Interview with Victoria Adams-December 18-1998

He wears her knickers and she sports his ring. Sometimes they have the same haircut. He still treasures the scrap of paper she gave him with her phone number the night they met. She's carrying their child. Victoria Adams (Posh Spice) and David Beckham are probaly the most famous romantic couple in England (and one of the richest - it's reckoned they earned £20 million between them in 1998). They're every tabloid's pot of gold - if my eyes were a camera I would make a small fortune every time they touch. Together for a photo studio this morning (each being shot for a different magazine), numberless hair and make-up experts swap their just-out-if-bed intimacy for stardom's brittle gloss.

"At the end of the day I'm not just Posh Spice," she purrs (it takes the stylists two hours to turn the wan Victoria into a sloe-eyed starlet). Not that she ever seemed that posh - not country posh or tweed posh; more nouveau riche (which matches her background as the daughter of a wealthy-ish businessman and lengthy stint at drama school) "I'd never like people to think I'm Victoria and I get up in the morning and go to work and then I become Posh Spice. Of course I like nice shops and the rest of it, that's how I got the name. But there's more to me than people think. I really am real."

She's certainly the best actress in the band. Anyone watching their so-bad-it's-possibly-good movie Spiceworld would notice that it's only Posh and Baby who deliver performances that don't make you cringe. Although Posh's role is mainly two-dimensional - all spike heels and lip-gloss, barbed one-liners and sharp frocks. It's enough for a Spice Girl, a cartoon popstar identity but hardly sufficient for a fully-fledged celebrity. Or half of a couple that the press seem to think are the latest Hugh and Liz or more worryingly, Charles and Di.

"At the end of the day we are really normal and down to earth," she insists. "On a Saturday night I'll be in with David watching the telly or around my mum's. I could never do anything just because that's what a popstar is supposed to do. You're more likely to see pictures of me walking down the street in a tracksuit than in what I wear on stage. I'd never pretend to keep up that image all the time.

Which almost seems a dereliction of duty. It's hard to imagine a better role in this life for a pop star Spice Girl than parading around London and New York in the very best restaurants and parties. A disco Barbie on show for the world's delectation - a high-rolling, Hollywood-style big spender - she and Beckham perhaps showing us that the English can reach Cher or Jack Nicholson levels of wealth and glamour.

"A lot of people think the nicest part of the job is that you must earn loads of money, you trael a lot, you're famous and you can afford what you want. And I can honestly say that's the least important part of what I actually do. The nice thing about it is that I'm in a position now to speak up on thinks I believe in and people listen. Because I am where I am, they listen to you and you can support things you feel strongly about."

Words to make any politician quake and left-leaning democrat turn pale and shake. But pop stars, for all their apparent naivete, do have numbers on their side. The Spice Girls have sold 40 million records and are the only band in English history to have achieved three consecutive number ones. This is no conventional mandate, but such statistics can't easily be dismissed. And even if Spicy victory was bought with ruthless marketing, then conventional politics is hardly, in comparison, free from spin. But what, I wonder, will she use her power to speak for or against?

"For example, speaking out and supporting the charities we support - the other day I went to have my scans at the hospital. We'll help with baby units. Many hospitals need help with funding and back-up units. David and I always give things for auction - autographs etc - which help raise thousands." She is not specific about exactly which causes she supports financially (and, of course, her scans were done privately, not at an NHS hospital).

She becomes more animated when the conversation turns to press attention. The Spice Girls, she admits have asked for it. They're a band who are dependent on the media (or at least were, perhaps they're now famous enough to withdraw) although she feels the 'complete intrusion' she's subject to is going too far. There were photographers outside her house the day Princess Diana died. News of her pregnancy was leaked to the press and broadcast around the world before she'd had time to ring her closest friends with the news. Even today, there are paparazzi skulking in a car around the corner from the photographer's studio. What's fascinating is the relentlessness of the media gaze. She's under constant surveillance.

"We recently took a holiday," she says, "and people took photographs and it was all over the newspapers and those pictures are still being published. It was just me on holiday in a swimming costume with David and half the time I didn't even know they were being taken. But you suspect sometimes..."

In September, David had a fist fight with a photographer who chased them for over 40 miles from a motorway service station back to their home (scary, just like Diana then). In their movie Spiceworld the only villians are tabloid editors and paparazzi - one photographer tellingly (and of course symbolically) enters their house by climbing out of a toilet. And she's currently taking legal action over newspaper reports of alleged 'relationships' between David Beckham and other women. Some of these stories were graphic, even lurid and it's easy to see how such reports could be hurtful or embarrassing. She can almost laugh such things aside, but you can sense her rage.

