FEATURE:
No Sweat?
PHOTO CREDIT: Oliver Begg for Stellar
A New Era and Huge Year for the Iconic Melanie C
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THERE are going to be…
PHOTO CREDIT: Charles Dennington
a few interviews dropped in here, in addition to a few of songs from Melanie C’s upcoming album, Sweat. That album arrives on 1st May. Whilst known as ‘Sporty Spice’ during her regency with the Spice Girls – more on them soon -, she is perhaps at her most energised and fit now. Looking sensational and delivering these high-intensity photos, you feel like Sweat has a double meaning. This icon, now fifty-two, in peak physical health and absolutely stunning, perhaps pushing back at ageism and sexism. Women in music seen as over the hill or irrelevant when they past forty. Though things have improved slightly the past few years, you still get stations with strict demographics. Songs from Sweat will not be played as wide as they should, even though they are from a legend of music who has had a hand in some of the most important Pop music of the past thirty years. Sweat is also a call to the Club. The sort of ecstasy and euphoria she experienced in the early part of the 1990s, before she found fame with Spice Girls. I have been a huge fan of Melanie C since the Spice Girls’ stunning debut single, Wannabe. I am going to come to interviews with Melanie C. Snippets from a couple from this year. An opinion piece that argues she is Pop’s most underrated icon. A Dance icon. We look at artists like Dua Lipa, Charli xcx and younger acts. Melanie C is right up there with the best and most relevant queens of Pop, I feel. I covered the Spice Girls recently when there was talk they may reunite. She revealed in a recent interview with Stellar in Australia how Spice Girls faced sexism early on. Ageism took. I am going to pop this interview in below, in addition to others. However, there are some important Spice Girls things to cover off.
This music queen is in a year where she is looking ahead and releasing stunning new music, but also there will be nostalgia and this huge anniversary coming up. Released in Japan on 26th June, 1996 and 8th July, 1996 in the U.K., this is an absolutely huge moment! I am not sure what is planned in terms of celebrations. However, it must be quite nerve-wracking, as people will ask about a Spice Girls reunion. Will they do some gigs to mark thirty years of Wannabe?! Their debut album, Spice, turns thirty on 19th September. I guess there will be a vinyl reissue and things around that. Melanie C has said how she and the rest of the group – Geri Halliwell-Horner, Emma Bunton, Melanie Brown and Victoria Beckham – are wary of doing a reunion wrong. Rushing it or it being seen as a cash-in. Maybe not giving the fans what they deserve. There has been talk for ages and reasons why they have not performed. The group not all on the same page. Some divisions maybe. However, in a year where they mark thirty years since their debut single arrives, fans from the 1990s and new alike crave this event to happen! It is impossible to mark that thirtieth without something happening. Unlike Oasis, I cannot see the five-piece going on a big tour – gauging fans with eye-watering ticket prices in the process – and that being that (though you feel the Gallaghers might get back on stage in the future). Perhaps a couple of gigs or a special one-off. You do feel like they all have their own stuff going on. That is especially true for Melanie C.
Embarking on this new album, Sweat, and getting that out there. Also, that fear of ageism and sexism lingers now. I feel like Sweat will be reviewed a certain way and restricted in terms of where it is played. Have Heart, Radio 1, Capital and other stations spun it? I do think that, when you are a woman over the age of thirty-five or forty, stations seen as ‘younger-focused’ overlook your music. I am sure these stations have played Melanie C recently, through given how incredible recent singles have been and how important she is, why has she not been given unquestioning airplay and respect?! I am eager to see what Spice Girls-related things happen later this year. Wannabe still sounds so fresh and vital today. You can hear major artists of today who, consciously or not, nod back to Spice Girls. Sabrina Carpenter is someone I imagine being a fa of the group. Addison Rae too. You can hear the whole interview below. However, this article notes how, personally, this is a happy time for Melanie C:
“This week, the former Spice Girl told the Stellar podcast her perspective on work/life balance has really changed since she met her now-partner, Australian model and filmmaker Chris Dingwall, a few years ago.
“The grass is always greener, isn’t it? As an artist, I love what I do and in the last couple of years since meeting my partner, I’ve really started to accept that my work is such a big part of my life,” she told Something To Talk About host Sarrah Le Marquand.
