Sugar And Spice Promoters Hope To Feed America’s Sweet Tooth With British Bubble-Gum Group The Spice Girls

During a break in his morning radio show, the disk jockey Rick Dees looks worried. “Are you girls making fun of me?” he asks.

Sitting in front of him are the Spice Girls, five young women from London who have had hit records around the world. Two are wearing impossibly short skirts, a third a neon green jump suit, another a pair of black pants and a T-shirt and the last a maroon athletic suit.

They have already flattered Dees by telling him he looks like Michael Keaton. They have told him about their motto, “girl power.” They have nodded politely as he dropped the names of old-timers like Rod Stewart and Paul McCartney.

There is good reason for these women, all in their early 20s, to be on their best behavior. The Spice Girls have come to America with high hopes, but they also face considerable skepticism.

Their bubble-gum music is undemanding, their marketing so aggressive and their package so attractive that many already see them as the Monkees of the ‘90s - the invention of a music Svengali.

But if they are worried about making a good impression, that does not stop them from teasing Dees. They call him “Ricky Dicky Dicky” and sass him rather than answering his questions.

When Dees asks if they believe in sex on the first date, Melanie Brown responds, “What are we talking about sex for, when we’ve got girl power to talk about?” So during a commercial, Dees frowns and says, “Am I doing OK? I feel like you’re making fun of me.”

“No, no, no, we like you,” insists Victoria Aadams.

“You’re cool,” adds Emma Bunton.

Dees relaxes a little. “They did great,” he tells a bystander after the interview. And when the band members, accompanied by four aides and two bodyguards, head across the hall to tape voice-overs for Dees’ internationally syndicated countdown show, his producer is even more impressed; on the spot, she offers them a slot as guest hosts on the show.

By the time they leave the station, the Spice Girls have convinced everyone that they really do like them - and more important, they have made certain that everyone at the station likes the Spice Girls.

The Spice Girls, which also includes Melanie Chisholm and Geri Halliwell, really want to be liked. They already have the assurance of some 4 million album buyers worldwide who have made the group’s first single, “Wannabe,” No. 1 in more than two dozen countries, including the United States this week.

In England, the Spice Girls’ first three singles all went to No. 1, and they became a nationwide sensation by providing a frothy, infectious female alternative to the sullen, disaffected boy bands who dominated the charts.

But foreign success is often meaningless in the United States. Only four other acts have had their first three singles hit No. 1 on the British charts, and none of those has had a No. 1 American hit. Of the four, only the mid-‘60s Liverpool band Gerry and the Pacemakers had much impact in America. The others were Frankie Goes to Hollywood, now known in this country, if at all, as an example of unfulfilled hype, and the virtual unknowns Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers and Robson and Jerome.

“Success overseas usually doesn’t mean much,” concedes Phil Quartararo, president of Virgin Records America, the Spice Girls’ American label. “America is very insular. They may be a big story internationally, but the consumer in Amarillo or Peoria doesn’t know what a Spice Girl is yet.”

Virgin, he adds, plans to change all that with a promotional campaign he describes as “absolutely massive.”

“For now, they primarily appeal to preteens,” he says. “But after we get one or two hits under our belt, we want to fan out the demographics to reach teenagers and young adults.”

Tony Novia, the contemporary hits radio editor at Radio and Records, a music-industry trade magazine, gives Virgin high marks for marketing.

“What they’ve done is very carefully and meticulously taken the girls to key stations and key programmers,” he says. “In Los Angeles, they had dinner with some of the most influential radio programmers in the nation. The girls sang a cappella for everybody, they knew how to act, and now those programmers want to see them win.

“Frankly, we’re in a lull period right now. There aren’t many superstars out there creating excitement or bringing people into the record stores. And these girls really have the ability to fire things up.”

Having impact was the idea from the start. The Spice Girls, none of whom play an instrument, were recruited by a newspaper advertisement placed by a talent manager wanting to put together a female pop group that could inspire the kind of hysteria that often greets artistically dubious male bands, Take That and Boyzone being two recent examples.

Still, the manager was dismissed early on. Halliwell says that working with an autocratic handler did not work “because we’ve got our own ideas.”

For the next year, the band members lived together, managed themselves, rehearsed their dance steps, sang a cappella for labels, ignored suggestions that they dress alike and stick to a single lead singer, and wrote the songs that appeared on their debut album, “Spice.”

“I think their appeal is such that people initially think, ‘Hang on, this is a manufactured band,”’ says Richard Stannard, a co-writer and co-producer of “Wannabe” and other songs on the band’s album. “But everything was there, right from the beginning - the attitude, the philosophy, the ‘girl power’ thing.”

Stannard and his partner, Matt Rowe, first heard the group in a London rehearsal hall three years ago. Before the Spice Girls hired their current manager, Simon Fuller, or signed a recording contract, they wrote and recorded “Wannabe” and “2 Become 1” with Stannard and Rowe. “They had all the ideas for the songs,” Stannard says, “and we’d sort of piece them together, like a jigsaw puzzle.”

But the band retained the final say on decisions affecting it. This stance is heard as an incessant refrain as the members talk over lunch a few hours after their appearance with Dees. Nobody pulls their strings; they truly do have girl power.

In fact, one of them literally has it: when Chisholm sits down, she shows off a tattoo on her shoulder, depicting the Chinese characters for woman and strength. “So it sort of says ‘girl power,’ ” she explains.

Brown adds: “We’re proud to be girls. That’s why we’ve got our lipstick and our miniskirts. But then again, you’ve got to get people to treat you like you’ve got a brain. Sometimes we get treated as bimbos, and we’re not bimbos.”

In the United States, the release of “Spice” was delayed until the group could devote its energies to promoting the album - and, says Quartararo, until radio became less dominated by hip-hop and alternative music and more receptive to pure pop.

An appearance on “Saturday Night Live” on April 12 will be their first with a live band; until now, their performances have all been either lip-synched or, less frequently, sung to a recorded backing track.