Sinead: I feel like we should open it in the way where it gets some funny one liner from the episode, that becomes the first line and it might not have anything to do anything, and then we just jump right in. It makes me laugh every time. But I don't know if it's gimmicky, I don't know.
Ashley: Well, we already do that, like you mean
[laughter]
Steph: There’s the open!
Spice Invaders Theme Song: [over trumpet music] It’s got theme song vibes. Like danceable, funky. [Laughter]. So 90s. Girl power. Spice Invaders.
Megan: This is Spice Invaders, an obsessive breakdown of the history of the Spice Girls, and what they meant to the people who grew up with them.
Ashley: Dun-dun... that’s what that reminds me of, you know what I mean? Like Law and Order
[laughter]
Megan: Law and Order dun-dun. Is that trademarked, can we use that?
Ashley: I mean it’s my voice, they can’t do anything.
[laughter]
Elyse: Oh yeah! Let’s just use your voice.
[laughter]
Sinead: Okay, so last time we talked a lot about like, the capitalist machine behind the Spice Girls, and how all encompassing that was in 1997. Today we're sort of jumping off that part midway through ‘97 to see how they made it work like in practice.
Elyse: Woohoo!
Cheryl: So we're in late spring and early summer of 1997 and this is a really intense time for the band. Filming has started on Spiceworld the film, as the group is concurrently recording Spiceworld the album. We're gonna get into Spice World the film in more detail in the next episode, but it's worth noting that this is like two full time jobs. It's an incredibly demanding schedule, the president of virgin UK at the time, Paul Conroy refers to the girls as “the hardest working group in Christendom”. The girl's daily schedule starts at about 7am for a call time and would end at around 11pm so when they left the recording studio
Elyse: Ooof. that's a long day
Steph: At least they’re young.
Sinead: Yeah, but they were literally like grinding their body into the ground
Elyse: That’s crazy.
Steph: Yeah no shit, that’s insane.
Cheryl: Yeah, so according to Matt Rowe, who we met when he worked on Spice the album: “When they came in to record ‘Spice Up Your Life’ [...] it was the middle of the chaos. It had been booked in, that they were coming to record their next single, and write it, with us [...] there was going to be an MTV crew there filming them as they did this, which there was. Well, how can you possibly do this? You can’t write and record a song in half-an-hour with a film crew watching”.
Megan: Didn’t they write ‘Wannabe’ insanely fast?
Steph: Yeah, like 15 minutes.
Sinead: They definitely did write a lot of their earlier songs quickly, but at the time when they were recording the Spice album, that was their only job was recording the Spice album, they were in the studio for a lot of time. Like they didn't have any other demands on their schedule, the way they ended up having them with Spiceworld because they're concurrently filming a movie as Cheryl mentioned.
Cheryl: And it's also like working in creating is still like a really vulnerable process, like you can't do like perfect documentary-style stuff, while your songwriting and remember too like the way they work. Like it's not like they're just songwriting too, they're trying to think about the song and the choreography at the same time. And all of this does not look great for a documentary. So yeah, they're trying to literally do three things at a time, not just record the album.
Megan: This is so much on their plate, like, especially since being home with COVID all the time, If I have to do two things in one day, I'm like, that's too many things, I can't imagine.
Elyse: Yeah, they must be just like so far into burnout by this point that all of that like creativity and excitement and adrenaline of just starting the band, you have to imagine that like, it would be a completely different experience trying to write a song, when you're a little bit into it, and you've been traveling and you're doing like 20 hour days, and you're probably a little annoyed with each other, even if you're still great friends, like it just would be a little bit less rosy than when they wrote that 15 minute song. And that would be really hard to live up to.
Megan: And they've been exposed now to like what the backlash of the media can be like too, right? So there might be a bit of that hanging over.
Elyse: So true.
Sinead: For sure, because of all of the demands on their time, their management had the idea actually to create, like mobile recording studios, so that the girls could leave the film set and walk across a parking lot and go into a studio. But according to Paul Watkins of the Absolute production team, he said: “We’d sit there literally all day long and quite often we wouldn’t even get them at all [...] Because we were so desperate to write with them, we were literally holding on to any kind of input they were giving us. Geri would literally run into the studio and she’d say “I just had this idea: Stop right there! Thank you very much” and then said she had to go. And that’s all she did.”
