As with most pop stars, she is shorter and slighter than you expect. Dressed in plain black trousers and a nondescript T-shirt, she is standing in a spacious rehearsal room in North London, talking with the drummer in her band. Her hair is chopped into a tufty punk crop. There is the nose stud and the gold incisor, but she wears no make-up whatsoever. She could pass for just another of the urchin-like musicians or guitar techs who drift unnoticed through the rehearsal room every day of the year. But she is Melanie C, Sporty Spice, a member of the gaudiest and most photographed group of the decade.
"I am a very shy person," she says. "As far as talking is concerned, I can't compete with the others, especially when Melanie (G, née B) and Geri were both in the equation. So I decided in the early days not to try. I prefer to listen and observe."
But Melanie Chisholm is not keeping quiet any longer. The Spice Girls, minus Geri Halliwell, are still very much together. They have finished recording 11 tracks for their third album, which is scheduled for release next year. But while other members were getting married and having babies, Chisholm took herself off to Los Angeles and made her own album, Northern Star, released next month. Produced for the most part by Rick Rubin, the Californian heavyweight best known for his work with the Beastie Boys, it has a modern American, grunge-lite feel, a sound pitched somewhere between Garbage and Madonna.
Rather as Robbie Williams did when he left Take That, Chisholm, now 25, is putting herself forward as the pre-teen pop idol who always had a more grown-up, indie-rock side just waiting to come out. The trouble is that whereas Williams had been booted out of Take That and hit rock bottom in his personal life before his solo career took off, Chisholm is still a proud member of the Spice Girls, a group which the more narrow-minded among the indie-rock fraternity regard as something akin to the Antichrist. Initial suspicion turned into downright hostility when, at the second of her two appearances at the V99 festival, in Staffordshire, the stage was pelted with missiles.
Although she wasn't hit, the incident clearly hurt. "Being part of the indie crowd as a fan, I never imagined I would not be accepted. I love Manic Street Preachers. I love Blur. I'm into all the people that play the festivals. I saw myself as one of them. So I was quite shocked. I'd been a little bit naive, probably."
Her choice of Anarchy in the UK as the song with which she ended both her sets at V99 seemed to cause particular offence. The editor of NME was prominent among those who vented their spleen at her lack of respect for such a sacrosanct number, suggesting that her version was the Establishment's revenge for Sid Vicious singing My Way. Whereas he had ravaged Frank Sinatra's showbiz standard, Chisholm had turned a punk classic into . . .
"Cabaret," she says. "Entertainment. Which is what it's all about at the end of the day." She shrugs. "It's all snobbery and a lot of politics and it's really pathetic. When I was a kid I hated Duran Duran because I was a Wham! fan. Now, when I look back, it seems such a childish thing. I don't dislike anything, so long as it's good. So why do we have to have all these little cliques? I think I'm pretty good, especially compared to some of the crap that's out there. And everyone likes Spice Girls records when they are drunk."
But whatever brickbats come her way, she has never had the slightest doubt as to whether it has all been worthwhile. Both her parents are musicians, and her mother, who is now 50, has been singing in bands since she was 14. "I always wanted to be a pop star. I always wanted to be famous. It was my Mum's job and I wanted it to be mine too."
Born in Liverpool and brought up in Runcorn and Widnes, she displayed an early aptitude for sports: netball, hockey, rounders, athletics, gymnastics, you name it. Nowadays she works out religiously, tying in her gym work with sessions of yoga, surfing and kick-boxing. She can do a complete backwards somersault from a standing start. But how strong is she, I wonder? Would I be able to arm-wrestle her?
"For the size of my frame I think I'm quite strong. But you could probably wrestle me. I'm really just a little girl," she says.
She has six tattoos including one of a "Tibetan symbol for grounding" on her lower back, dipping below the line of her Calvin Klein underpants. She turns and pulls them down to give me a better look. Her newest one is on the upper back, a huge turquoise phoenix. She proudly lifts her T-shirt to show me that one too, its wings spread across the rippling musculature of her bra-less shoulders.
She has, so far, avoided the concerted attention of the paparazzi and the scandal sheets. "Other members of the Spice Girls sell a lot more papers than me," she says. Even so, attention has focused in recent months on the matter of her sexuality. "It's no one's business, for a start. I'm not gay. I'm with my friend and they take a picture of us and say I'm gay and it's just nonsense. There's nothing wrong with being gay, but I'm not."
Curiously, her face only really darkens once during our meeting, which is when I ask whether she finds it flattering always to be singled out as the most musically talented of the Spice Girls. "It's just somebody's personal opinion," she says. "Obviously I know the capabilities of everybody in the band, I've worked with them for years, and there's not any real difference technically. I've tended to do the noticeable bits in some of the songs, but I've got weaknesses in places where the other girls have got strengths. I can hit high notes, but I can't sing low. We're not the most talented people in the music industry, but we can all do it equally as well. Whoever you think is the best singer is your personal choice."