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MANY things were very different in the Nineties, as Mel C can attest to better than most.
Mental health was rarely spoken about by anyone in the public eye, depression was “almost a taboo”, she says, and women’s weight was freely discussed — to the point where Victoria Beckham and Geri Horner (then Halliwell) were weighed live on TV. “Shocking, isn’t it? It’s my daughter’s least favourite expression, when I say it was a ‘different time’. And it really was — thank god things have changed,” says Sporty Spice, real name Melanie Chisholm, and mum to Scarlet (13).
“There’s so much more celebration of body diversity now. Young people don’t want to look skinny anymore. That’s not the aesthetic of the day, you know?” But the Spice Girls’ immediate elevation to global cultural phenomenon (eventually selling an estimated 100 million records and worldwide tours, including Dublin in 1998) and the pressure to fit that pop star aesthetic at the time had a devastating impact on her mental health. At one point, after Horner left the band and when Chisholm released her first solo album, Northern Star, she was unable to leave the house.
“It felt like going outside was petrifying,” she says. “In the darkest times, in the depths of depression and eating disorders and that fear, is the security of the four walls. I think a lot of that was because I felt like the eyes of the world were on me through the media.”
The pain she was in would have been undetectable to the millions of Spice Girls fans around the globe. The band had put ‘Girl Power’ firmly into the zeitgeist and happily played up to the personas of Sporty, Baby, Scary, Ginger and Posh.
Meanwhile, Chisholm felt she had to keep powering through, “like a treadmill I couldn’t get off” she writes in her longawaited autobiography, Who I Am, and feeling alone “with what was by now a serious eating disorder”.
She says now: “With hindsight, I think it would have been really beneficial for me to have taken a break.”
Robot
During her battle with anorexia and excessive exercise, she turned “into a robot”, with daily 10km runs followed by two-hour workouts, and restrictive eating.
She was at her thinnest in
1998, after the release of the group’s second album Spiceworld — their last as a fivepiece.
“It’s like you have a big price to pay for being successful,” she explains. And she doesn’t believe she would have developed an eating disorder if she hadn’t been famous and under constant scrutiny.
Horner — who has since been open about her own battle with bulimia — did broach the subject with
Chisholm at the time.
“She tried to speak to me, but I just wasn’t ready to acknowledge the problem at that point.”
And when her weight did increase (but not by much), headlines like “Sumo Spice” emerged, which she now describes as “devastating and humiliating”.
And while fans may have seen Sporty as the strong, fun, relatable Spice, inside, her already fragile sense of self was crumbling.
“I didn’t have confidence in my own thoughts and feelings. I have spent a lot of my life not trusting my own instincts and thinking everybody else knows better,” she says.
The book is also the first time Chisholm has publicly talked about being sexually assaulted during a massage, the night before the very first Spice Girls show in Istanbul.
“Still to this day, it’s something I haven’t fully dealt with,” she says, explaining she felt it was important for her to share, “because it happens a lot in varying degrees. In the scale of situations like that, I think it was quite mild — but it was also wrong”.
“Now, I’d never have a hope in hell of finding who this person was. But I’m thinking, ‘Wow, what could he have gone on to do?’ So I think it’s really important that we speak up.”
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