Here is a partial list of things the Spice Girls did in 1997: released the best-performing album of 1997 in the United States (“Spice”); wore the famous Union Jack dress to the Brit Awards (Geri); shook hands with the Queen (also Geri); arrived at Cannes by speedboat to announce plans for a Spice Girls movie (“Spice World”); recorded “Spice World” (the album) on the set of “Spice World” (the movie), so that “Spice World” (the movie) could have a soundtrack (the album); angered Maori leaders by performing the haka in Indonesia; traveled to South Africa to meet Nelson Mandela, who described the meeting as “one of the greatest moments in my life”; squeezed and cuddled and petted 13-year-old Prince Harry at the same event, causing him to blush furiously (two months after the funeral of his mother, Princess Diana); published a book; appeared in Istanbul for their first live concert (a Pepsi production); turned 21 (Emma); released “Spice World” (the album); fired their manager ( Simon Fuller , whom they have since rehired and who will produce an upcoming animated film featuring their music and voices); attended premieres of “Spice World” (the movie) in London, Paris, Rotterdam, Madrid, Düsseldorf and Brussels; shot the music video for “Who Do You Think You Are”; shot the music video for “Spice Up Your Life; shot the music video for “Mama”; kicked off the annual British Legion Poppy Appeal to commemorate war dead; collectively earned an estimated £300 million through merchandise sales.

Thanks to the digitization of 1990s print media, if members of the Spice Girls generation are so inclined, they can now acquire within seconds all the Google-able context missing from their recollections. They can read that the five women learned to sing and dance together over the course of a year living, unpaid, in a home owned by a father and son management team; that the father and son’s strategy of dangling the promise of a contract without actually producing one failed badly, prompting the women to abscond with their demos one evening, and subsequently sign to the record label of their choosing; that the group was originally called “Touch” and then “Spice,” “girls” being incorporated later because people in the industry tended to refer to them, with a whiff of derision, as “the ‘Spice’ girls” (it had the added benefit of distinguishing them from an American rapper already using “Spice”); that their signature nicknames were imposed by a British music journalist who, Melanie Brown later said, “couldn’t be bothered to remember all our names”; that the members co-wrote all their songs; that Melanie Chisolm invited Liam Gallagher of Oasis to physically fight her at the 1997 Brit Awards, while the Spice Girls collected their trophy for “Best British Single”; that Gwyneth Paltrow and Winona Ryder once dressed up as the Spice Girls and filmed their own version of the “2 Become 1” music video in Ryder’s apartment; that the Spice Girls were vehemently opposed to the United Kingdom adopting the euro as its currency (“The Euro-bureaucrats are destroying every bit of national identity,” said Victoria Beckham, then Victoria Adams); that, at the height of their influence, the academic consensus was that the Spice Girls were mock-feminists who had dangerously and lucratively misappropriated the Riot Grrrl “girl power” ethos for personal gain; that the media consensus was that they were all charm and no talent (and, by 1998, no charm); that they were the subjects of some of the first vitriolic hate pages on the web, where users graphically fantasized about torturing and murdering them; that the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood described their marketing as “child molestation”; that the music producer Phil Spector, currently in prison for murder, compared them unfavorably to a “porno film”; that Thom Yorke of Radiohead labeled them “the Antichrist”; that, at the time she left the group in 1998, Geri Horner (then Geri “Ginger” Halliwell) was living in a poky cottage at the back of a Hertfordshire dairy farm, where, in her own words, she spent her weekends “crying.”

Yet when one reads contemporary accounts of first hand interactions with the group, the pervading sense is that the Spice Girls were all they were marketed to be: feisty, mischievous, and bonded as tightly as covalent atoms. Their impression is of fast-talking strong personalities who delighted in returning rapid-fire volleys of questions to the dazed journalists sent to interview them; the kind of livewires who, for no reason, in the middle of a Rolling Stone interview, attempt the magician’s trick of neatly pulling a tablecloth off a table laden with china and glassware and food — unsuccessfully. Their demonstrations of girl power seemed almost nuclear. The experience of interacting with them may have been best characterized by the “Spice World” screenwriter Jamie Curtis who, speaking to The Telegraph earlier this year, recalled simply that the Spice Girls “were terrifying. Particularly if you were a man. If you walked into a room and it was just the five of them you would literally turn around and try and get out as quickly as possible.”