There is a light at the end of the Beckhams’ hebdomadis horribilis: Victoria Beckham has the UK’s highest-selling single of the week with Not Such an Innocent Girl, originally released in 2001.
After her eldest son Brooklyn’s bombshell revelations about the rift with his parents, including his horrified account of his mother dancing “on” him at his wedding to Nicola Peltz in 2022, fans taking mater and pater Beckham’s side in the celeb gossip of the year showed their support by buying MP3s of Beckham’s debut solo single. (Her first effort without the Spice Girls, 2000’s Out of Your Mind, was a collaboration with Dane Bowers of Another Level.)
The song has made No 1 on two fringe charts, the Official Singles Sales chart and the Official Download chart, but has not cracked the primary Top 100, which combines streams and sales to determine chart placings.
At No 100 on that chart is Myles Smith with 5,258 combined units for his 2024 single Stargazing; exact numbers for Beckham’s song were not made available by the Official Charts Company, though it said sales and streams of the song had risen 19,615% since last week.
The sales and download chart placings in effect give Beckham her first No 1 chart placings since the Spice Girls’ Holler/Let Love Lead the Way in 2000. The five-piece had nine UK No 1 singles, the highest of any girl group, but Beckham never achieved a No 1 as a solo artist: Out of Your Mind was beaten by Spiller and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love).
Both were released, somewhat mind-bogglingly, just a week after 9/11. Not Such an Innocent Girl was hyped up as part of a chart battle with Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head, but lost quite magnificently. Minogue’s song hit No 1 and became a generation-defining smash with first-week sales of 306,000, and Beckham’s effort limped to No 6 with just over one tenth of that figure, at 35,000 sales.
Even Beckham seemed to want to quickly forget the whole affair, and so may not welcome this resurgence. Her self-titled debut album flopped, spending just four weeks on the chart. She is the only Spice Girl to have released just one solo album, having left music behind to pursue fashion.
That said, two rumoured Beckham solo albums never saw the light of day. One recorded around 2002 eventually leaked in 2006, and is known by fans as Open Your Eyes. In 2003, she recorded a hip-hop album with the US producer Damon Dash called Come Together. Despite featuring a collaboration with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, it was scrapped, perhaps wisely. It leaked in 2016 after a demo CD was sold on eBay.
Despite demands from social media users to “release the tape”, the same leaky fate has not yet met the footage of Beckham allegedly dancing so “inappropriately” on her eldest son at his wedding that the young couple renewed their vows a year later in order to “create new memories”.
“First impressions can be wrong / So let me clear what’s going on,” Beckham sang 25 years ago – but as of yet, neither she nor husband, David, have sought to clarify the allegations.
