Spice Girls, the show was never released on DVD. Footage of the tour was professionally recorded, but deemed to be of too poor a quality for commercial release.

Thankfully, the entire show lives on on YouTube ... via 2007-era camera phone fan footage. Look, it’s all we’ve got: