Reproduced from Guardian 2 August, 1999

So friendship never ends, eh? Not if you listen to Melanie Chisholm, now known as Loose Cannon Spice after uncharitable remarks about the other Spice Girls appeared in the new issue of Q magazine. According to Sporty, Posh's wedding was `OTT', some days she `doesn't even bother' to talk to Scary and she sees the band as little more than a hobby, anyway.

Well, that should put her bandmates firmly in their place. But she saves the best for ex-Ginger. Admitting she hoped Geri's Schizophonic album would be terrible, she dismisses her former friend as untalented, musically hollow and (ooh, miaow) `cotton wool'. Maybe you'd better settle this outside, girls.

There can't be many of us who haven't hoped a rival would fall flat on her face. But it's the relish Mel took in expressing it that makes you wonder what happened to Girl Power. It could be she was stirring things up to draw attention to her own solo album, which is expected in the autumn. It's more likely she was indulging in the bitching that afflicts most female groups, who spend years saying how hard it is to make it in the male-dominated pop world, then turn on each other.

Diana Ross was guilty of most unsisterly behaviour toward her fellow Supremes, alleges Mary Wilson in her 1986 autobiography, Dreamgirl. She undermined them, Wilson says, taunting Florence Ballard about her weight. Years later, performing at a Motown reunion, she physically pushed Wilson to the back of the stage. `Strangely, I still love her and am proud of her,' muses Wilson, who then avenges herself by saying that Ross had an affair with Berry Gordy and anyway, her real name is Diane.

More recently, one Simone Rainford sold her story of life as an original All Saint, which apparently ended because Melanie Blatt was mean to her. Meanwhile, Geri Halliwell claims she was picked on by Mel Brown. Brown says Chisholm snores. Really, ladies, if you can't say anything nice, you shouldn't say anything at all.

Conversely, despite the Robbie Williams/Gary Barlow slanging match, male bands incline toward discretion when nursing grudges. When, say, John Lennon was cross with Paul McCartney, instead of calling the latter a fat wuss, he wrote a song, How Do You Sleep? Much more constructive - not only did he get it off his chest, he got royalties.

So while the men are comporting themselves with relative restraint, women are reverting to the kind of behaviour supposedly left behind with puffball skirts. One of the Spice Girls' aims was to refute the idea that women see each other as rivals, as witnessed by the supportive slogans on the sleeve of their first album (`I'm a girl, I can do it' etc). Who'd have guessed that three years later ...

Let us not forget, though, that the Spices and All Saints are stage school girls who have been taught to lunge after fame like guided missiles. Girl Power was a very convenient launchpad but, having broken through pop's glass ceiling, it's time to look after oneself. Mel C probably feels she deserves it after spending the best years of her life singing the spewy 2 Become 1. Who can blame her?

But there was a band who embodied true girl power before the term existed: Bananarama. Don't laugh. Realising none of them had much talent to speak of, Siobhan, Keren and Sarah stuck together with a devotion unmatched by today's bands. They formed during a drunken night out (none of this audition business) and lived together in a London highrise out of friendship rather than because a manager forced them to. When Siobhan left for a more glamorous existence as Dave Stewart's wife, neither of the others said a word against her - not even when, later, she topped the charts with Shakespear's Sister. Now, that's loyalty.