Mel B reveals how the Spice Girls got their nicknames

Publish Date
Tuesday, 15 August 2017, 9:04AM

They're the nicknames every 90's girl knows.

Scary. Baby. Ginger. Posh. Sporty.

And even though it as been nearly 20 years since the Spice Girls first burst onto the pop scene, we still affectionately call them by their iconic nicknames.

So where did the names come from?

Melanie Brown (AKA Mel B and Scary Spice) has revealed that Peter Loraine, who was a Top of the Pops magazine editor, actually came up with the aliases to make life easier.

“It was actually a lazy journalist that couldn’t be bothered to remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames. And we were like, ‘Oh, well, that kind of works. I don’t mind my name. Do you like your name? Baby? Posh?’ We were like, ‘Let’s just go with it,'” Mel B said.

"I’m very kind of in-your-face. I was even more so back then. I was, what, 17, 18, like, ‘What! What do you want?!’ So I guess I could have come off as Scary. But I like my name,” she continued.

Speaking about how he came up with the names, Loraine reportedly said. "Posh was the first one to be thought up because Victoria looks pretty sophisticated. The rest were pretty easy really because the girls' characters were already really strong. The names jumped out at us. We laughed the most when we came up with Scary. Jennifer Cawthron came up with that one because Mel B was so loud and had tried to take over our whole photo shoot."

And the rest, they say, is history!

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