Old Spice? The girls line up once more for the camera.
As Morrissey once put it: oh, Spice Girls - so much to answer for. It's not often a pop group sets off a cultural whirlwind, but this group turned out to be much greater than the sum of its parts. If they didn't entirely invent celebrity culture, they made its worst aspects commonplace. It was the Spices who made the Hello! wedding photo-shoot de rigueur, who forced teenage girls to think it's their right to own £1000 handbags, and made 10-year-olds believe that a willingness to "work hard" compensates for lack of talent.
Anyway, today the five of them - Spice Women nowadays, with Baby expecting a baby of her own - made their first public appearance since Geri Halliwell quit in 1998, and I'm just back from the press conference. They announced a 12-city tour, which will coincide with the release of a greatest-hits album containing two new songs. To quote them: "Our solo careers may be ebbing away, but our thirst for the limelight remains unslaked, so we're back, back, back!" (Actually, that's not quite how they phrased it. More like: "We feel like the time is right. We wanted to have some fun and be together again for a while," in Mel B's words this lunchtime.)
Oddly enough, I'm delighted. Despite having been a confirmed hater while they existed, in retrospect I can finally see their plus points. The songs, for one thing: if it's now acceptable to celebrate Take That's washed-clean pop, then Wannabe and Spice Up Your Life also deserve admission to the chart-pop hall of fame. Call it nostalgia, but when it comes to putting on a show of fake-Latin booty-shaking, Spice Up Your Life is far better than Madonna's La Isla Bonita.
There was the optimism, too. The Spices' can-do attitude fitted into the new-broom feeling of 1997, when a new government had been installed and change was in the air. And the Spice Girls stood for something. "Girl Power" may be a quaint bit of 90s phraseology now, but at the time it impelled their prepubescent fanbase to get out there and just do it - whatever "it" was. Leading by example, they sacked their manager and ran their own affairs. However wrong some of their subsequent decisions, they made them in the knowledge that they were answerable only to themselves. "We ARE girl power," Geri said today. "It doesn't matter how old you are, 5 or 65."
Their most successful descendents, Girls Aloud and Sugababes, might have the songs, and certainly have the ambition, but lack the qualities that set the Spices apart - the positivism and the determination to lead a mini-revolution dedicated to the proposition that girls must seize the moment.
All the same, I have some misgivings, and the timing of today's announcement - coincidence or ploy? - makes you pause. (Geri claimed to be part of the new in-crowd, saying: "I met Gordon Brown the other day - he seemed a nice enough fellow when you peel away the layers a little bit.") 10 years have passed in the blink of an eye. Can the magic really reappear?
