The Spice Girls showed us how to party. In dark times, they’re back to remind us

They say Britain is a nation of devoted queuers. If so, it’s just had a bonanza, segueing neatly from a stampede for tickets to hear Michelle Obama in conversation at London’s Royal Festival Hall to a full-on meltdown in pursuit of a chance to see four-fifths of the Spice Girls in venues across the land next summer. Clearly, the lack of Posh – busy designing those frocks in which you can imagine an elegant Tory wife expressing support for her faithless husband while planning to take him to the cleaners, or indeed the morgue – is no barrier to adulation; Sporty, Scary, Ginger and Baby will do just fine on their own.

Following the example of Take That sans Robbie Williams, rather than Fleetwood Mac with Crowded House’s Neil Finn subbed in for Lindsey Buckingham (who, in time-honoured fashion, is busy suing the band), the Spice Quartet are heading out to meet fans old and new. That demand has immediately prompted them to add dates to the tour suggests their business instincts, or at least those of their manager, Simon Fuller, have not been dimmed by the passage of time.

For those of a certain vintage, there has been a greater reckoning; one that involves the cold realisation that it is 21 years since we popped to the pictures to watch Spice World, a movie that crested the zeitgeist so astutely that its supporting actors included Roger Moore, Elton John, Jennifer Saunders and Meat Loaf (not to mention affording an early glimpse of Dominic West before The Wire and The Affair made him American).

Union jacks abounded in Spice World, both the film and the band’s more general psychogeography; and their message of female empowerment – triumphing over manipulative managers and evil tabloid journalists in order to fulfil their duties to their fandom and their true friends – was optimistic and jaunty. Fast forward a couple of decades and Big Ben, one of the film’s tourist-attracting landmarks, has been through the mill, wreathed in scaffolding to the disappointment of countless visitors. Flatpack nationalism and misbehaving men in power have had an even worse press.

But it never does to overthink really good pop music. Girl power may have been a gateway to feminism for the Spice Girls’ devoted adolescent fans, but nobody looks to the group’s music for a radical reinterpretation of the second wave. Similarly, their flag-waving embodied a generalised affection for home and community more than a manifesto for inclusion – or, more dangerously, exclusion. But that is not to belittle their achievement, or to underestimate the genuine significance of their songs to those who bought them in their millions. It may not have had the cultural chops of their Britpop contemporaries, but their debut album, Spice, was Parklife without a Penguin Modern Classic hanging out of its back pocket.

Power, too, to the elbows of a group of women in their 40s taking to the stage to perform what we can only assume will be a characteristically hectic demonstration of stagecraft. In their favour is the fact that their dance routines always did resemble a particularly bouncy fitness DVD; and that, in terms of the depredations of age, we have already had to cope with the sight of the Rolling Stones resurgent.

Of course, the Stones, bands such as King Crimson and the 71-year-old Patti Smith share a vital ingredient to aid their continuing stage presence: they are consummate musicians and writers of music, a credential that the Spice Girls themselves would be unlikely to trumpet. But although their brand of entertainment and celebrity was light as a feather and manufactured to within an inch of its life, their survival tells us that they were on to something.

And, in a pop scene currently awash with soppy love songs, in which no classic remains unsullied by a wispy reinterpretation designed to fit around the contours of a glossy television advertisement, the Spices’ real discovery was just how much we liked to party, and to enjoy one another. And if we could do it in absurd Lurex clothing and platform boots, we can do it in our John Lewis double denim and comfy Campers.

Nobody imagines that next year will be any less gruelling for the inhabitants of the UK than this one has been, and a night off stockpiling insulin and corned beef may be just the ticket, albeit a ticket for which you will probably have had to sell the family car. And, frankly, if this encomium doesn’t end in Simon Fuller personally biking me round an Access All Areas lanyard, then I simply don’t know what “positivity” is supposed to be about. Come on, Si, spice up my life.

• Alex Clark is a freelance journalist and broadcaster