Elyse: I just got goosebumps when you said that.
Megan: Me too!
Elyse: That's so cool, that she just ran into a studio and then “Stop” happened.
Sinead: Yeah, and Elliot Kennedy, who you guys might remember is the producer that they really loved working with on the Spice album. He actually backed out of working with them on Spiceworld because he'd heard from the other producers that the girls just didn't have time to create music properly or have a creative process. He said “I did a couple of backing tracks for Spiceworld. But when I heard from Absolute and Matt and Biff how it was going and what a nightmare it was turning into I thought ‘I don’t want to get involved. This is not what I’m into”.
The music was just taking a backburner to their other celebrity ventures. And they were insanely famous already by this point, lik, not even having a second album out and they just didn't physically have time to be involved in a second album the way they were with their first one.
Cheryl: But having said that, the Girls claim that there's a lot of themes that were going on in their own lives at the time, that are actually on the album. Mel C has said that “Stop” was about their feelings towards fame and the frustration the group had about being overworked.
Elyse: Really?!
Cheryl: Yeah.
Elyse: I didn't know that. That makes it kind of sad. Like Stop right now. Thank you very much. I need somebody with the human touch, that's horribly depressing about being on the road.
Megan: You got to slow it down baby, gotta have some fun.
[laughter]
Sinead: It's pretty on the nose.
Elyse: Yeah, it is now that you say it.
Sinead: I mean children-us couldn't even fathom this like what the demands, like 30 year old us are like, Oh, this is horrific. Children-us are like “Oh, they're famous. They're so lucky.” Like we didn't understand.
Elyse: No. Like not even remotely close.
[laughter]
Cheryl: ‘Too Much’ was about how fame impacted them as a group, with Geri writing the first lyrics while leaving the set that was buzzing with paparazzi floating around and trying to get in. The intensity of the fans and the media made it very difficult for the band to go anywhere which added further constraints to the album recording process. In his biography of the group, David Sinclair said “What later became one of their most chilled out hits was thus written, and the vocals recorded, in a caravan in the middle of a virtual riot”.
Elyse: Whoa...that is so stressful to think about.
Sinead: There would be so many people in some of these like smaller places that they were showing up to film and also record the same time, that the local police would be like overwhelmed and like would have to like call in like additional people from other places to come and do like crowd control. So they quite literally in that situation were mobbed in like this trailer.
Elyse: I am someone who gets really stressed out in crowds, they make me really uncomfortable. The idea of being in that situation and then someone being like, cool, now write a song is just mind bending.
Sinead: Write a song after you've spent all day acting as your alter-ego in a Hollywood movie.
Elyse: Oh god, these women are superheroes.
Sinead: They are but from the production side of things by all accounts, the final tracks on Spiceworld were the result of pretty considerable post-production work and not from that much contribution from the girls themselves. And this really leaves this album and the band pretty wide open to the criticism that music was neither theirs nor their priority.
And that's like a pretty common theme but it's hard not to say it about this because they were scheduled to do so many other things. It was a business decision to create a Spice World Album at the same time as the Spice World Film and they didn't need to do that. They could have done one thing at a time but everything in Simon Fuller's machine is like go go go and they also too, the five of them did want to be Go go go but as you said earlier Elyse, like burnout is definitely around the corner for the five of them.
After the album was recorded, Virgin decided that they needed a B-side and there wasn't one available. And that's where Space Invaders came from. Andy Watkins and Paul Wilson of Absolute were being pressured to make a B-side, so they put like a bunch of mics in front of the girls and had them sit down and told them just to talk about whatever they wanted to. And by all accounts everyone in the music label hated the song and I personally don't love the song itself either. But clearly we liked the song enough to use it as our name.
Elyse: We love the song title.
Megan: The title!
Steph: The title is great. The content….
Elyse: Steph, I think you just wrote the perfect tagline for Space Invaders. The title is great, the content, meh!
[laughter]
Ashley: Or not, you know.
[laughter]
Sinead: Yeah, apparently whoever at Virgin was in charge of collecting this B-side called the song hideous. [laughter] That was in David Sinclair's biography, and I don't necessarily disagree
Megan: They're so busy, we're just gonna get them in a room and record whatever they say. Like how far is that from what we talked about at the beginning where like they want control of their music and they want to all to have input and they did it like collectively as a group and it's been such a short time and yet it seems so far from their their process that they've loved so much in the beginning.