“Rather than separating work and life, I enjoy them both together, which has been a big shift for me,” she continued.
“I think that really happened after I met my partner, Chris. He is able to travel with me a lot. “He’s a screenwriter so he can often work from anywhere and that usually means with me, which is good for me.
“It’s just so beautiful to be able to enjoy the life I have with the person I love.”
It’s believed the couple first crossed paths in 2023 when Mel was touring around Australia as a DJ.
Speculation that the pair were dating increased after they posted similar photos from the same hotels to their respective Instagram accounts around the same time.
In July 2025, Mel confirmed their relationship, posting a carousel of loved-up photos from a recent holiday on her Instagram with the caption: “A slice of paradise”.
Elsewhere in the interview, the Never Be The Same Again singer opened up about the Spice Girls’ secret group chats.
“I’ve got in trouble for saying this in the past but all friendship groups have this,” she said.
“We have different ones with different people in [them].
“But the one that makes me laugh – it’s so funny, over the years we have this running joke where everything is Mel B’s idea.
“So the group chat that she started is called ‘My idea’ and she will definitely be the one sending the funny messages.
“I said to Emma [Bunton] once: you know, you’re the only person who’s not got a group chat without you in it. And she’s like, what do you mean? You’re so diplomatic.”
One of the things they’ve discussed on those group chats? A potential Australian reunion tour.
“It would be wonderful. It’s incredible to think ‘Spice Mania’, which is what I call the period between 1996 and 1998, was only two years,” she said.
“We went on tour in 1998 and we toured Europe and North America and they’re the only places we ended up getting to. America didn’t even see the original five Spice Girls because Geri had left by then.
“Our live performances were quite limited and that breaks my heart because that’s my favourite part – so I’d be the first person to put my hand up to tour Australia, followed closely by Mel B, probably”.
Apologies for lazily or oddly dropping in video interviews and songs in the middle of seemingly unconnected interviews. There is a tonne of stuff I want to include. It is clear that there is part of Melanie C always with the Spice Girls. This year is one where she is thinking back to 1996 and breaking through with the group. I can only imagine the pressure she must feel from those who want the group to get back on stage or do something special. However, it has to be right and they all have to agree.
However, she also is looking ahead to Sweat and tour dates. I will bring in a review for the title track soon. There are a couple of interviews from this year that I want to get to. Incidentally, go and follow Melanie C on Instagram, as it is fascinating seeing everything related to Sweat revealed. This is a massive year for her. I am pumped for new music but, as a fan of Spice Girls, that side of things too. I want to head back to earlier in the year when The Times spent time with Melanie C. Actually, they talked about Spice Girls and asked if a reunion as going to happen:
“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.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Claire Rothstein
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.”
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.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Claire Rothstein
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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?”
I guess there is still a lot of conversation around Spice Girls and their legacy. However, we also need to herald and recognise Melanie C as a phenomenal solo artist. Sweat is this new era. Rather than try to slot in with modern artists and the sound they are making, she is staying true to herself. However, there does seem to be this rise in Dance and Disco. Madonna returning to the dance floor this year for a follow up to her 2005 classic. Kylie Minogue’s previous couple of albums very much immersed in Dance and Disco (more the former I guess). Melanie C. However, there is personal resonance and relevance to Sweat and its sound. How she is nodding back to her pre-Spice days and the music she was immersed in. You can pre-order Sweat here: “Before she became Mel C of the Spice Girls, Melanie Chisolm found herself swept up in the UK's burgeoning '90s rave scene partying to the sounds of Prodigy and Grooverider. Her new solo album Sweat is a love letter to those heady and formative days; an invitation to party, to find community on the dance floor and joy in a dark world. Recorded between London, Stockholm and Sydney, Sweat fuses her past and present - the sport and the spice, the forgotten teenage raver and the accomplished DJ”. Before closing things up, there is an article championing Melanie C and arguing why she is underrated. This is a very special and important artist we all should show more love for:
“When people talk about pop reinvention, the conversation almost always circles back to names like Madonna or Kylie Minogue. Artists who continually reshape their sound, their image, and their relationship with the dance floor.
But there’s another pop icon who deserves to be part of that conversation: Melanie C.
As she releases “Undefeated Champion”, the third single lifted off her forthcoming record, Sweat, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Melanie C has quietly been releasing some of the most compelling – and most underrated – dance-pop of the past five years.
