Mel C: The Brits bust-up with Posh that sparked my mental health problems
SPICE GIRL Mel C today reveals how a drunken bust-up with Victoria Beckham led to her longterm battles with depression and eating disorders.
The star said that after the group’s managers threatened to sack her over the incident at the Brit Awards, she started becoming ‘really hard on myself’, which came at a cost to her mental health.
Melanie Chisholm, once known as Sporty Spice, tells Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that she was read the riot act after she told ‘Posh Spice’ Victoria to ‘f *** off’ during the offstage clash.
‘I was so hurt and embarrassed,’ she says. ‘We’d all had a few bevvies and on the way out there was a little scuffle between myself and Victoria. We can’t say this on air but I asked her to go away. I was told if that behaviour ever happened again, then I would be out.’
The 46-year-old muses: ‘To think I could have messed that up and lost it all… I began to be really, really hard on myself. I think that is where the start of some of my problems came because I had to be very, very strict with myself. I couldn’t allow myself to relax because if I did I might mess it all up.’
Mel C has previously said the incident happened when they were guests at the 1996 Brit awards, a few months before the group released their debut single Wannabe, that became a monster hit. The following year they stole the show at the Brits, where Geri Halliwell wore her famous Union Jack dress.
Ms Chisholm, who revealed in 2016 that she had been bullied by unidentified members of the band, says she also struggled to live up to her public persona as ‘the gobby’ and ‘boyish’ one.
‘I think I was described as the plain one at the back that doesn’t really do much or doesn’t really say much,’ she tells interviewer Lauren Laverne. ‘That is really hurtful when you are a young aspiring pop star. I tried to make myself perfect, whatever I deemed perfect to be.’
Ms Chisholm admits she tried to conceal her eating disorders and fights back tears when she recalls her ‘relief’ when she was given a diagnosis of depression.
‘I think my body actually took over my mind,’ she says. ‘I went from being anorexic to having a binge eating disorder. That’s when I went to my GP and I was diagnosed with depression. It was such a weight lifted off my shoulders. It was such a relief because I thought, “Oh my God, there’s a name for it and I can be helped.”’
The singer, who has subsequently enjoyed success as both a solo artist and a musical theatre star, now believes she should have left the band before its eventual demise in 2000. She says: ‘I kind of stayed a bit longer than I wanted to. A lot of that was because I was so unwell. I was struggling being in the company of the girls. I knew I had to go because I had to sort myself out.’
Ms Chisholm also reveals that she struggled to handle the discovery, at the height of the Spice Girls’ success, that her father had a teenage daughter from another relationship. ‘He had kept a secret from me for 15 years,’ she says. ‘It kind of took me a few years to get over it. I felt betrayed. I kind of felt like my childhood had been a bit of a lie.’
‘We’d had a few bevvies and there was a scuffle’
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 today at 11.15am.