Melanie Chisholm has never looked hotter than she does in the video for her comeback single, Sweat, an ultra-camp tribute to Jane Fonda workouts and Eric Prydz’s Call on Me. Chisholm — 52 years old and ripped to the heavens: abs, quads, biceps, glutes, all of it, honed beyond belief — frolics and cavorts on an exercise bike and bench presses barbells surrounded by admiring trainer dudes clad in Union Jack budgie-smugglers. She donkey kicks in ankles weights, spike-heeled booties and outrageously saucy unitard. The song, a dance track that could be about training, but — guess what? — could also be about sex (“I’ll make you, I’ll make you sweat” etc), is fun and silly and compulsive, and while Chisholm definitely does not take herself too seriously, the whole effect is, nonetheless, outrageously sexy. Sporty Spice — but absolutely not as you know her.
“I think this is the most courageous I’ve ever been in a video,” she tells me. What made her so courageous, I ask. “I think it’s because I’m 50. I look like this — and it’s powerful.”
We’re sitting in the restaurant of a private members’ club in central London. Chisholm is, oh, everything you’d expect of her. Glossy and socially competent in the way of someone who has spent decades dealing with the media, on top of early, formative years in a stage school; but also just sweet. Obviously, genuinely warm, with nothing left to hide, minimal f***s left to give; Scouse-accented, though she grew up in Cheshire (she was born in Whiston in Merseyside, in 1974, but raised in Widnes, Cheshire) and has lived in London since she moved there, aged 16, to study dance; bare-faced — she’s off for a facial afterwards, cashing in a Dr Barbara Sturm facial (“a free one I got in a goodie bag”); and a smiler, easy with eye contact. She’s wearing an Adidas tracksuit, a fancy one, crisp and structured to the point of seeming almost tailored. It’s either a collab I can’t identify or one that Chisholm has customised with her stylist and creative director, Graham Cruz. “He’s been incredible for me, because he’s really allowed me to embrace Sporty, but also to evolve. I used to feel like, if I was in a tracksuit, it was like I was the fancy-dress version of myself.”
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Leather dress, price on application, Marine Serre. Gold shoes (throughout), £845, Christian Louboutin
CLAIRE ROTHSTEIN
Nude tube dress, £215, Wolford. Crystal mesh dress, £1,600, Ports 1961
CLAIRE ROTHSTEIN
I feel like I’m witnessing the birth of a new era of Melanie Chisholm, I tell her. That video — the title single from her new album, a record of solid, undeniable dance tracks — that body, that courage, that … no longer feeling like a “fancy-dress version” of herself.
“It really feels like that,” Chisholm says. “It really does. For a long time I wanted everyone to see there was more to me than Sporty Spice. I was fighting with that for a long time, dealing with my own demons … But I’ve realised Sporty Spice is a huge part of who I am, and rather than throw that over there, embrace it. Embrace all parts of yourself!” She smiles. She seems to be in a very good place. “I thought 40 was amazing. Then 50 came. I was like, this is so much better!” But what about youth? The Nineties? The Spice Girls? “It was a rocky road at times,” she says.
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Melanie Chisholm always wanted to be famous. “Absolutely, 100 per cent.” Her mum, Joan, is a singer, her dad, Alan, a bass player: “I used to go and watch Mum, she used to play every Friday and Saturday night, and I was so proud of her. Nobody else’s mum was a singer, I thought it was very glamorous. But I knew how hard it was to succeed in music. So I thought, ‘You know what? Theatre’s a more sensible choice.’ That was my young brain.” Like, theatre was accountancy or something? “Right? I was thinking West End.” Cats! “Yes!”
Aged 16, she won a place at the Doreen Bird College of Performing Arts in London. While there she discovered raving: “House music, on a girls’ holiday in Spain. Summer of ’90, or ’91? Costa Brava, and it was kind of bubbling everywhere. We’d never heard music like that — I was with all dancers — and being in a place where it’s not all 1980s step-touch round your handbag? It was a new world.” Just as she was beginning to immerse herself in rave culture, “the Spice Girls happened, and our lives weren’t our own for a few years”.
Trench coat, £3,990, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Earrings, £300, Isabel Marant
CLAIRE ROTHSTEIN
Tuxedo dress, £2,800, Givenchy by Sarah Burton
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You surely know the story of how the Spice Girls — one of the most culturally transformative, socially and economically disruptive (eruptive?) forces of the 20th century, up there with the Beatles; it’s culturally snobbish and also just wrong to deny it — were formed? How in 1994 400 young women answered a call-out in The Stage magazine and five were selected: Melanie Brown, Geri Halliwell, Victoria Adams (now Beckham) and Emma Bunton, in addition to Chisholm. How they got frustrated with their original management, sacked them, toured some other companies and signed up with Virgin. They exploded on to the world in 1996 with the beautiful, preposterous, compulsive chaos of their first single, Wannabe, landed a multi-platinum album with their debut, Spice, and went on to rule the charts and the hearts of young women and gay men everywhere for four long years. They continue to matter, continue to captivate and obsess on multiple levels — from the ructions of the Beckham family’s fallout with their eldest son, Brooklyn, to my neighbour’s 17-year-old daughter, whom I bumped into on my way to this interview and when she learnt of my mission screamed, “Tell her I love her! Tell her I’ve been listening to them since I was four years old.”
