It was such a huge disappointment earlier this year when persistent rumours that the Spice Girls were playing Glastonbury were quashed. Melanie C was as disappointed as any of us, as she told the Guardian in January. But she still made it to the festival to play a banging set on Saturday, her deep catalogue of solo disco-worthy songs capped off with a couple of Spice Girls hits. Interviewed by the Guardian’s Laura Snapes on Sunday morning in the Cabaret tent at the festival, she seems totally thrilled by the experience, chatting away with characteristic ebullience. “I didn’t expect the amount of people that came!” she says. Why on earth not? Any Spice Girl would draw a Glasto crowd, but Melanie Chisholm has more musical material to draw from than any of the rest of them.
It seems ridiculous that the Spice Girls have never played this festival – but as Mel points out, things were different in the 90s. “Back in the day you wouldn’t have seen a band like the Spice Girls at a festival,” she says. “But things have changed over the years.”
The last five years have been a whirlwind for Mel C – she’s released a solo album, put out her autobiography Who I Am: My Story, performed as a dancer at Sadler’s Wells, and has gotten into DJing. Last year she made her first Glastonbury appearance, playing several sets that nobody could get near for the crowds, memorably capped off with a mix of Who Do You Think You Are and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. “It sounds like it shouldn’t be done, but I think Kurt would like it,” she laughs.
Before the Spice Girls took off, Chisholm was a committed raver, she tells us – ever since her first holiday without her parents, in Spain right at the height of acid house in the early 90s. She’s fallen back in love with house and dance music in the past few years, since she’s started DJing. “I enjoy it as much as I enjoy singing. Post pandemic, you see a lot more people out clubbing who are my kind of age group. Perhaps it’s because our kids are growing up a bit.”
Mel’s daughter is 14 now, and she herself is turning 50 in January – and still fighting against the music industry’s sexism, she says, especially when it comes to older female artists. But one thing that has improved is artists’ comfort in talking about their mental health. Chisholm has been open about her experiences of depression, anxiety and an eating disorder towards the end of the Spice Girls’ heyday, and says she’s greatly heartened by how things have changed – yesterday, a huge crowd was cheering in support of Lewis Capaldi as he told them he was taking a mental health break after his Pyramid Stage performance.
“I don’t feel like there was any mental health support in the 90s. It wasn’t even considered,” says Mel. “It’s incredible now that we’re so accepting when people put their health first … I was really quite ill at one time. I probably shouldn’t have been working. [And] the tabloids were bastards, as they continue to be. We were pursued constantly by paps and tabloids, we were being listened to, they used illegal means to get their info. If there had been a big announcement [about the Spice Girls breaking up], we couldn’t have faced what that would have been like for us.”
Mel is still insanely active – she tells us she busted out eight pull-ups at the gym the other day (that’s close-grip, for the fitness enthusiasts). Around the time she released her first solo album, she wanted to distance herself from the idea of Sporty Spice – but lately she’s come to realise that it’s just who she is. “I was always dressing in sportswear … a lot of girl bands had co-ordinated outfits for everyone, but for us, someone always looked and felt uncomfy. At rehearsal Emma was always in a babydoll dress, I was in tracksuits, Victoria was more posh. We looked in the mirror and thought: why don’t we just wear what we wear?
“I realised before our 2019 tour, I am Sporty Spice! It’s not something I become, or something I put on. It’s who I am. Not my entire self, but part of it.”
Girl power hasn’t gotten old. The world is still a patriarchal place, if perhaps slightly less so than in the mid-90s. But Melanie C reckons the maxim has evolved a bit. “We’re still fighting for women and equality, but these days we also have so many people who are non-binary … aren’t we fighting for a world that’s kind of genderless? For people being people? When you’re making music, why should it matter what sex or gender you are?”
The audience enthusiastically applauded that. Mel was a bit of an accidental role model for gay, gender non-conforming and bisexual women growing up in the 90s, when we were extremely starved for representation. She says she’s incredibly honoured by that – she has done loads of work with queer artists in the intervening years, including performing with London drag performance collective Sink the Pink, most notably at Pride in Brazil under Bolsonaro, in a giant collective middle-finger to the government. “When we first came out and we were shouting about girl power and the sexist experiences we had in the music industry, we quickly realised we had a big LGBTQ following,” she says. “Traditionally we have ridiculed for being different, which is about fear, isn’t it. I think the kinship with the Spice Girls there is that we celebrate difference and individuality.”
So: will we ever see the Spice Girls at Glastonbury? Melanie C has hope, despite how hard it is to get everyone to agree on where and when. “I hope there’ll be more Spice Girls shows, I really do. I will continue to bug and pester. When [Glastonbury’s organisers] see the footage from yesterday, I hope I fomo them into wanting to do it. It’d be very fitting, we’d go down a storm. Let’s manifest this now: the Spice Girls will do the legends slot at some point in the future!”
