James O'Brien finds that behind the gold tooth, nose stud and tattoos Melanie C is a surprisingly talented but lonely musician.
IT TAKES about 20 minutes to turn Melanie Chisholm, an uncommonly gauche girl who speaks with disarming frankness about her loneliness and alleged lesbianism, into Melanie C, the combative pop star formerly known as Sporty Spice. It is a remarkable transformation, presided over by a brace of stylists and apparently intended to endear her to that Holy Grail of former teen pop dreams - the adult audience.
The gold tooth, the nose-stud, the Hallowe'en eye make-up and the tattoos spreading faster than the hole in the ozone layer - all enforce the idea that Melanie, 25, is a bold and ballsy rock chick with no time for self-doubt and a Spice-inspired certainty that she deserves every second of her celebrity. I mean, she even swears on stage, graffitis her denims and launched her solo career with a backing band straight out of Spinal Tap.
And if all that isn't tough enough, tickets for her recent concert at the London Astoria boasted the bizarre caveat: No Under-14s. It is something of a shock, then, to encounter pre-transformation Melanie.
Backstage at the BBC, where her deep desire to be taken seriously as a musician has been rewarded with a prestigious slot on the purist's favourite TV show, Later... With Jools Holland, she cuts a curiously self-effacing figure.
"What does purist mean?" she inquires, brows knitted and eyes displaying a vulnerability utterly alien to the Spice Girl modus operandi perfected publicly by Posh and Scary. "Right," she says, enlightened. "Yeah, it's all about the music. The music is all that really matters. It's my life, I'm married to it."
And, in a way, she is. Mel C's existence has prompted much less media interest than that of her bandmates. Posh and Scary have their husbands and babies, Baby and erstwhile cohort Geri Halliwell their headline-grabbing feud. All four have a penchant for designer gear and appearing at the more saccharine end of the magazine market, while the little attention devoted to Melanie focuses almost exclusively on her failure to fit into any pop pigeon-hole.
It is a situation which, in the five years since the Spice Girls burst kicking and pouting into public consciousness, has made for lazy journalism and hurtful conclusions. She favoured figure-eclipsing shell-suits over her bandmates' bared midriffs and microskirts. Conclusion: she's the ugly one, aka Plain Spice. She cut her hair short, bunged a bit of gold in her gob and began indulging a passion for body art. Conclusion: she must be queer. She can carry a tune, seems to have a deeper understanding of matters musical than the rest of the Spices, displaying a genuine knowledge. Conclusion: she's the one with talent, destined for serious solo success. And that, as Gary Barlow can testify, could be the most damning conclusion of all.
DELVING a little deeper into the Sporty story yields some surprising information. If you demonstrate a genuine interest in her - as opposed to her music, the Spice Girls or her public image - you get some fascinating responses. This football-crazy, terrace-dwelling Liverpudlian scally, for example, spent her late teens at a genteel performing arts school in Kent, where her field of excellence - wait for it - was ballet. And what she prizes most is her independence.
"My parents broke up when I was about three," she explains. "I'm close to them and everything, but they both remarried quite quickly and had new families, whereas I was the only child of their relationship. "I think it made me more self-reliant, more independent. I think it affected me more deeply than I realised at the time and created this determination to really make something of myself.
"In a way, I suppose I wanted to show everyone that I wasn't just fine on my own, I was actually better off." Her relationship with mother Joan is so strong that it stretches to matching tattoos, but there was enough steel in this independent streak to see Mel decamp to Sidcup at the age of 16.
"My father was very nervous and my mother had her reservations but, to be honest, there was really nothing very much they could do about it.
"I had my heart set on going to performing arts school and so I went. Even then I was very disciplined and knew that I wanted a classical training. So I got myself one." She talks a good game but these quotes, bereft of her strangely girlish Liverpudlian twang, paint a feistier picture than what you see in person. The training, for instance, did not yield the expected dividends.
"I came back to Liverpool and went on the dole. I thought I'd get all these dancing jobs but I didn't, so I had to sign on. It was horrible.
"I lived on junk food, put on loads of weight and went from a full dancer's regime to sitting on my arse all day. Then I answered the ad."
THAT now-fabled ad, seeking girls with singing and dancing ability keen to join a new band, was not so much the light at the end of the tunnel as a ticket out of spiralling depression. "The Spice Girls saved my life," she says with unchallengeable certainty. "If it wasn't for that break I know I'd probably still be stuck in Liverpool doing naff all with my life and dreaming of what might have been. Whatever happens I'll never forget how lucky I am just to be here.
"I always dreamed of being a pop star and knew I had something inside me which might just make it happen but how many other kids feel that and end up stacking shelves? Lucky, that's the only word for it."
Well, another word would be "talent" and rarely has that been more evident than in the opening bars of her performance on Jools Holland last night. Her hypnotically-chorused new single, Northern Star, is clearly not required listening for the professionally groovy audience there to check out Supergrass, Robert Cray and indie bad boys du jour, Campag Velocet, but they soon perk up and, by the end of the song, they are eating out of her hand She can cut it, of that there is absolutely no doubt. Suspicions of serious talent raised by her chart-topping duet with Bryan Adams, When You're Gone, have been confirmed by her consistently impressive album, also dubbed Northern Star.
SO ONLY one real question remains: why do we still obsess about her myriad stylistic developments when her musical ones have been so much more impressive. One answer presents itself when the conversation moves to matters of the heart and having to spend your first two years in the public eye being known almost solely for your relative lack of physical charms.
"In the early days it upset me when they got quite personal, saying things like 'The plain one at the back'," she says, spectacularly understating the bile hurled at her shell-suited self. "I never cried, though. The other girls would just laugh at it and make daft comments but it does affect you, everything that anyone says or writes about you will have an effect and it's daft to pretend otherwise.
"But I never cried," she repeats. "I don't cry much. I keep my emotions in." This repetition, coupled with an insistence that words can be just as painful as sticks and stones, solves the Mel C riddle. She clearly believes she is unattractive - a fact which renders her tattoos, studs and gym-addiction a psychologist's field-day.
AND, despite initially insisting that the absence of a man in her life was a lifestyle choice, eventually concedes that she is lonely. Seriously lonely. Prompted by her insistence that the only time she feels truly safe is on an exercise treadmill with earphones strapped to her head, I suggest that most people probably find that security in the arms of a loved one. After a pause she leans forward with an expression which somehow combines pleading and defiance.
"Really?" she whispers, and the defiance disappears. "I suppose it must do, yeah. I have never had a serious relationship and, yes, I do feel there is a big gap in my life. "Not all the time but often I think about what it would be like to have someone you could share everything with." And that person, for the record, would definitely not be a woman.
"Right," she laughs, confidence fully restored. "How stupid is that. I've had me share of fellas, I lived with a lad when I was 17. I really don't know where they dig this stuff up.
"I thought it was funny at first, now I just think it's sad." And you believe her. In fact, you believe almost everything she says because, in her rejection of all that the Spice Girls originally stood for, Melanie Chisholm is totally real.