Elyse: Yeah, like is this the sell-out point?
Sinead: I think you could make a fair claim of that for sure. I think their level of meteoric fame and the short period of time in which they went from being five random girls to the biggest group in the world is like 14 months. And… less actually, it's actually less than that honestly. And I think this is where we're starting to see the cracks.
Cheryl: One really great example of this is actually the music video for “Spice Up Your Life”. So in early September 1997, the group traveled to NYC to film the music video for “Spice Up Your Life”. Steph, you did a review session, I'm wondering if you could share with us what this video looks like.
Steph: So it's a lot like CGI, almost certainly in front of some form of green screening, but in like a weird post-apocalyptic realm. It reminded me of the Matrix in a weird way. Because everything's very dark and gray and depressing. And the Spice Girls are like going around to spice up their life. They're also in a weird spaceship thing. It's weird.
Cheryl: I also would go with like, maybe Blade Runner is like a visual reference.
Steph: Okay, yeah, I can see that too. I had just recently seen the Matrix so that's why I thought of it.
Elyse: I'm just looking at it now. This is very Blade Runner. Hella high production value compared to their earlier videos like it's clearly had a lot of budget put into it.
Megan: You guys are comparing it to blockbuster movies that I'm sure millions were spent on, so if it’s giving you those vibes it must have a good budget.
Steph: I do remember there also being weird ads in it, like the Starbucks logo is somewhere in the music video, but it's like with spice. Spice Girls or Spice World.
Elyse: Oh, Josie and the Pussycats vibes.
Steph: Oh yeah.
Cheryl: They weren't actually consulted on the darker world domination aesthetics at the video ended up being the band actually wanted a carnival theme for the video. But they were so exhausted by the demands on their time. They didn't put up a fight about it.
Elyse: That's so unlike them,
Megan: You can tell they're just worn out they don't have the fight left in them.
Elyse: Mmhmm.
Cheryl: Mel B was later quoted in her first autobiography saying it wasn't right. “I don't think any of us liked it much. Even though we enjoyed making it, I still can't understand what's going on in it half the time”. It's upsetting.
Sinead: It is. So while they were in New York City, they also attended the 1997 MTV VMAs and the tone of the VMAs that year was markedly dampened because Princess Diana had been killed in a car accident like three days before.
The Spice Girls had been nominated for two awards and they were set to perform “Say You’ll Be There” as well. “Wannabe” won for Best Video of the year actually. And they appeared on the stage wearing black armbands which were a tribute to Diana, Melanie C said “we'd like to dedicate this award to Princess Diana, who is a great loss for our country” and Geri followed up with “and also I think what we are really about is what Lady Diana had, real girl power”, which I don't I don't know if I agree with that.
Megan: Although Geri saying you have girl power, as we've learned, is not necessarily a compliment to who you are as a human being.
Elyse: Okay, here's how I feel about it. I feel like it's reductionist and not necessarily a compliment. But if a Spice Girl said to me, after I died, that that girl had real good real power, there'd be a part of me, that'd be like, “awwww, I did it”
[laughter]
Sinead: So I actually have a picture of them at the awards that I'm just going to send right now. And the main reason I wanted to share this picture is, you can see their armbands, if you look at their faces, they're absolutely exhausted.
Elyse: Whoa
Sinead: And they all had their own makeup artists for the show, like Cheryl had looked up before it because there'd been some little comment about that. They're just like, this is what it looks like when you have two full time jobs for four months.
Elyse: Yeah, their eyes look dead.
Megan: They have bloodshot eyes, and the first thing I noticed was like they're all wearing a lot of eyeliner, which I'm thinking is to draw your attention away from like bags under the eyes.
Elyse: Yeah, I bet your right.
Sinead: Only Victoria doesn't look exhausted and she still looks tired.
Elyse: Yeah, she does.
Steph: Yeah.
Cheryl: So their insane summer schedule leads into an insane fall schedule. The girls headed into intensive rehearsals for their first major concert, a two night event in Istanbul, which was sponsored by Pepsi.
