Credit: Spotify

Victoria Beckham is known as many things. Spice Girl, fashion designer, model, footballing spouse, and, these days, matriarch of a weird and crumbling celebrity family. But here are some further labels that you might not know apply to her: hip-hop artist and Wu-Tang affiliate.

In the early 2000s, following the dissolution of the Spice Girls, Beckham needed a fresh start. She was still taking her music career seriously at the time, and solo success was firmly on the agenda. Her debut album away from the Spice Girls had been a failure, but she was not yet defeated. Work on a follow-up began in 2002.

With a working title of Open Your Eyes, the prospective album was indebted to an electropop sound—but that came to be viewed as a mistake. After Beckham was introduced to Damon Dash, the co-founder of Roc-a-Fella Records alongside Jay-Z and Kareem Burke, she decided that she wanted a more “urban” sound. This was not, necessarily, the most advisable move.

Material with a more hip-hop and R&B sort of vibe was recorded, ostensibly to be included in an album called Come Together. The reaction to this news was not especially kind. There was a fair amount of mockery going around when people learned that this was the direction Beckham had decided to embark upon.

Even Dash, her producer, didn’t exactly seem enthusiastic about what they were doing. Speaking to MTV, he wanted to make it very clear that the rumours of Posh actually rapping on the record were untrue. “She’s not going to be rapping,” he insisted. “All we’re going to do with Victoria is give her a hip-hop influence.”

Dash also revealed a degree of cynicism in his approach to working with Beckham. It was almost like he viewed turning her into a hip-hop artist as a challenge to his business acumen. “If we can make Victoria hot,” he said, “we can make anybody hot.”

In this endeavour to make Vic “hot,” genuine hip-hop royalty was enlisted. The duo MOP were brought on board to rap on a song called ‘It’s That Simple,’ while Ol’ Dirty Bastard jumped on a song called ‘That Dude.’ Securing any member of the Wu-Tang Clan for a Victoria Beckham song is surprising enough, but, of all of them, it was ODB. The oddest, most idiosyncratic member.

It was a big gambit to make Victoria Beckham relevant as a solo pop star—and it didn’t work. Not even a little bit. Tensions emerged with Beckham’s record label, who understandably had reservations about her new style, and the album was cancelled. The label went bust not long after that, and Victoria Beckham pretty much gave up on her solo pop career.

This episode may have been entirely forgotten, but, years later, demos from the Come Together sessions found their way online. The ODB song, ‘That Dude,’ could be heard among them. It’s all a matter of opinion, of course, but it’s not terribly difficult to see why it didn’t get its release.