But if it was wildly exciting and incredibly fun for those of us watching, for the Spice Girls themselves the experience of such sudden, vast fame was a bit overwhelming. “We were in survival mode,” Chisholm tells me. “Work, work, work.”
I have wondered about the murky truth of superstardom in the Nineties, a time when safeguarding just wasn’t a thing. Teenagers — particularly teenage girls — weren’t regarded as the children nearly all of them actually were, and mental health was simply not a consideration. In the run up to this interview I watched Girlbands Forever, the BBC’s brilliant three-part documentary about girl band culture — intensely nostalgic but also a shocking exposure of the worst aspects of how the music industry treated the young women it was elevating to stardom. The manipulation, exploitation, enforced diets, pressure to have abortions.
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The Spice Girls with Prince Charles in 1997
CLAIRE ROTHSTEIN
Was that the Spice Girls’ experience? “No, we called the shots.” You did? “Oh yeah. But I was shocked. I did a panel a couple of years ago with Leigh-Anne [Pinnock] from Little Mix, Shaznay [Lewis] from All Saints, Nicola [Roberts] from Girls Aloud and Keisha [Buchanan] from the Sugababes. I was shocked to hear their stories. Their stories made my blood boil! The experiences they had? I went, ‘What the f***? The Spice Girls, did it mean nothing?’ We thought we were paving the way for everyone else.”
In what way? “When we started we were wet behind the ears. ‘We wanna be famous! We wanna be famous!’ Then people started saying things like, ‘Girls don’t really sell records, not like boy bands. You’ll never be on the cover of Smash Hits, because girls buy the magazine.’ And we were like, ‘F*** that!’ And we started talking about ‘girl power’. When you’re in a band you have to figure out who you are, and we were like, ‘We have to be a girl band, for girls.’ ” One that made the industry reconsider where women stood within it, how powerful they could be and how they deserved to be treated.
“I look back and I think, ‘Wow, you were lucky.’ But I also think we were petrifying. There was something about the energy of the five of us.” You think people were scared of you? “Yes, I do.” You were sort of unknowable, unpredictable, rogue, I say. Like that time Geri pinched Prince Charles’s bottom. “We’d quite revel in that. We were from majority working-class backgrounds, we were going to make music in this heavily male-dominated industry. We had to go in, all guns blazing, make the impact. Sometimes we laugh and go, ‘How did we get away with it?’ But it had to be done.”
Leather jacket, £990, and trousers, £925, Situationist. Red patent leather shoes, £690, Christian Louboutin
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Cutout dress, £2,350, Roberto Cavalli. Tights, £23, Wolford
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Like pretty much every celebrity I have ever met, Melanie Chisholm has suffered on account of fame, perhaps as much as she has benefited from it. Perhaps more. “I’ve had some very lonely times in my life,” she tells me. “I’ve had some very difficult times.”
The Spice Girls fizzled out at the end of the Nineties, in a tangle of solo projects that followed the official departure of Geri Halliwell in 1998. In the months before the band’s demise, Chisholm developed issues related to eating, associated with the endless, cruel scrutiny of the tabloid press. “I was exercising more, eating less, getting smaller and smaller.”
Does she think that would have happened to her if she hadn’t been famous? “No, I don’t think it would.” I wonder if the other Spice Girls realised what was happening to her, if they tried to raise it. “Yes, absolutely, it was a very physical thing, very noticeable. When you’re with each other for so much time and your eating habits change, they’re aware. They did try to speak to me, but I wasn’t ready to hear it.”
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Chisholm reached rock bottom, she says, after the band ended, when she was trying to find an identity and a career beyond Sporty Spice. She was devastatingly lonely, working and working and neglecting her social life to the point where “I’d come home, and it was just me”. By the millennium new year things had reached breaking point. “I was with my family in LA and I couldn’t get out of bed. I was crying and crying. I’d started having a binge-eating disorder, but I didn’t understand it.” Finally she sought professional help, was diagnosed with both clinical depression and disordered eating, and slowly began to heal.
“When I was pregnant with Scarlet [her daughter, now 16], that was such a huge moment, because for the first time in my life I was proud of my body. I was like, wow.”