Their management rented a nine bedroom mansion on several acres with lots of security for fans and media in the south of France that they all moved into, which is a huge contrast from what they were dealing with in Maidenhead. They spent the entirety of their days singing, rehearsing with a full band, dancing with their choreographers and working out for approximately six weeks
In contrast to the really friendly nature of their time of flatmates in Maidenhead, life in the rented Spice mansion as a famous girl group was very different. Victoria said “it was not a happy time, none of us were happy. But instead of talking about it, like we would have done the old days we just kept to a rooms”
Megan: That's so sad like, you know, they were going through it alone, even though there were five of them probably going through similar if not the same thing, like they were alone in it.
Steph: It’s almost like, they were too tired to even talk about it.
Elyse: I feel too, like there'd be a certain sort of shame about not being happy at that time. Because like you've been given this huge mansion and you’re global pop stars, like you've had everything that you've ever wanted, you're famous, you're living your dream. And I imagine that there would be a lot of fear of being the first one to be like, I actually am not stoked about this. You don't want to burst other people's bubbles. You don't want to bring down the vibe, you don't want people to think you're not engaged or invested. Like I can see how that would almost drive a wedge between them.
Cheryl: Geri in particular had a very difficult time with this regiment, particularly with rehearsals. She doesn't have the dance background as the other four, and she does have to work much harder. She apparently refers to this time as Spice Kampf in her biography.
Elyse: She does
Cheryl: Because it's just how terrible it was on her in the group.
Sinead: So after this six weeks of rehearsals, they're off to Istanbul, they have to do dress rehearsals. The Istanbul shows were really heavily choreographed. And they also featured five complete outfit changes in like an hour and a half to like it wasn't a super long show. They had a gigantic video screen behind them. And there was like pyrotechnics, and it was just this huge thing. Critically, the shows were received fairly well. Carolyn Sullivan, who wrote about it for The Guardian said “to dispense with the big question first, they really did sing and being a democracy, each girl got an equal shot at singing lead, a meritocracy would have been a better idea, with only the two Mel’s allowed to belt them out while the others chipped in on the choruses”
[laughter]
Steph: Oh my god. Savage.
Sinead: But to her credit, Sullivan went on to say that “in terms of pure spectacle, you'd be hard pressed to find anything better. They're not the Beatles, or even the Supremes. But they have more than passed the test.” And because it's kind of crazy, right? Like they have been a band for over a year with albums and everything out and they've never had a public concert. Like, that's kind of ridiculous. So it was like a long time of people being like, can they even perform like, could they even do a tour? And that's kind of what Istanbul was about. They were fulfilling their obligations to Pepsi, but they were also proving that they could support like a full on tour, which would end up happening obviously in the future.
Megan: That is insane, though. Like usually now you put an album out, you go on a big tour, like, was that not the case back then? Or like how did they avoid that?
Cheryl: Touring just doesn't fit the Spice model. Like you can't make the same headlines when you're on tour than when you're doing a press circuit. When you're on a tour, you show up to do setup, you do your tech and then you perform and then you pack it all up and you get in a van, sometimes you sleep in the van, and then you do it all again the next night. Like there just isn't the time to generate the same headlines the Spice Girls model was based on. It's a choice and it's a choice because doing the media hits generates headlines and it's also way cheaper. A concert tour is bloody expensive.
Megan: This is like the, it just makes me think of how we were like debating like where they manufactured or were they independent enough in their like control over their music at the beginning to like maybe they weren't so manufactured. But now I'm just looping back to like, it was totally manufactured all over again.
Sinead: I think you just see with the mounting financial pressures because you have to think like by this point, there is a whole like underside of staff, tons of people who are on the bank roll of like the Spice project, like they have become a corporation that now has to like meet targets and like continue to make new revenue streams and do all this shit like and whereas like a year before, they were just friends who were trying to record one album. They got what they wanted, but it's like in the process of getting what they wanted, they lost, they started to lose, why was that they were special to begin with and in sort of a way.
Cheryl: Their goal was, again to go back to like that famous historic quote was to be as famous as Persil Automatic, you know, and like, it does take this much work not just to get that famous but to stay famous.
Cheryl: This hectic schedule is cited by both Victoria, Geri and Mel C as a particular time that exacerbated already existing eating disorders and they felt really unable to share the details of this part of the experience until years later. In her book, Victoria explained “since I've been with David, my eating had been more or less normal, but now it was beginning to get worse again. I think it was because food was the only thing I had control over. I couldn't see my family. I couldn't see my boyfriend.”
