Happily preventing the Teletubbies from claiming a Christmas number one, the Spice Girls score their second of three festive chart-toppers in a row. And of the three, this is the best in my book…

Too Much, by The Spice Girls (their 6^th of nine #1s)

2 weeks, from 21^st December 1997 – 4^th January 1998

It’s a ballad, of course (a girl group festive release will always be a ballad, there may be actual laws about this) but it’s not as straightforwardly sweet as ‘2 Become 1’, or as sentimental as the one to come next year. This is a sassy, soulful, fairly sophisticated, ballad that, with a little more oomph, could pass as a Bond theme.

It unfurls – that’s the perfect word – seductively, with plenty of horns and strings. Plus it has a couple of the Spice Girls’ best lines. As with all their good songs, they are the ones in charge, not the men. Unwrap yourself… Geri purrs… From around my finger… While in the middle-eight, Mel C unleashes the iconic: What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand, I want a man, Not a boy who thinks he can…!

When you add in her harmonies in the second chorus, Mel C here cements herself not only as the star of this single but as the official ‘Spice who could sing’. I think this might be one of the group’s less well-remembered number ones, and it certainly passed me by at the time – twelve-year-old me having given up on them after the manic ‘Spice Up Your Life’. But listening to it now, I might be tempted to place it as their 2^nd best chart-topper, after ‘Say You’ll Be There’ (clearly the singles where Mel C was allowed to unleash are the best).

‘Too Much’ was the girls’ 6^th #1 in a row, maintaining their 100% record – a record that stands to this day (though it has since been matched by Westlife). Their next release, ‘Stop’, would be their first and only single not to make the top. As I mentioned in my last post on the Spice Girls, the returns from their second album were clearly shortening, although they remained a global phenomenon. This is also their final number one as a five-piece, as by the time of their seventh chart-topper, Geri will have famously called it a day.

In my last post I mentioned that late-1997 saw extremely high singles sales. It’s hard to say, as records vary, but this may have been the ultimate peak for physical singles in the UK. In the run up to Christmas ’97 there was a week in which the entire Top 5 all sold over 100,000 copies, and in the all-time highest-sellers table four songs from the latter half of the year remain in the Top 50 (‘I’ll Be Missing You’, ‘Barbie Girl’, ‘Perfect Day’ and the record-holding ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’). Why this is I’m not qualified to say… Cut-pricing, cultural relevance, the ubiquity of CD players are all decent reasons. The quality of music, in my opinion, is not. The autumn of 1997 has seen a bit of a drop-off compared to the first half of the year. Whatever the reason, we head into 1998 with sales still high, and the turnover at the top ever-increasing…