Scarlet’s father is the property developer Thomas Starr. He and Chisholm were together for ten years before splitting in 2012, when Scarlet was three. Chisholm was in a seven-year relationship from 2015 with Joe Marshall, who was also her manager. “So that was complicated,” she says. For the past two years she has been in a relationship with the Australian model Chris Dingwall.
Melanie Chisholm with her boyfriend, the Australian model Chris Dingwall
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Are you in love? “I mean, of course!” They met on the celebrity dating app Raya. Is dating as a celebrity a nightmare? I don’t understand how famous people do it. “I don’t understand how anyone does it. When I found myself single, you know what it’s like. You’re like, ‘Not interested, I don’t want to meet anyone ever again.’ Did that for a bit. Then, a night out with the girlfriends, oh, you’ve got to get back in the game! Made me a profile.” She met Chris quickly — “luckily”, as she was already getting tired of men messaging her, “making references to, like, ‘Ooh, Spicy!’”
Dingwall was based in Sydney, Chisholm in north London, but “I had a DJ tour booked in Australia”. They met up, went for dinner, “Been together ever since.” He is good for her because he is incredibly calm, she says. Might she marry him? “You know what? It’s something I didn’t think would be part of my story. But I’m so happy with Chris. Maybe it is something that will be in my life. I just think, just do all the things. Do you know what I mean? Have all the experiences.”
We talk Botox (we’re both fans), the injectables Profilho and polynucleotides (her favourites), and potential plastic surgery. “I’m not against surgery, though I am terrified of it,” she says. “Although, sign me up for that bloody Kris Jenner facelift. I would definitely have that. Actually, I’m not terrified of surgery, I just don’t have time for the downtime.” We talk shopping. “I was in Urban Outfitters with Scarlet about four years ago and I was like, ‘This is just my wardrobe from the Nineties.’ And she said, ‘Shut up, Mum, it’s not all about you.’”
I ask if Scarlet is showing any signs of following Chisholm into the music industry; she shakes her head. “So relieved! It’s so hard to be in the shadow of a parent who’s had success.” The nepo baby stuff? “Oh, we kind of embrace nepo baby. F*** it, let’s go for nepo baby! The thing is, with Scarlet, she’s not in the public eye. I made that conscious decision when she was a baby. Obviously I have friends who handle it very differently, each to their own, no judgment at all. But for me, probably because of my experiences with fame, I didn’t feel comfortable making that decision for her.”
And of course we talk about the Spice Girls. How close are you now? “With the other girls? It fluctuates. Like any friendship group. I’ve always been really close to Emma.”
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Are they in a WhatsApp group? “I got in hot water recently. I did an interview with Emma and I said, ‘Oh, you know there’s always a WhatsApp group without you in it, right?’ And she was like, no! But what I was trying to say to Emma is, ‘You’re the only person who is in all the WhatsApps.’ She is that person. She’s never acting up. Everyone else is acting up at some point, but she’s the one who never acts up.”
When was the last time she acted up? “It’s going to be when all this press comes out.” I ask her to give me an example of a Spice Girls WhatsApp group name — one of the ones she’s in. “There’s one Mel [B] started, called My Idea, because everything’s always her idea, allegedly.”
Print catsuit, £880, Pucci
PHOTOGRAPHS: CLAIRE ROTHSTEIN. STYLING: RAY TETAUIRA
She says she has watched the Victoria Beckham Netflix documentary: “We went to the premiere.” Was that the last time you were all together? Yes. What’s it like? “Well, that was a public event. It’s more fun when it’s just us, and we haven’t changed. It’s like family. You know when you go home and you just fall back into those roles?”
You hate them and you love them and you switch allegiances in a heartbeat and gang up against someone else because it’s funny? “Exactly. People say, ‘Oh, are you still friends?’ It’s more than that. It runs so much deeper. We drive each other mad, you know? Someone is often acting up, and they have to get pulled back into line, but we’d probably go [to war] for each other.”
Professionally, and personally, things seem pretty perfect for her. She tells me she loves DJing, “which I’ve been doing for the past eight years”, and which inspired this album of dance music. She says it’s like she’s picking up that love of raving from where she left off, just before the Spice Girls happened.
And of course I ask her about a future possible Spice reunion. Chisholm has told me that the 2019 reunion tour was wonderful, the first time they’d had the time, space and perspective of age to appreciate “the legacy we’d created. My personal view on this? It’s a public disservice for the Spice Girls to not get back on stage together. You’re speaking to the wrong person, because I’m there, you know?”
OK, so who do I need to speak to? Victoria? It’s Victoria, isn’t it? Melanie Chisholm tilts her head and arches an eyebrow. It’s Victoria.
Melanie C’s album Sweat is out on May 1. She plays the 02 Academy Brixton, London, on October 23
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