During this time a journalist actually reported on a tiff that she and Simon Fuller had over her not finishing a meal in Hong Kong. The story said that the meal was not to her liking and that was sort of a cover story for it. But behind the scenes Fuller was reported to have told her that “she wasn't going all day on one bowl of rice”.
Elyse: Yikes.
Cheryl: Yeah. Mel C, overwhelmed by the schedule and attention and the fact that the group had some very tough personalities, said “inside I was bottling up so much anger that my body just gave up. The fallout was depression and an eating disorder.”
Elyse: Geri struggled with an eating disorder as well. She had been for some time, she had disordered eating when she was in her late teens. But then, you know, when she joined the Spice Girls, it got a little bit better for a while. So she has a quote from her book saying “when I joined spice It was as though my problems are packed in a box and put into storage at the back of the wardrobe. And while I lived in Maidenhead, and we rehearsed each day, the problems remained locked away”.
So it got better for a little while, except it seemed like the restriction and the exercising persisted, then it re-emerges later. But throughout that whole period, the only person she talked to in the house is Mel B, and Mel B knew everything that was going on and was very supportive of her, but she didn't tell the other girls and it's such a shame knowing that Victoria and Mel C were both going through it, that there is this sort of hidden world that they were all experiencing and hadn't connected on and Geri actually got severe enough that she self admitted herself to a psychiatric ward. while all the other girls were away visiting family over the holidays and stayed there for 10 days. And again Mel B was the only one that she told she'd even been there, no one else knew. It was bad enough that she asked Simon for some time off to recover and she said that “I need a few weeks. I'm really going through something. I need some time to get better.” And he said “I'll see if I can give you a day” and I mean like not to drop too much of a bomb but that was when she first thought I need to leave this group.
Ashley: Wow.
Elyse: Yeah.
Megan: Good for her though, for having that like self insight and even asking for it even though she wasn't like granted it. It shouldn't be grantedable. But anyway, to be able to ask is like hugely strong. Mel C talks about having like perfectionism from an early age and I think that's often tied to like disordered eating right and then they're put under this spotlight, You know, and Mel C spoke about being sort of like working-class from Liverpool, didn't deserve this sort of fame and money, had to be perfect to deserve it. It's like not only this scenario sets it up, but like just like mentally the fact that they're achieving all this like they feel like an imposter right? And Mel C even says like girl power they were all about Girl Power, like saying this and yet she had no power over what her own body and mind were doing to herself and that just drove into the eating disorder even more, in the depression even more, you know when everyone's looking at you like “Oh, you're perfect, You're beautiful You're famous you're a singer you're doing all this” and it just makes you feel like you're more of a failure because you don't see yourself as being like perfect or how everyone else sort of perceives you and I think the lack of control comes up a lot for all of them.
Ashley: Did anyone read anything about Mel B and Emma? Emma didn’t really share a lot about her life in general, right?
Steph: Not really, no. Like anything about some of this stuff was like more like dealing with just the surprise fame of it all. She doesn't really reference any eating issues, presumably there were some like I feel like at some point every girl goes through thinking, oh shit, that moment like Oh shit, I have to be thin I guess cuz thin is cool? But other than that, I don't think...she's never referenced having any major relationship issues with food or dieting or excessive exercise or anything like that.
Sinead: So I can speak to Mel B who basically says she's never really had that many issues with her body which she credits to just having a metabolism that keeps her thin she's also very active
Megan: Not that you have to look a certain way to have an eating disorder.
Sinead: Exactly. That's the other thing, I'm stumbling over myself because I don't know, I don't want to fatphobic and I also don't want to be like you need to have a lot of body changes to have an eating disorder because we know those things aren't true. She talks a lot in both of her autobiographies about some of the other girls having issues with food. She loved to gorge on junk food, especially after being out at the pubs and that was something that sometimes some of them would participate in and other times they wouldn't, which was a part of how she knew that they were struggling in their relationship with food.
Elyse: Yeah, Geri even says In her autobiography because Mel B was such a good confidant for her, that Mel B even this is like problematic from an intuitive eating standpoint, but it's quite sweet like when Geri wasn't sure what to eat, Mel B was like, “well just copy me like I'm having this much so I just have this much and then you know you're having enough”. And it was to the extent that she said Mel B just couldn't fathom seeing food as an enemy because it brought her so much joy.
