Mime and mime again
What Spice Girl Mel C really, really wanted was to keep it real
Spice Girls star Melanie Chisholm has opened up about her frustration over being forced to mime during the band’s heyday.
Chisholm and bandmates Victoria Beckham, Emma Bunton, Geri Horner and Mel B enjoyed success worldwide thanks to hits such as Wannabe, Stop and Say You’ll Be There. But when it came to performing, they often had to rely on a pre-recorded backing track, which the vocalist found very frustrating.
“I was actually quite surprised at how little time we spent performing,” Chisholm said in a scene from upcoming BBC documentary Hits, Hype & Hustle: An Insider’s Guide to the Music Business.
“There are so many interviews to do, TV shows and then a lot of performances you are miming. It’s really frustrating as an artist. A lot of people in the music industry have worked their way up and we were successful at this point but we had never done a live show.”
The girls finally had their chance at a concert in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1997. But the magnitude of performing live for the first time in front of an audience of thousands meant the event was more than a little daunting for the five-piece group.
“There was so much pressure on us, the production was absolutely huge and it was petrifying,” she said. “That was probably one of the most terrifying nights of my life. Everybody was waiting for it and everyone was waiting for us to fail.
“I think people expected us not to be able to sing live. I think people expected not a lot of the show to be live. It was almost an out of body experience. Nothing can prepare you for that amount of adrenalin.”