Sep 14th 2001

Victoria Beckham
 
Why is Posh so angry?

- 'And Brooklyn - when you're old enough to read this book, you'll see that Mummy and Daddy were really really famous once.'

That's what Posh Spice cares about, it's all she's ever cared about, and her autobiography is a make-believe to persuade the rest of us to care about it too.

Victoria calls her book 'truth telling, and 'setting the record straight'. Here, there will be no newspaper stories, no kiss and tell boyfriends, no tabloid headlines, just the truth and nothing but the truth. Probably she believes this. Victoria doesn't live in a relative universe; she's a Spice Girl.

Start at the beginning: There's the loving family - Mum looking after the kids and Dad making money. The well-known Mock-Tudor pile and Rolls Royce are no longer broadsheet jokes, they are totems of lower- middle class aspiration, This was a family doing well for itself, and Posh was going to do even better.

She admits she wasn't bright at school, but she worked hard and managed five GCSE's and a cookery prize, well aimed here at all those who claim she can't boil an egg. Goaded by her own failures and what seems to have been a pretty universal lack of interest in what she might achieve, Victoria was determined to prove herself. In a chapter titled 'Message To The Underdog', she reminds Wannabe's everywhere ' It doesn't matter what you look like. It's about hard work, determination, and self-belief.'

What is? The 'it' here is fame. Always fame. There is no way for the reader to avoid this family altar. Fame is where every other value can be sacrificed. For all the posturing about normal life and the intrusions of the press, the price of fame is well worth paying - if you are Victoria. The sad thing is that a whole generation of kids has been asked to pay the price too. Forget doing something for its own sake, or because you love it with all your heart. Do it so that you can be like Posh Spice. Do it so that you can be famous.

I am being hard on her? Isn't she just a pop star trying to justify herself?

The autobiography is self-justification. It is a life written backwards. Victoria wants us to see her as a survivor against the odds, as a dream come true. The banalities of her background are worked up into meaning - not meaning unnoticed at the time, but meaning that was never there. Hers is not a life freighted with significance. The new charting of the territory feels awkward and contrived. At the same time - once again - I am sure she believes it.

Who am I to say how it was for her?

This is not an argument about facts. It is about the new phenomenon of the invented life. Artists and creative people always have invented themselves, reading the runes of what they are, and making out of it new creatures and new work. The problem is that the airspace has been hi-jacked. Just as TV evangelists corralled the language of sincerity, and New Age therapy unhooked genuine insight from the words used to describe it, celebrities have coined themselves as modern gurus.

Don't call it money. There is plenty of money to be had from this counterfeiting, but that is not its purpose. Celebrities who are the real thing don't need to shout about it. Mick Jagger isn't offering advice to Wannabes, any more than Madonna is telling us how to live. It's the ones who have nothing to offer that desperately need a myth. They want the myth for themselves, but the audience is crucial to the process. Forget all the stuff in Learning to Fly, about self-belief. If you believe in yourself - which actually means believing in what you do, then you don't need a whole world out there telling you it's fine. I'm not talking about praise or blame - I'm talking core values - the work, not the world, is what sustains you.
She's just a pop star! Lighten up!

Yes, that's what she is, and I would be happy to accept that and to enjoy her, and check out the Prada and the new hairdo, if she was happy to be just what she is. Needing to be more, needing to be so serious, is where the gap between image and reality is too wide to bridge.

There's a lot in her book about how nobody thinks she can sing - but she can, and how nobody realises she's a trained dancer - but she is. There is huge anger around the dismissal of her talent. Why is she so angry? She's had years to prove herself as more than a cut-out pop star, and she hasn't done that yet. If she does, it will not be because she really can sing and dance, but because she might grow into the space she wants to occupy so badly.
The book is entertaining on the early days of the Spice Girls and the shady guys who put them together to try and blend their voices in a terraced house in Maidenhead. She has a good ear for dialogue and comedy, and I love the parts where they are fighting with their keepers or being sent out like high-class whores to buy an outfit 'get somefing smart, gehwls'.

Chic, their manager, reads like a Miami Vice pimp, who never tired of reminding the simmering Spices that he had managed The Three Degrees. When it came to a hair-do he was adamant - 'The Three Degrees 'ad an 'effin' set.'

The group's personal take-over of their talent and image seems to have been masterminded by Geri, who doesn't get as bad a press as expected, in spite of wrecking the group and pushing Victoria into catastrophic dieting. Victoria and Geri were very close, and you sense there is still hurt here. There is an innocence about Victoria that can't imagine a world where people will betray her on purpose.

I find her absolute love and loyalty to David Beckham touching. Here's one person who won't betray her. When she heard he might have kissed another girl, she punched him in the face. She wants to be married, she wants to be a mother, she likes putting on her Marigolds and doing a bit of cleaning - hair tied back with a G-string,of course. She wants to be Essex, ordinary, Mrs David Beckham. She also wants to be famous...