Slam it to the left! Melanie Chisholm spilled all about her ups and downs as Sporty Spice in her memoir.
“I was the tidy one and would go around cleaning up after the others,” Chisholm, 48, recalled about her relationships with each of the Spice Girls in her book, The Sporty One: My Life as a Spice Girl, which hit bookshelves on Tuesday, September 27. “Geri [Halliwell] was the designated driver because I couldn’t drive, Mel B [Melanie Brown] didn’t own a car. Victoria [Beckham] did have a new Renault Clio (always the posh one) and I sometimes got in with her, but Geri’s battered Fiat Uno is the Spicemobile I remember travelling in the most.”
The group, which was rounded out by Emma Bunton, was formed in 1994. Their rise was fast and intense, with the singers parting ways for the first time in 1998.
In the early days, the bandmates — who were known as Sporty Spice (Chisolm), Posh Spice (Beckham), Ginger Spice (Halliwell), Scary Spice (Brown) and Baby Spice (Bunton) — bonded over their fame.
“We loved going to Windsor at the weekends (once again taking our lives into our hands as Geri bombed along the M4). Often, Victoria would go home on a Friday night to see her boyfriend at the time, and Emma would head back to her mum in Finchley too,” Chisholm wrote. “But Geri, Mel B and I would drive over to Windsor on a Saturday where, for the very first time I had ‘posh’ ice cream; Häagen-Dazs had a store there and I ordered my inaugural Cookies & Cream. What a revelation!”
The musician, who shares daughter Scarlett, 13, with ex Thomas Starr, recalled thinking she and her bandmates were the “bee’s knees” when they started out. “When the five of us were together, we felt unstoppable,” she gushed.
Looking back, Chisholm revealed that she was “nervous” about becoming Sporty Spice. That perception shifted when she made her 1999 solo album, Northern Star.
“I realized that, well, I am Sporty Spice, she’s always in there. Two bars of ‘Wannabe’ and I’m jumping around like a knob. It’s not like I have to put on an act, it’s just there,” she revealed. “It was a huge weight lifted from me. After struggling to understand who I was throughout Northern Star, and beyond, I was now able to accept every aspect of myself.”
When the group reunited in 2007 for a world tour, as well as the 2012 Olympics and their 2019 tour (sans Beckham) — Chisholm finally understood how big the Spice Girls were to their fans.
“The main arc of our career was, pretty much, over and done in two years. ‘Wannabe’ came out July 1996, Geri left in May 1998 and shortly after that [it all ended],” she wrote. “Rather than us fading into the distance and becoming some sort of nostalgic memory, we somehow managed to outpace even newer, bigger bands with this tour. … I think that speaks volumes, that we have a fanbase comparable to today’s biggest bands.”
Scroll down for more of Chisholm’s revelations from The Sporty One: My Life as a Spice Girl: