Last May, Halliwell burst the bubble herself. The singer, who’s 5 feet 1 inch tall, kicked off her platform shoes, parted ways with the Spice Girls and pondered a solo career that officially begins this month with the fun, Madonna-ish album “Schizophonic” (EMI). Halliwell had planned on staying through last summer’s tour but ended up bolting months earlier. There were rumors of infighting. Halliwell, however, insists she left prematurely because she’d been demoralized when her Spice Girl duties conflicted with an interview she wanted to give about breast-cancer awareness (she’d had a benign lump removed when she was 18). “I told a couple of friends and my family that I was leaving, and they thought I was mad,” says Halliwell. “They said, ‘You’re chucking in something brilliant!’ And a part of me was frightened.”
Halliwell grew up in a working-class London suburb, the daughter of a car salesman. “My father died six months before the Spice Girls started,” she says, “and I think that kind of drove me. I had enough pain to make me desperately ambitious.” When Halliwell left the group, she had an estimated $25 million. She couldn’t return home “for tax reasons,” as she’s put it. Where to turn? Halliwell hasn’t had a serious boyfriend in five years, but she has had a good buddy in George Michael, who put her up for months in Beverly Hills and St-Tropez. “I was alone, and he said, ‘Come and stay with me.’ I’d always fancied him, but I wasn’t his type.”
Will Ginger Spice fly as a solo artist? There’s long been sniping about Halliwell’s musical gifts. “Geri didn’t actually sing that much, so it was quite easy to delegate her areas,” Scary Spice remarked, after Ginger left. Halliwell insists she was “instrumental” in writing the Spice Girls’ tunes, and holds forth about the significance of pop in general and “Schizophonic” in particular. She sounds defensive, of course. But suddenly she stops and says, sweetly and plainly, “Look, I know I’m not the best singer in the world. But I wanted to put out a CD that gave you friendship, connection, escapism, something.”
No one could claim that “Schizophonic” breaks new ground musically. As with the Spice Girls’ CDs, many of the tunes here are thin as butterfly wings. Still, it’s a diverse, upbeat, likable album, and Halliwell’s voice sounds pretty good. Sometimes she’s brassy, as on the declaration of independence “Look at Me.” Sometimes she’s tender, as on “Walkaway,” a touching, if grammatically challenged, ballad clearly about leaving the Spice Girls: “Solitude and loneliness have been a friend of mine/As I’m turning my back on emptiness, I leave them all behind.”
On the eve of “Schizophonic’s” release, Halliwell has a lot of hustling left to do. She’s suddenly on the lookout for a new manager, and she’s writing an autobiography, due out this fall: “I’ve always written diaries. When I was chasing my rainbows and knocking on doors, I was writing it all down because it was so funny. I had a pile of rejection slips this thick. But I used to look at movies and music, and think, That is what is going to get me out of the gutter.” It certainly has. Of her solo foray, Halliwell says simply, “My heart is on my sleeve. You can love it or stamp on it.” Surely the ambassador deserves a little good will.