For many listeners, Melanie C will always be synonymous with the global pop explosion of the Spice Girls. Yet if you trace her solo catalogue from the late ’90s to today, what emerges is one of the most fascinating genre journeys in mainstream pop: alternative rock, acoustic confessionals, euphoric trance, sleek disco-pop, and now a fully realised embrace of underground club culture.
And in many ways, it all comes back to the dance floor.
Long before DJ booths and Ibiza residencies, Melanie C already had one of the defining dance records of the early 2000s.
“I Turn To You” – from her debut album Northern Star – became a euphoric club anthem thanks to its thundering remix culture. The song’s propulsive trance production and emotional release captured the peak of turn-of-the-millennium dance music: ecstatic, cathartic, and built for 4am dance floors.
It wasn’t just a hit. It was a statement.
While many of her peers were leaning into R&B or radio-friendly pop, which, yes, the artist also known as Sporty Spice also flirted with, Melanie C embraced the energy of European club music – something that, in hindsight, foreshadowed the direction her career would eventually circle back to.
Fast forward two decades and the dance floor came calling again.
In 2018, a spontaneous DJ booking at the flamboyant London queer club night Sink The Pink reignited Melanie’s connection with club culture. What began as a one-off experiment quickly evolved into a genuine second act: DJ sets at iconic Ibiza venues like Pacha and Café Mambo, and festival appearances that placed her directly back in front of dance music audiences.
That energy fed directly into her 2020 self-titled album, Melanie C, one of the most purely enjoyable dance-pop records released that year. Tracks like “Who I Am,” “Blame It On Me,” and “In and Out of Love” pulsed with confidence: sleek house rhythms, disco shimmer, and hooks that felt both nostalgic and forward-facing. The album wasn’t trying to chase trends. It sounded like someone who had rediscovered the music that first made them fall in love with dancing.
And crucially, it sounded authentic.
Part of what makes Melanie C’s current era resonate so strongly is the space where it lives: queer nightlife. Dance music has always been inseparable from LGBTQ+ culture – a lineage that runs from underground house clubs to Pride main stages. By stepping into that world not just as a performer but as a DJ and participant, Melanie C positioned herself within that tradition rather than above it.
The connection feels organic. There’s a sense of shared joy in her music – the same feeling she describes when recalling nights spent dancing among strangers who suddenly felt like community.
It’s a quality that links her, spiritually at least, with icons like Kylie Minogue and Madonna: artists whose music thrives in queer spaces because it offers both liberation and escape.
Now comes Sweat.
If her 2020 album reintroduced Melanie C as a dance-pop artist, the new record looks set to double down on that identity – pulling together the threads of her life: the athlete’s discipline, the pop star’s instincts, the DJ’s understanding of rhythm, and the raver’s love of euphoria.
In a cultural moment that often feels defined by anxiety and global uncertainty, her instinct is simple: make joyful music.
It’s a philosophy that echoes the best dance music traditions. Clubs have always been spaces where people temporarily outrun the world’s chaos – where, for a few hours, rhythm and community take precedence over everything else.
If Sweat succeeds, it won’t just be another entry in Melanie C’s discography. It will be further proof that her career arc – from Spice Girl to club DJ to dance-pop architect – has been one of the most quietly fascinating evolutions in modern pop.
And perhaps it’s time the conversation caught up with that reality. Because when it comes to reinvention, resilience, and an instinctive understanding of the dance floor, Melanie C belongs in the same breath as Madonna and Kylie.
The only difference is that people don’t say it often enough”.
Rather than bring in any reviews or more interviews, I shall call time here. I wanted to talk about Melanie C’s huge year. Sweat coming out on 1st May. This worldwide tour in promotion of the album. I think she will be on the road when Spice turns thirty However, for Wannabe’s thirtieth (8th July if you are going by the U.K. date) there is nothing in the diary yet. One of pour all-time great artists, I am excited to see how Sweat is received. I love the tracks she has put out so far, and it shows she is always adapting and evolving. Let’s hope that Melanie C keeps on releasing music for many years more. The future of Spice Girls and whether anything will happen this year. It is down to them I guess. However, Melanie C also need to focus on her…
HER vital solo work.