"It totally amaze me that people can print complete lies and people then believe it. You can laugh about it only so much, brush it off only so much, but at the end of the day there comes a point where you have to say 'this isn't on, this is just disgusting'. I don't know what it's going to take to make them stop. I do think a lot of us are guilty, we've all picked up a newspaper at some in our lives and looked...b ut there has to be someone who says 'this is not allowed'."

Her demand for regulation of the press is understandable given the intense interest in her private life ("it's not just famous people they bother, it's everyone", she insists). But is a Spice Girl the best or worst person to explore the limits of media freedom and possibilities of censorship? It's a potent question. And perhaps it's something that she and David will have to del with even more rigorously once their child is born. A celebrity dynasty is just as enticing as a royal brood - Prince Charles and the Palace already seem to be working overtime to control William and Harry's media presence. Victoria and David's child, after all, is already famous - we're talking about it now, months before it's even born.


"It is really hard. I suppose people must look through the newspapers think, 'Oh god, it' them again.' We're not asking for that. But it's hard for us to be in our situation and have a private life. It would be very hard for us to disappear. And it's something we're going to have to think very hard with the baby. I don't want my children to be photographed all the time. I want my baby to have as normal a childhood as possible. We are both very normal. We do our own cooking. We do our own cleaning. We go out and drive ourselves."

However recent press rumours suggest she's sold the rights to her wedding to OK magazine for £1million. Victoria laughs when I mention the figure ("you can't believe everything you read," she smiles) but confirms that she has come to an arrangement with the magazin. But can she really have it both ways? Can she tell the press some things are off limits, then take one of the most private and precious things in life - a wedding (if you have such a romantic view) - and auction it off?

We have been offered money for our wedding," says Victoria, "but there are photographers wherever you go. I can't stop that. I've got a really good relationship with the magazine and I trust them with the pictures. The press will be all over my wedding whatever I do - but this is my way of trying to deal with it and make it as bearable as possible."

Maybe she's in a no-win situation, the holiday episode with David perhaps teaching her that the paparazzi will always hit their mark. This way, at least, she'll benefit from the inevitable deluge of flashbulbs. It's a pragmatic and almost, dare I say it, girl power approach to the problem. Maybe girl powere was only a smoke-screen for girl greed but the Spice Girls do seem tough, even ruthless. Ther can't be many bands who have successfully extradited themselves from not one but two professional managers. When we discuss her pregnancy, she's as hard as nails (and in this context that's a compliment).

"It was a surprise," she admits.

It wasn't something planned?

"We talked about it when we got engaged. We discussed it. There would have been no point in us getting married and me saying 'I don't want kids' and David saying 'I want 10'. Of course it was something we talked about for a long time."

So you were always going to keep the child?

"Yes. I'm not saying I'm against abortion or anything like that. But I'm in a position where I'm in a steady relationship and can support a child. I don't know. Things might be different if I was in a different relationship. It's all down to individuals and you have to do what suits you."

I think she's a tough little pop star. She softens most when she discusses David. And he's even more unreal than she is - a perfect 10, Roy of The Rovers meets Flash Gordon in Gucci on the catwalk. Footballers normally don't look this good. So maybe they really are the UK's number one couple - the most haughty and sleek of Spice Girls, the most beauiful and talented of athletes.

"I don't know," she laughs, "if I was to sit here and think, 'I'm famous, David's famous, our baby's gonna be famous', I'd just go mad. I think it's great that we've both got these jobs, but at the end of the day we shut the door and then we're who we are. And then no one knows. They think they do. Everybody would like to think they know us. Not many people know him at all. Not at all. He can be so funny and he's really, really deep. We can sit in a room and talk for hours. We don't have the television on, we don't look at a magazine, a video. We can sit there and talk and talk and talk. People don't know about that. People think all we do is go shopping and bu Gucci."

How does she feel when football fans taunt David with obscene chants about their sex life, and about Victoria hrself, hoping to put him off his game?

"It's easy for people to say 'don't worry about it', but it's hard when that much negativity is being thrown at somebody you care about. What's worse is that you can't really respond. I wish they'd sing them more clearly and in tune then I could hear what they are on about."

Throughout our interview David's being photographed for GQ magazine (its readers voted him the 'most stylish man'). Every few minutes he comes into show Posh the Polaroids and get her opinion or approval.

"I think you'd look better in a shirt," she comments.

"Aren't you going to do any where you're looking nice and smiling?" she asks.

"I don't know what I think of that top."

"Make sure you get the Polaroids off them. Any that they don't need."

He grins a lot in response. Not so much sheepishly (well. a bit), more tenderly and grateful for her advice (or comments). There's certainly a seductive and careful power about Victoria.

I ask her one more question. A simple one. Have you any idea what you might call your baby?

"Yeah, Glenn, after Glenn Hoddle." And she cackles. Wickedly. Really quite wickedly.