Sinead: Have we talked about that Geri and Mel B had sex?
Elyse: What!?
Steph: No one said it. And I don't know. I didn't know where to say it.
Elyse: Wait. I didn't know this.
Steph: And Geri denies it.
Sinead: Because Mel B is bisexual and Mel B has had like years long relationships with women as well as men.
Elyse: Geri does say in her book, she's like we were such close friends. I worried that sometimes the other girls felt left out. But I didn't know she meant left out of the sex.
Cheryl: It comes out in the lead up to the 2019 tour. Mel B does an interview with someone and says it. And then Geri issues this statement that makes me very angry. One of the things she says is something along the lines of “and on mothering Sunday of all days” and it bothers me because there's this tradition of like, we have to keep queer people away from the children. And it bothers me because she gets to don this protective armor of motherhood and therefore she can't be queer because she's a mom. It's hurtful to betray your trust but it's not hurtful to say you had sex once
Sinead: I can empathize with Geri for hiding from that part of herself because she hasn't dealt with her own internalized homophobia. I just can't empathize with her saying publicly a bunch of shit like in 2019.
Ashley: It is weird that Geri would react that way in 2019 and I don't agree with her reaction but it's also not fair to out your friend on TV when she hasn't you know...
Elyse: That’s a fair point
Ashley: It's not fair to out someone, period, but like it's also not fair to disparage them and turn it into this like “mothering Sunday”, like all that shit. Like it's not her reaction isn’t fair either, just overall handled very poorly.
Elyse: Could you imagine if there have been an openly lesbian Spice Girl? That would have made so many people's lives easier.
Cheryl: How many years of trying to be like, “I’m not into women!” would it have saved me?
Sinead: I mean, even just for me as the child of a lesbian, it would have made me feel fucking amazing because there was so little lesbian visibility at that time. And Mel B wasn't, she was not closeted at that age, during that time, and she absolutely was seeing women in addition to men it just wasn't being reported on. I don't know, but she, I don't think she was closeted and I don't think that there was a lot of pressure on her to perform heterosexuality. She certainly does not ever say that in her books.
Megan: I honestly think the media at that time, they would have rather just assumed “Oh, she's out with a girlfriend”, that was a poor choice of words, a female friend.
[Chimes]
Sinead: On October 13, the first single drops “Spice Up Your Life”, it immediately became their fifth number one single out of five singles.
[laughter]
So they continue to break records. Following “Spice Up Your Life” they released “Spice World”. The album was released on November 1 1997. It sold 1.4 million copies in its first week in the UK and it reached number one in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Japan. It actually peaked at number three in the US and number two in Canada by early ‘98.
Transcript created by Sinead O’Brien and Cheryl StoneBy the end of ‘98, it had sold more than 13 million copies worldwide. When you contrast that with the “Spice” album which had sold 19 million copies by the end of ‘97, it didn't do as well as “Spice” did. The second single for the album “Too Much” was released on the 15th of December ‘97 and that became the girl's second consecutive Christmas number one.
Cheryl: I think it's funny to yet again have an episode where we're talking about one of the most famous music groups of all time, they’re compared to other music groups. But yet again, we spent a very little time actually talking about their music. As we've touched on throughout this, this is an intentional part of the Spice strategy, we keep getting media hits to stay in the limelight.
Megan: But they keep creating hits, so gotta be something about the music, right?
Sinead: They definitely do keep creating hits, but like Cheryl said the music is less important to the Spice strategy than it is to them as like a part of their story or like the legend around them. So while the journalists are following them writing the story, during the same time the girls were creating something that was literally them writing their story themselves. And that is Spice World, the movie.
Steph: I'm so excited for Spice World, you have no idea!
Elyse: Me too!
[Chimes]
Ashley: We're gonna end it here today. Thank you so much for listening. Spice Invaders is hosted by Sinead O'Brien, Cheryl Stone, Elyse Maxwell, Stephanie Smith, and Megan Arppe-Robertson. It's researched and written by Sinead O'Brien and Cheryl Stone, and produced and edited by me, Ashley McDonough.
To see any visuals we talked about in this episode, as well as bonus content, be sure to follow us on instagram at @spiceinvaderspod. Thank you to Lukus Benoit for composing our theme song.