Aformer Spice Girl on growing up
Ex Spice Girl Melanie C on growing up
You may think the era when The Spice Girls were the world’s most successful pop act was a musical nadir or you might have been a fan and still lament their loss. Either way, they were surely, along with Princess Diana, the most recognisable women on the planet for most of the nineties.
I wasn’t shocked to find that The Spice Girls have sold 100 million records. I was, however, surprised that Mel C, the former Sporty Spice, has sold 20 million in her solo career. These days Melanie Chisholm goes by the slightly more mature sounding Melanie C. She is now 43 – and the co-originator of Girl Power was as pleased as punch when I spoke to her on International Women’s Day. A few days before that she had met up with some of her heroines and peers as part of a week of celebratory events.
‘I went out on the March4Women in London the other day. I got to hang out with Annie Lennox, which is always a delight. Then I sang with Kate Nash and Natasha Bedingfield. Bianca Jagger was there too; we had a blast,’ she says.
Melanie plays down any political or even feminist angle to the event: ‘Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I just want all of us to be nice to each other,’ she says.
I tell her her her attitude chimes with a lyric on the track Escalator, from her last album, Version Of Me, on which she sings, ‘I don’t want to get political but when we get together we don’t fall.’ ‘Exactly,’ she says. The response to Version Of Me has also given her several reasons to be cheerful.
‘I went out to make an album that I would want to buy. I just thought: if people like it then great and if they don’t, stuff it. Luckily it has been received well. It was my highest chart entry in over a decade,’ she says.
Melanie has been releasing her music on her own label, Red Girl, since 2004, a move designed to put herself in control of her career.
‘I became sick of doing things for other people. I decided “I’m going to put myself first for a change.” By nature I’m a peoplepleaser. But you get to the stage in your life where you need to stand up for yourself.’
She is on good terms with the other Spice Girls, she says. But the reunion tour idea is on hold. The appearance at the London Olympics was more to mark their contribution to British culture than to satisfy a clamour to see them together again. She is by no means ashamed of her Girl Power past, but feels it is just a part of how she perceives herself.
‘I’m over 40 now and what is satisfying for me is when I go on tour, I meet fans who are coming to see me who don’t remember the Spice Girls; a lot of them literally weren’t even born,’ she says.
‘At the same time, when I go on the road I see so many familiar faces who I know grew up with the Spice Girls. I very rarely play Spice Girls songs in my solo shows. I used to do a punk version of Wannabe when I first went on the road but now I have so much material that it is harder to leave one of my own out that people will want to hear to put a Spice Girls song in there.’
Melanie is still living up to her former Sporty Spice nickname, partaking as she does in triathlons. She also has an eightyear-old girl, Scarlet. She is, she says, more keenly aware of what the term ‘role model’ means than ever before: ‘When we were in the Spice Girls we had really young fans of course and we did feel we had a responsibility,’ she says.
‘That was hard because we were only figuring out who we were ourselves. Now I think it is much easier for me. I think I’m a good mum. I’ve got good morals. I feel I’m a real person. So many of the things girls see in magazines or wherever are unrealistic. Everything is airbrushed and nobody can be that, not really. I still look after myself. I eat well but I know I look rubbish on the school run at half past eight in the morning like everybody else and it doesn’t bother me a bit.’
Version Of Me is on Red Girl Records. Melanie C plays Vicar Street Dublin on April 13.
‘When I go on tour, I meet fans who don’t remember the Spice Girls, they weren’t born then’