Spice Girls – Holler

Their ninth No.1 put them level with ABBA, and it was the last single they released for seven years

Holler gave the Spice Girls their ninth British No.1 and put them level with ABBA, the first female group to reach that number. It was also the end of the run. On October 13, 2000, ten days before the single reached the shops, the four remaining members performed it on Top of the Pops. About two months later they had stopped working as a group, and no second single followed.

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The song began as a fresh start. Geri Halliwell had left in 1998, the group had said farewell to her with Goodbye that December, and the four who stayed took a break. When work on a third album resumed in August 1999, they went looking for a tougher sound and found it in Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, the American producer then at the top of R&B radio. Jerkins wrote Holler with the four members, LaShawn Daniels and Fred Jerkins III, and recorded it in September 1999 at Sarm Hook End and Whitfield Street Studios in London. It is an R&B dance track with vocoder on the vocals, and it opens with Jerkins announcing the group’s name, which made him the first male voice on a Spice Girls record.

Then it waited. The group first sang it on their Christmas in Spiceworld shows in December 1999, when it was still called Holler Holler. They performed it at the 2000 Brit Awards, but technical problems kept the song out of the television broadcast. Jake Nava directed the video at Elstree Studios in July 2000. By the time anyone could buy the single, it was more than a year old.

The launch, ten days early

The Top of the Pops appearance on October 13, 2000, was the start of the campaign. The BBC’s chart show had been the group’s home ground since 1996, and this was the first time they had walked onto it to launch an album as a four-piece. The record they brought was unlike anything they had sung there before: no chanted hooks and no jokes, but a sleek American production built for clubs. The performance asked the audience to accept both changes at once.

The audience did. Virgin released Holler on October 23 as a double A-side with the ballad Let Love Lead the Way, because the group said they could not choose between them. It sold a reported 31,000 copies on its first day and 106,000 in its first week, entered the British chart at No.1, and earned a silver disc from the BPI four days after release. It reached No.2 in Australia, New Zealand and Canada and on the Eurochart Hot 100. America was the exception: the single missed the Billboard Hot 100. Reviews were mixed, and Entertainment Weekly complained that the group sounded as if they “really, really wanna be” Destiny’s Child.

Beaten twice by the same band

The stay at No.1 lasted one week. Westlife’s My Love replaced it, and then the Irish group did it again. Virgin released the album Forever in Britain on November 6, the same week as Westlife’s Coast to Coast, and the newspapers turned it into a contest. Westlife won, and Forever entered at No.2, the only Spice Girls studio album that did not top the British chart. On November 16 the group performed Holler at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Stockholm, where Melanie Chisholm said beforehand that it might be their last appearance together before a break. Promotion stopped in December.

The song came back when they did. They sang it on the reunion tour of 2007 and 2008 without Halliwell, who sat out a number recorded after she had left. On the 2019 tour she performed it with them for the first time, nineteen years after the single.

Holler is usually filed under the decline, and the chart does not support that. It did what every Spice Girls lead single had done: it went straight to No.1. What had changed was everything around it, from the lineup to the sound to the competition waiting a week behind. The Top of the Pops performance shows a group that could still command the country’s biggest pop stage, with about two months of the story left to run.