How Melanie C Learned to Embrace Sporty Spice

Going into her North American tour this year, Melanie C was trying to have zero expectations. She would be performing in cities for the first time in more than two decades as a solo artist. Some of them were stops she last visited as a member of the Spice Girls during their 2007 reunion tour. Ticket sales were good, but what would happen when she actually set foot on those stages in front of throngs of people?

It turns out, the world is hungry for a star like Melanie. “I was blown away,” she tells Rolling Stone. “The responses everywhere were incredible, and people were singing all the new stuff, which, you know, for any artist is exactly what you want.”

The singer, born Melanie Chisholm, has lived a life and career that has been celebrated, studied, critiqued, and rehashed for years now. As Sporty Spice, she and the rest of the Spice Girls — Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell-Horner, and Victoria Beckham — zig-a-zig-ah’d their way to the top of the charts in the 1990s, championing a “girl power” ethos that dominated mainstream pop culture. 

Today, calling from London on a bright afternoon, Melanie radiates optimism. Her ninth studio album, Sweat, released in May, and she’s just wrapped her U.S. tour. In every city — as the curtain pulled away at every venue from the Fonda to the Castro Theatre, casting Melanie in a blur of neon light — she’d take in the moment. 

“The places I just literally hadn’t been to for such a long time were the ones when it really, really touched my heart to know that there’s still support out there,” she says. “It was just beautiful to meet people and hear their stories about the first shows that they’d ever seen me, whether it was back in ’98 with the Spice Girls or the last time I was doing Northern Star shows.” She adds: “There’s this beautiful community of fans. We’ve all grown up together.”

On Sweat, she reaches back to her beginnings in the Nineties rave scene and picks up where she left off on her previous self-titled album, which marked a similar, unabashed pivot. A trip to Spain on holiday during her college days spilled into nights out every weekend in London at the best clubs and the occasional warehouse party. ”I was really drawn to that unity and the joy and that shared experience and how it brought so many different communities and cultures together,” she says. “Then it got left behind because Spice Girls happened quite quickly.”

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The group declared an indefinite hiatus in 2000, and though they’ve reunited a few times since then, Melanie found a new path forward as a DJ starting in 2018. “It reignited this passion that I had for dance music, and I’ve never looked back,” she says. “I’m so grateful. I was courageous enough to learn a new skill at that age.”

The new album pulls together several parts of Melanie’s story as she leans into her memories as a teenage raver, embraces her Sporty Spice persona, and non-figuratively flexes her skills as a solo artist. The LP also arrives a couple years after the end of Melanie’s long-term relationship with Joe Marshall, her former manager, and in the first months of her marriage to Australian model Chris Dingwall. The former era provided “great fuel for making music,” she says, inspiring songs “Flick of the Wrist” or “Good for Nothing.”

“I had all of these things going on, all of these phone conversations and arguments and all of this anger to get out, but then I also met somebody and I fell in love with the man that went on to become my husband,” she says. “I feel like [the album] crossed such a range of human emotions. It gave me a great journey to go on through the record.” Melanie points to “Drum Machine,” the second track, which has become a favorite when playing live. “That’s purely about falling in love with my husband and those feelings at the beginning of a relationship, where it’s such a physical feeling,” she says. Elsewhere, the music video for the title track, sampling Diana Ross’ “Work That Body,” captures Melanie going full Sporty — exercise bands, spin bike, spandex, and all. 
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When closely considering who she is now, Melanie, 52, recalls the fourth and most recent Spice Girls reunion tour (sans Beckham) in 2019. “When we did the stadium shows, it just finally hit home. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, how does a 40-something jump around as Sporty Spice to ‘Wannabe’?’ But as soon as we started rehearsing, it was just there: Sporty Spice isn’t somebody I become. It’s within me.”

She continues: “I really made peace with being a Spice Girl every day. Even when I’m onstage as a solo artist, I have to embrace the Spice Girl in me because she never goes away. She’s always there, and I felt so much more comfortable. I think as a young person, a lot of us make the mistake of looking outside to discover who we are when they’re always there.”
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While Melanie remains elusive about a reunion with her bandmates, she does divulge which song she’d most want to sing on any hypothetical fifth reunion tour. “It’s funny because what I used to call the silly songs — a song like ‘Wannabe’ or ‘Spice Up Your Life’ — they’re the ones that really take the roof off. They’re the ones that people just go nuts for. So, I think for the experience of that and seeing other people’s joy, it would have to be ‘Wannabe’ or ‘Spice Up Your Life.’” Naturally, she also doesn’t count out “Viva Forever.”

After wrapping her U.K. and European tour run and her Asia and Australian shows, Melanie says she’ll be returning to North America soon enough. “It’s been such a wonderful experience getting back out playing live in America, and I just feel so welcomed back as well,” she beams. “I kind of felt guilty that I’d left it so long, and I suppose I just want to say, I will not leave it that long until next time.”