Spice Girls: The Story of the World’s Greatest Girl Band

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While they searched for the right replacement, there was some good news for Chris when Victoria told him she had decided once and for all that her future lay with his all-girl band and not with Persuasion. She had talked things over with her parents and realised that everything was much more professional with the Herberts and she could not keep both going if she was going to continue living in Maidenhead. This was business and she seemed to have no compunction in ditching her former bandmates.

Nothing was etched in stone as far as the make-up of the new group was concerned. It seemed a good idea, however, that the fifth member should be the youngest – thereby lowering the average age of the five. It was back to the drawing board for Pepi, whose next thought was a bubbly blonde girl she had taught three years previously at Barnet College. She remembered that her name was Emma Bunton but, in those pre-Facebook days, had no idea how to contact her. She had to pop into the college to search through old records before eventually coming up with a phone number. Emma’s mother, Pauline Bunton, answered and Pepi explained that she wanted to invite her daughter to try out for a new girl group.

Emma was thrilled to be asked. She had the advantage of being another stage-school veteran and had attended many auditions. Chris drove over to North London to meet her and her mum, and they had a pleasant chat over a coffee before going back to Pepi’s house where Emma sang ‘Right Here’, a top-three hit in the UK the previous year for the all-girl American R&B trio SWV (Sisters with Voices). It was a good choice. Chris Herbert thought she was perfect: ‘She was very cute, very nice with a sweet voice, a very “pop” voice. I really liked her character a lot. It was one of those light-bulb moments when I realised she was definitely something we didn’t have. It was immediate for me.’

Chris had to explain, though, that it all depended on her being accepted by the other four. They would have to look at the dynamic between her and the current residents of the house in Maidenhead. One thing stood in her favour – that she was from a working-class background in North London. When Emma Lee Bunton was born in the Victoria Maternity Hospital, Barnet, on 23 January 1976, her father, Trevor, was a delivery driver. She would be the youngest of Touch but was actually older than Michelle.

Trevor subsequently became a milkman and sometimes took his daughter out on his rounds during the school holidays. Her mother did her bit for the family finances, working as a home help for a well-to-do local woman. Pauline was raised in Barnet but her father – Emma’s grandfather – was Irish, Séamus Davitt, from County Wexford. They were Catholic and Emma had a traditional baptism and attended mass growing up. Sadly, she never knew her grandfather, who died before she was born.

She has an older half-brother, Robert Bunton, from Trevor’s first marriage and she would go to the park and watch them play football in the local league at weekends. Her younger brother, Paul James, known as PJ, is four years her junior and the two of them are very close. They shared a room until Emma was twelve. Because money was tight they sometimes needed to share their dinner as well.

Emma might have been the baby of the new band but, more relevantly, she had the most extensive CV. She seemed to have been in showbusiness all her life. She was a natural blonde and a very photogenic little girl, who was much in demand as a child model, getting work from the age of two onwards.

Pauline had done some modelling when she was a child so it seemed natural to sign her daughter up with the prestigious Norrie Carr agency, putting aside Emma’s earnings so that she would have a nest egg when she was older. In the end the money proved invaluable when she needed fees for theatre school. Over the years Emma featured in so many promotions that it was a rare household that hadn’t come across a picture of her cherubic face plugging some product or business, or on the front cover of a magazine in the dentist’s surgery.

She was the poster girl for Outspan oranges, the girlfriend of the Milky Bar Kid, smiling sweetly on the tins of Heinz Invaders spaghetti-shapes and standing next to a pretend mum in ads for Mothercare and Argos. She was a cover girl for Woman’s Weekly and Womancraft magazine. She was the face of best-selling games including and, arguably most famously, the timeless favourite Pop Up Pirate. One of the agents at Norrie Carr said, ‘She never stopped working and had that special something we were looking for. She had a twinkle in her eye and loved the camera.’

Hardly a week would go by when Emma wasn’t whisked out of school so that her mum could take her off to a shoot. If it was in the West End, she always made sure to include a trip to the Science or Natural History Museum to make sure her little girl wasn’t falling behind in her educational progress. She was at St Theresa’s, a Catholic primary school in East End Road, Finchley, close to the North Circular Road.

Emma loved her modelling days, spending time with the other boys and girls or sometimes inviting her own friends along to join her. Occasionally someone at school might be jealous if they saw her picture in a catalogue but mostly she had a very happy childhood. It helped that she developed such a close bond with her mum. Emma said, ‘She’s got such a soft nature, so unselfish. But she’s also a very solid person.’ The biggest drama for her parents came when she was hit by a car at the age of four. She needed hospital treatment and still has a scar on her leg as a permanent reminder of a lucky escape.

