"Spice Up Your Life" is a song by British girl group the Spice Girls from their second studio album, Spiceworld (1997). The song was co-written by the group with Matt Rowe and Richard Stannard, at the same time as the group was shooting scenes for their 1997 film Spice World, while production was handled by the latter two. It is a dance-pop song, with influences of Latin rhythms such as salsa and samba. The song's theme reflects the group desire to "write a song for the world" while the lyrics have been labeled as dance-oriented with a self-promoting message.
Released as the lead single of Spiceworld in October 1997, "Spice Up Your Life" received an extensive worldwide promotional campaign that included a series of appearances on television programmes and presentations at award shows. It received mixed reviews from critics, obtaining divisive opinions for its production and lyrical content. Despite the lukewarm critical reception, the song was a commercial success. It debuted atop the UK Singles Chart, becoming the group's fifth consecutive number one in the United Kingdom and has since been certified double platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). It performed similarly on the music charts in the rest of Europe and Oceania, while in the United States, the song did not perform as well as their previous releases, peaking at number 18 on the Billboard Hot 100.
An accompanying music video, directed by Marcus Nispel, features the group in a futuristic setting, inspired by the 1982 film Blade Runner, controlling every aspect of society in a dark post-apocalyptic cityscape. The song has been regularly included on the setlists in most of the group's concerts and presentations, most notably their performance at the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony in London. It was also used in the 2023 film Barbie and the third of the Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials, "The Giggle", in which the main villain of the episode (The Toymaker) makes a grand entrance with the song playing in the background.
Background In May 1997, the Spice Girls went on a promotional visit to the Cannes Film Festival in the south of France, where they announced their then-upcoming movie Spice World (1997). The group began shooting scenes for the movie in June. Meanwhile, Virgin Records started the first marketing meetings for the promotional campaign for their second album Spiceworld, which was set to be released in November 1997. No song had been written for the album at this point, so the Spice Girls had to do all the songwriting and recording at the same time as they were shooting the movie. Between takes and at the end of each filming day, the group usually went straight into a mobile recording studio set up in a Winnebago, which followed them between film sets. Their schedule was physically arduous with logistical difficulties, as Melanie Brown commented in her autobiography: "doing the two full-time jobs at the same time took its toll and within a couple on weeks, exhaustion set in".
For the album, the Spice Girls worked with the same songwriting teams and producers from their debut studio album, Spice (1996). But during the recording of the Spiceworld tracks, the group was so busy with the filming schedule that the quality of their musical contributions became more erratic and piecemeal. Andy Watkins, of the production duo Absolute, co-writers of "Who Do You Think You Are" remembered: "We'd sit there literally all day long and quite often we wouldn't even get them at all." Eliot Kennedy, who co-wrote "Say You'll Be There" with the group, worked on a couple of backing tracks for Spiceworld, but decided not to get involved in the album after hearing from the other teams about the complications of the recording schedule.
Writing and recording In May 1997, the Spice Girls did a promotional trip to North America in support of their second single "Say You'll Be There", which included a performance on the Mexican television show Siempre en Domingo in Acapulco. According to Emma Bunton, their visit to Mexico was the inspiration behind the song's "Latin feel". The song was written by the Spice Girls with the songwriting team Richard "Biff" Stannard and Matt Rowe. In an interview with Music Week, Stannard commented about their initial ideas for the song: "We were talking about Bollywood films, the colours and how the Spice Girls could present themselves. It was a matter of how do we get everything in to one song?" Rowe recalled the chaotic experience of the recording process of "Spice Up Your Life":
It had been booked in, that they were coming in to record their next single, and write it, with us. It was at Whitfield Street Studios and there was going to be an MTV crew there filming them as they did this, which there was. Well, how on earth can you possibly do this? You can't write and record a song in half-an-hour with a film crew watching.
The session was interrupted constantly, with label executives entering the building, phoning the group, or throwing things through the window. Eventually, when the producers ordered the filming crew to leave the room, the group managed to finish the song. The vocal recording was completed the same day, and instead of taking turns, the five members went inside the isolation booth and recorded the chorus together. Brown commented that for this reason the final mix sounds "spontaneous and full of energy".
"Spice Invaders"
"Spice Up Your Life" was already finished and ready to be released, but nothing was recorded for the B-side; every other song available had been used in Spice and the group needed a new track for their next single. A session with Paul Wilson and Andy Watkins—the songwriters and production duo known as Absolute—was booked. Because of the limited time and the scarce creative inspiration during the filming of Spice World, Virgin told Absolute to make anything they liked. The duo created "Spice Invaders" by placing four microphones and telling the group to talk about anything they wanted. The conversation was recorded and as Wilson later described it, a "hideous bubblegum" backing track was added to the recorded session. Watkins and mix engineer Jeremy Wheatley, finished the track during the night.
