A lot of things were very different in the 90s, as Mel C can attest better than most. Mental health was rarely brought up by anyone in the public eye, depression was ‘almost a taboo’, she says, and women’s weight was freely discussed – so much so that Victoria Beckham and Geri Horner (then Halliwell) were weighed in live on television.
“Shocking, isn’t it? It’s my daughter’s least favorite expression when I say it was ‘another time’. Scarlet, 13. “There are so many no more celebrations of body diversity now. Young people don’t want to look skinny anymore. It’s not the aesthetic of the day, you know?”
But the Spice Girls’ immediate elevation to global cultural phenom (eventually selling around 100 million records) and the pressure to fit into that popstar aesthetic at the time had a devastating impact on her mental health. At some point after Horner left the band and when Chisholm released her first solo album, Northern Star, she couldn’t leave the house.
“It felt like going outside was petrifying,” she says. “In the darkest times, in the depths of depression, eating disorders and this fear, it’s the safety of four walls. I think a lot of it was because I had the felt like the eyes of the world were on me through the media.”
The pain she felt would have been undetectable to the millions of Spice Girls fans around the world. The group had put ‘Girl Power’ firmly in tune with the times and happily played the characters of Sporty, Baby, Scary, Ginger and Posh. Meanwhile, Chisholm felt she had to keep moving, “like a treadmill I couldn’t get off of,” she wrote in her long-awaited autobiography, Who am Iand feeling alone “with what was now a serious eating disorder”.
She now says: “Looking back, I think it would have been really beneficial for me to take a break. I think partly I was afraid to quit, because I didn’t know what it would lead to. “
During her battle with anorexia and over-exercising, she transformed herself “into a robot”, with daily 10km runs followed by two-hour workouts and a restrictive diet. She was at her thinnest in 1998, after the release of the band’s second album – their last five-piece – spice world.
“It’s like you have a big price to pay to be 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 – broached the subject with Chisholm at the time. “She tried to talk to me, but I just wasn’t ready to acknowledge the issue at the time.” And when her weight increased (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 and relatable spice, inside, his already fragile sense of self was crumbling. “I didn’t trust my own thoughts and feelings. I spent a lot of my life not trusting my own instincts and thinking everyone knows best,” she says.
It is also the first time that Chisholm has spoken publicly about being sexually assaulted during a massage, the day before the first-ever Spice Girls show in Istanbul. “Still to this day, it’s something that I haven’t completely dealt with,” she says, explaining that she thought it was important for her to share, “because it often happens in varying degrees. On the scale of situations like that, I think that was pretty sweet – but it was also wrong.
“Now, I would never have any hope of finding out who that person was. But I’m like, ‘Wow, what could he have done next?’ So I think it’s really important that we talk.”
However, her story is ultimately one of resilience and learning to love herself – of working-class roots and, at times, a difficult childhood (she ended up with someone whom she barely knew for five months at age five, while her touring musician mother) to stratospheric success with three Spice Girls albums and eight solo studio albums.
And it’s hard to argue that Chisholm hasn’t had the most successful solo artist of all the Spice Girls – who could forget Never Be The Same Again and the Bryan Adams collaboration, When You’re Gone. ? And, at 48, she’s still making music, her voice just as powerful and undeniably Mel C as she was 26 years ago.
“It’s very much my wish” that the five members of the band get together again, she said, “we obviously still have to convince Victoria…
“Victoria won’t mind me saying [the Olympics 2012 show] was difficult for her, she had a lot of anxiety about this performance. Obviously, her life took such a different direction that she didn’t want to go through it again – especially when the level of the Spice Girls’ profile is so high; whatever we do, all eyes in the world are on us.”
Most recently, she split from her partner of seven years, music producer Joe Marshall. But she’s good: “Of course, it’s always sad when it ends, but [writing] the book helped me recognize that life is really a series of chapters. It’s exciting to wonder what’s going to happen next.”
In fact, throughout the Spice Girls years, she was the only one who was mostly single, she notes, and the way singleness was discussed so obsessively and negatively in the ’90s compounded her insecurity at this point. topic. “I hate the idea that, the generation I grew up in, traditionally taught that we have to be part of a couple, that’s what makes us whole. We have to find our soul mate – all that shit . [That thinking means] we don’t learn that we have to be the whole thing ourselves.”
Girl Power has come a long way since 1996. The Spice Girls wrote “Who Do You Think You Are” in response to men trying to boss them around in the early days of the group (it was Horner who acted as the main catalyst pushing them to write their own music and leave the managers who originally set them up) – and what Chisholm calls “early expressions of our version of feminism”.
She says: “It’s crazy, the enormity of what we’ve achieved in those two years and the legacy we’ve left, the impact it’s had, it still lives on – even if we don’t no music – people are still discovering the Spice Girls.”
Girl Power, she says, has infiltrated future generations. “My daughter [from previous relationship with Thomas Starr] is 13 so I see a lot of teenagers and a lot of her friends are really vocal and opinionated and wise. I’m so impressed with the younger generation.”
A staunch ally of the LGBTQ+ community, she adds, “It wasn’t just Girl Power, it was about equality, and of course we live in very different times. Now there’s a lot of fluidity in gender and how people define It’s really about being an individual and being able to be who you want to be.
Who I am: my story by Melanie C (Welbeck Publishing) is available now.
If you have been affected by the issues raised in this story, please visit: www.rte.ie/helplines.
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