Spice Girls producer was duped into leaking songs by fraudster now selling them for £10,000 EACH
The previously unreleased tracks had been unheard for over a decade - until Eliot Kennedy was tricked into uploading them online
The record producer responsible for recording the newly-leaked Spice Girls songs says he was duped into giving the recordings away by an internet fraudster who is now trying to sell the tracks for £10,000 apiece.
The four previously unheard songs - Pain Proof, A day In Your Life, If It's Loving On Your Mind and Right Back At Ya - were recently leaked online and shared among fans.
Eliot Kennedy, who recorded the songs with the Spice Girls after Geri Halliwell left in 1998, says he was contacted in 2014 by a man claiming to be Simon Fuller - the media mogul who was the architect of the girl band's success.
The man, whom Eliot believed to be Fuller, told him of plans to put together a new collection of Spice Girls songs to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the band, and said he wanted to include the four previously unreleased songs on the new album.
Overjoyed, Eliot dug out the tape recordings of the sessions and set about converting them to digital files so he could email them to the former Spice Girls manager.
"He asked me to send him to them, so I sent him MP3s," Eliot Kennedy told MirrorOnline.
"He thought they were fab and said he’d put all four on the new album.
"He sent me the link to a server, and asked me to upload the stems (individual recordings of each instrument and vocal).
"I even bought an ADAT machine off eBay so I could convert all the mixes to digital."
Eliot sent the files across and thought nothing more of it, he was told a legal representative would be in contact with him in order to sort out the details of a contract and work out payment.
It wasn't until the renowned producer saw his pals Mel C and Emma Bunton in person that it dawned on him something wasn't quite right.
"I was working on the Sport Relief record with Gary Barlow, I’m in the studio with him, and Emma Bunton and Mel C come in to work on the record.
"It was lovely! I said to Mel C 'hey this is good isn't it - the thing that Fuller’s doing with the album'.
"She didn't know what I was talking about.
"I asked 'have you not spoken to Fuller?' but she didn’t know anything about it."
When Eliot went back and checked the email address he'd received the emails from, he saw that it was an AOL address rather than one registered to Simon's company XIX Entertainment.
"I phoned (the real) Simon and said 'I feel like a complete an utter d**k', and I told him about it.
"I gave everything to a lawyer, but I haven’t heard anything back after that and Simon hasn’t pursued it.
"I have been inundated with emails from Spice Girls fans in South America, they said there was a guy in Argentina selling “exclusive new Spice Girls songs" for £10,000 each.
"I thought 'bloody hell I should be doing that myself!' - but I’d rather give them away than someone do that."
Eliot believes he was duped by the man in Argentina into digitizing the songs and giving them away, otherwise they would have remained as tape recordings on his shelf.
"I spoke to the Spice girls, they said there are no plans to do anything and we let it go.
"Every now and again I get an email from someone claiming that this guy is dropping his price, and I tell them to spread the word that he’s a thief."