Billie Eilish Thought The Spice Girls Was A Fake Band Invented For ‘Spice World’
She'd seen the film "like 40 times", but didn't realise they existed outside of it.
Like Lorde, Khalid or Yung Lean before her, much has been written about Billie Eilish’s age. The pop wunderkind just released her record-breaking debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? two weeks ago, at age 17, and if that freaks you out, then this story isn’t for you.
As Eilish does the promo rounds, we’ve learnt more and more about …Where Do We Go?‘s inspirations. Just yesterday, for example, we learnt Eilish had to get personal permission from Steve Carell to sample her favourite show The Office on track ‘My Strange Addiction’.
And now, it seems that Eilish’s influences include The Spice Girls — though she didn’t know that the girl group existed outside of 1998 film Spice World until quite recently.
Growing up, Eilish loved Spice World, telling Ellen DeGeneres last week that she’s watched it “like 40 times”. But, having been born in December 2001, Eilish was born a full year after the band went on hiatus. For her, Spice’s World was only Spice World, much like Josie & The Pussycats belonging only in Josie & The Pussycats.
Elaborating on Capital FM’s (via NME), Eilish said she thought Spice World was “a made-up movie about a group of girls who sang”, rather than a postmodern meta-fiction set in an alternate reality. Easy mistake.
“I thought all the music was written for the movie,” she explained. “I thought all the characters were cast for those characters. I didn’t figure it out until two years ago.”
It was only in 2017 that Eilish worked it out, around the time of the reunion rumours/announce, though at first she thought the Spice World actors were simply ‘re-enacting’ the movie. To be honest, this sounds a lot better than any reunion tour ever could be.
As NME point out, Eilish recently met Mel C, who went to one of the pop-star’s London concerts this past March. We can only imagine they had a perfectly pleasant conversation about other excellent films from 1998, such as Sliding Doors, which really, if you think about it, could have opened up a whole conversations about an alternate reality where Spice World was a documentary, and Eilish thought it was fiction. Wow.