One huge bonus of modelling was that every year from the age of about six until she was twelve she was one of ten boys and girls chosen to shoot a catalogue abroad for two weeks. Family summer holidays were always spent in a caravan in Clacton-on-Sea so trips to Corsica, Lanzarote and Mallorca were very exciting for a young girl.

Emma’s other great love was dancing. She had started ballet classes aged three and had a natural talent. When she was five, her mum had spotted a flyer locally for the Kay School of Dance in Finchley and managed to enrol her daughter even though she was younger than the other children there. She was always far more interested in ballet, tap and disco dancing than in taking part in any sports at school. Her parents could only afford the ballet lessons but the school gave her the other classes for free. Her early ambition to be a professional dancer was dashed at fourteen when she fell and injured her back. By coincidence, when she was eight she came across Victoria Adams once or twice in dancing competitions in North London.

When she was ten, Emma was accepted by the Sylvia Young Theatre School, which had rapidly become one of the leading performing-arts schools in the country. Sylvia was an East Ender from Whitechapel and had originally become involved with teaching by organising fundraisers for her daughter’s primary school in Wanstead. She enjoyed that so much, she moved on to charging 10p a lesson for talented local youngsters. In 1981 she started a Saturday school in Drury Lane but that soon proved so popular that she decided to look for a permanent base. Two years later she took over a disused former Church of England primary school just north of Marylebone station in Rossmore Road.

Sylvia liked to call her pupils her ‘babies’ or ‘young ’uns’, which led her to adopt Sylvia Young as her professional name. Legend has it that she expelled her own daughter, Frances Ruffelle, from the school for being ‘disruptive’, although the award-winning actress and singer was already eighteen when the permanent school was founded. Discipline, however, was an important ingredient of life at Sylvia Young’s – not so much abiding by a long list of rules but, more importantly, cultivating an ability to work hard and be a step ahead of the competition in the tough world of entertainment.

Sylvia was always looking for ‘someone who has a certain amount of ability but is trainable’ – mirroring Chris Herbert’s expectations for his girl group. Another mantra from the school also fitted perfectly with his strategy: ‘If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.’

She also insisted that her students learn everything equally so they could audition for a television soap one day and for a new pop group the next. It’s easy to see how Emma would be a perfect candidate for Touch.

By the time Emma joined Sylvia Young in 1985, the school seemed to have a direct conveyor-belt to Central Casting for some of the most popular programmes on television – if you needed a young Londoner for a market stall in Albert Square, Sylvia’s establishment was the first place to look. Adam Woodyatt (Ian Beale), Nick Berry (Simon Wickes) and Letitia Dean (Sharon Watts) were just three of the alumni who became household names in EastEnders.

You had to be good to be accepted at the school in the first place, passing an audition, an interview and a written test. Her mum waited nervously in the street outside throughout the process and was as pleased as Emma when she was accepted. Parents had to be able to afford the fees, which weren’t cheap and were an obvious drain on the Bunton family finances. It didn’t help matters when Pauline and Trevor split up a year later, although he still lived locally and, according to Emma, the disruption to her life was minimal. She remained on very good terms with her dad throughout her teenage years. Pauline retrained as a martial-arts teacher and taught her daughter the finer points of Goju-kai karate. Emma might look sweet but you wouldn’t want to get on her wrong side.

Apparently much more traumatic than her parents’ split was the news that she would have to leave the theatre school because her mum and dad could no longer pay. She was enrolled for a week or two at a local secondary school, which she hated. ‘I cried so much,’ she later said. All ended well when she was awarded a scholarship back to Sylvia’s.

By this time Emma and her mum had moved to a third-floor flat on a small estate in Rogers Walk. There was no garden so Emma and her friends would spend a lot of time in the local park. One of her best friends as a young teenager was Kellie Bright, then another budding actress. They would spend weekends at Alexandra Palace in North London, roller-skating or messing about in the rowing boats on the lake. Much later Kellie would become one of the best-known faces on British TV playing Linda Carter, landlady of the Queen Vic pub in Albert Square.

Another classmate was star actress Keeley Hawes, the daughter of a London cab driver, who lived in a three-bedroom council flat practically across the road from the school in Marylebone. She and Emma were London girls and became firm friends; Keeley was a welcome guest at the caravan in Clacton. She, too, had won a scholarship to Sylvia Young’s. In those days she didn’t sound anything like her famous creations, Mrs Durrell in The Durrells or the home secretary, Julia Montague, in Bodyguard. A series of elocution lessons gave her the cut-glass vowels of one of television’s most recognisable voices.

When she left Sylvia Young’s, though, she became a model before her breakthrough as an actress, and didn’t need to speak. She had been working in the fashion department of Cosmopolitan