The Story of Pop: 1998 (Chapter 38)

With more hits from the year that So Graham Norton started on Channel 4, and when Geri Halliwell auctioned off her Union Jack dress for charity, this is The Story of Pop: 1998. And speaking of the Ginger one – it’s the Scary one we revisit this week…

• Artist: Melanie B feat. Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott
• Song: I Want You Back
• Released: 13/09/1998
• Writers / Producers: Melanie Brown / Gerard Thomas / Donald Holmes / Missy Elliott
• Highest UK Chart Position: #1
• Weeks on Chart: 15

Even if Geri Halliwell’s departure hadn’t happened, the Spice Girls were now at a stage of their career which had hothoused so quickly in the space of two years, that some sort of slow down would naturally happen. If members leaving hadn’t been the cause of this, then other factors would have.

Indeed, those factors were making their presence felt as the remaining quartet spent the summer of 1998 on their gruelling US leg of their world tour. In that time, Victoria Beckham and Mel B both found out they were pregnant with their respective first children – Victoria with Brooklyn, and Mel with Phoenix Chi.

Added into all of this, the artist known as Scary Spice had met and fallen madly in love with her dancer on tour, Jimmy Gulzar, with whom she had also got engaged and would then marry that September, the very same week that the Spice Girls returned home to conclude their tour at Wembley Stadium.

And added into all of this, she was beating her former Ginger Spice colleague to the punch, by becoming the first of the girls to break out on her own with a solo career, doing so in one of the most canny and credible ways possible. Around the time of the US leg of the tour, the movie Why Do Fools Fall In Love was about to be released.

It was a biopic of Frankie Lymon, the charismatic lead singer of the Rock’n’Roll group, Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers, starring Halle Berry and Larenz Tate. One of two soundtracks for the movie was being produced by Missy Elliott and Timbaland, which had songs inspired by the film, recorded by the likes of Destiny’s Child, En Vogue and Busta Rhymes. It was on this that Mel was to make her solo debut.

Of how she got involved, Mel revealed in her 2002 autobiography Catch A Fire: “This was the first time I’d even considered doing anything by myself. I was on tour with the Spice Girls when Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott called me up and said ‘Melanie, I’ve got a song for you, will you come and record it with me?’ I checked it with the girls and within a month I was out there, I recorded it in a day, did the video, then came back. She’s a genius!”

And genius is certainly a word that can be described of “I Want You Back”. For the first time ever, it presented Mel both sound wise and visually in a way we’d previously not seen her in the Spice Girls, and opens with her trading off raps with Missy on a thundering R&B beat: “I’m the M to the E-L-B, you know me / I’m the M-I-S-S-Y to the E / And I’ve got many flows from overseas / Well how can you beep beep with no keys?”

And the subject matter is certainly darker than anything we’d heard from her in the group, as she finds herself in indecision over a lover she wants even though she shouldn’t: “Boy I’m tired of you / Runnin’ over me, tellin’ me what to do / Now what have I done to you? / To make you sex a lot, I thought I made you hot … You got me losin’ my mind, my mind / You can’t keep breaking my heart / You got me drinkin’ liquor in the morning / And sitting all night at the bar”.

But if it sounds like the song runs the risk of being a little too mature, given the majority age of the Spice Girls’ fanbase at this point, the chorus is a total earworm for a reassuring pop sensibility: “I think I want you back, your love has made a deep impact / I know it might sound whack / But damn I think I want you back (want you)”.

And in the video, directed by the legendary Hype Williams, we’re presented with Mel in an eerie green filter and futuristic backdrop alongside Missy, and her soon to be husband Jimmy as a tortured hunk in a harness. And yet she completely and utterly sells it. What happened next then, was both a surprise and yet not at the same time.

Being the first of the Spice Girls to launch her own project away from the band, and given how much interest and hype there still was on their every move at that time, meant there was always going to be a heightened degree of interest. That said, “I Want You Back” was very far removed from anything the group had done.

Nevertheless, with first week sales of 83,000 copies, upon its release in mid-September the single gave Mel her very first solo number one to add to the seven she had achieved as a Spice Girl. But it was only at the top spot for a week, and it only spent six weeks of its fifteen week chart run inside the top 40; in many ways, acting as a more realistic arbiter of what to expect for Mel B’s audience and long term chances.

For her candle as a solo artist was to ultimately burn briefly and brightly; she had two more top 10 hits with “Tell Me” (#4 in October 2000) and “Feels So Good” (#5 in February 2001), but her debut solo album Hot, on which “I Want You Back” also featured, crawled in at #28 in the autumn of 2000, and ultimately led to her parting ways with Virgin Records.

But whilst bigger and better releases came from the other four girls in the band, past and present, over the next three years that followed, “I Want You Back” was a crucial record, because it helped to introduce the era of the Solo Spices, and helped to start moulding their individual paths away from the band. More on which, of course, we’ll discuss at the very end of this series…

Don’t forget to follow our brand new playlist on Spotify – updated weekly so you never miss a song from the story of pop in 1998. And you can leave your memories of the songs below in the comments, Tweet us or message us on Instagram, using the hashtag #StoryofPop1998.