Spice Invaders has received mixed reponses from music critics in retrospectives. In 2018, El Hunt of NME placed it at number eight on his list of "The 10 Best Spice Girls Songs", characterizing it as "an absolute train wreck of a pop song", calling it an "under-appreciated gem" and praising Brown's delivery. The Evening Standards Jessie Thompson commented that the song "represents everything they were loved for".
Alexis Petridis of The Guardian was less positive, placing "Spice Invaders" at the bottom of his 2018 ranking of the Spice Girls' entire catalog and describing it as "the sound of a group who could, by this point, get away with anything".
Composition and lyrics Musically, "Spice Up Your Life" is an uptempo dance-pop song, with influences of Latin rhythms such as salsa and samba. Critics noted that the song incorporates an infectious melody and "haunting" harmonies, mixed with a piano hook and a "relentless" drum beat, that creates a carnival atmosphere. It is written in the key of F minor, with a time signature set on common time, and moves at a tempo of 126 beats per minute. The song is constructed in a verse-pre-chorus-chorus form, opening with an introduction, which consists on the repeated use of the word "la". The first verse, pre-chorus and chorus follows, using a simple chord progression of Fm–C7. The same pattern occurs leading to the second chorus. At the end of the song, a spoken bridge precedes the third chorus, and then closes by repeating the chorus for a fourth time.
Lyrically, "Spice Up Your Life" have been described as an "international rally cry" by Music Week, aimed at a global audience. Melanie C commented about the inspiration behind the song's theme: "We always wanted to do a carnival tune and write a song for the world". Some critics considered the song to be an example of branding or "sloganeering", while the lyrical content has been labeled as dance-oriented ("Slam it to the left / If you’re having a good time / Shake it to the right / If you know that you feel fine"), with a self-promoting message ("Every boy and girl / Spice up your life"). The song includes mentions of different dance styles during the bridge ("Flamenco / Lambada / But hip-hop is harder / We moonwalk the foxtrot / Then polka the salsa / Shake Shake Shake haka"), and lyrics in Japanese, Spanish and German at the end of each chorus ("Hai, si, ja"). The lines "Yellow man in Timbuktu / Colour for both me and you" during the second verse have received criticism for its racist connotation. El Hunt from NME called it "regrettable", while The Irish Times and The Guardian referred to them as "woeful lyrics".
Release and promotion
The promotional campaign for the release of "Spice Up Your Life" began the last week of September 1997, when the song started to receive airplay across Europe. On 6 October, the Spice Girls officially unveiled all the tracks from Spiceworld in a press conference in Granada, Spain. The same week, they appeared on the British television programmes Talking Telephone Numbers, GMTV, and The Big Breakfast. The single was originally going to be released in the United Kingdom on 6 October 1997, but the date was delayed for a week in an attempt to displace Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997"—a tribute to Princess Diana, who had died two months before—from the top position.
"Spice Up Your Life" was commercially released in the UK on 13 October 1997, in two single versions. The first one, released in cassette and CD maxi single format, included two radio mixes, one from record producer Mark "Spike" Stent, and another from American DJ David Morales, an instrumental version of the song, and the B-side "Spice Invaders". The second version, released in a digipak, contained three tracks: the Stent radio mix, a club mix by David Morales, and a remix by house production team Murk. In the United States, Virgin Records America sent the song to radios on 1 October and the single to record stores on 21 October. The American edition, released in both cassette and CD maxi single format, featured the same track listing as the first UK version.
On 12–13 October 1997, the group performed songs from Spiceworld including "Spice Up Your Life" in a two-night concert in Turkey, as part of a sponsorship deal organized by Pepsi. Following the concerts, the Spice Girls made a couple of weeks of promotion in Singapore, Thailand, India, Hong Kong and Japan, and attended the Bambi Awards in Germany. In November, they appeared at a charity event in South Africa, taped a special concert for Antena 3 in Spain, and did promotion in Italy, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. In December they traveled to Brazil for a press conference, and then to the US to made televised appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, while UPN released a one-hour special dedicated to the group titled Too Much Is Never Enough. During January 1998, while promoting the album and the release of their movie Spice World, the group appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman and The Oprah Winfrey Show, and were featured on the cover of Vogue magazine.
Critical reception