'Nobody's Leaving'

TORONTO - The Spice Girls might not last Forever, but they have no immediate plans to split up either.

Despite disappointing sales of their one-month-old album, Forever, Melanie Chisholm - the artist formerly known as Sporty Spice - told The Sun yesterday in an interview the British all-girl pop group is still a tight unit.

"Nobody is leaving," said Mel C, who was in Toronto to promote her year-old solo album, Northern Star, and hits Edmonton tonight for an appearance at West Edmonton Mall (HMV Stage, Phase 4) at 7.

"I know there have been a lot of rumours in the press about me leaving, or about the band splitting up. We're not going to split up. We're going to be together for a long time. Even if you don't see us out there performing, nobody's going - 'cause we like being together."

The group's four members will concentrate on their solo careers in 2001, Melanie Brown's debut solo album, Hot, is already out in the UK and due in Canada in February. Emma Bunton and Victoria Beckham are working on releasing theirs. Mel C, meanwhile, is already looking ahead to her second solo album and hopes to collaborate with Bryan Adams and Lenny Kravitz. "We're not going to be touring as the Spice Girls for the next year," says Mel C.

She does admit that the group is disappointed with Forever's reception. According to Soundscan, first-week sales in Canada and the US were a meagre 17,000 and 33,000, respectively. Expectations were far higher given that the group's first two albums, 1996's Spice and 1997's Spiceworld, sold a staggering 35 million albums worldwide.

"It has been dissappointing," Mel C said. "We do think it's probably our best album, musically. But you know, we completely understand the game and how it works. And we've not promoted this record like we've promoted the others. And then, obviously, we're very different artists than when we started out. We're like older. We've got other projects. Two of the girls have families."

The bottom line is that the Spice Girls aren't the keen pop tarts they once were, she said.

"Things don't last forever. I just get on with my life and I just go in whatever direction makes me happy. And at the moment, I'd be a liar if I wasn't to say definately the solo record is making me a lot happier."

The Spice Girl voted most likely to succeed on her own, Mel C's Northern Star's sales have reached 50,000 in Canada, 100,000 in the US and 2.2 million worldwide.

Reports about Mel C wanting to quit the group grew louder when she appeared on British TV last month. The singer, who has been dating Tomcat guitarist Dan Williams since September, says it was a slip of the tongue.

It has been a rough year in the supermarket and English tabloids for the singer, whose real struggles with depression, an eating disorder - her recent weight gain led to the tag "Sumo Spice" - and obsessive-compulsive behaviour were written about before she was ready to talk.

She also has had to deny that she's a lesbian.

"The press has been a bit obvious in the way they've reported about me," Mel C said. "I became very successful this year as a solo artist, and so they've done their best to really put me in an asylum.

"More than anything, they've really, really tried to grind me down very, very personally, and they're telling lies about me or exposing very personal things about my health and stuff like that. They've just got their claws out. (But) they seem to be calming down right now."