Spice Girls: The Story of the World’s Greatest Girl Band. Sean Smith

Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Spice Girls: The Story of the World’s Greatest Girl Band - Sean Smith страница 15

Автор:
Серия:
Издательство:
Spice Girls: The Story of the World’s Greatest Girl Band - Sean  Smith

Скачать книгу

never achieved her ambition of playing Carnegie Hall, although Love Potion did support Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes in 1978 at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. But she’s still gigging around her old haunts – in June 2019, when the Spice Girls performed at Wembley Stadium, the Joan O’Neill Band was playing Woodwards wine bar – Woodies – in Formby.

      Tina Turner was not one of Melanie’s idols while she was growing up. The first record she bought was The Kids from Fame album that had also proved such an inspiration to Victoria Adams. But, more significantly, she was a fan of Madonna. She wasn’t so keen on the music but loved the image. She was nine when Madonna started having hits with ‘Holiday’ and ‘Borderline’ and she would dress up, pretending to be the unmistakable star in front of the mirror at home – just as a million and more young Spice Girls fans would impersonate the girl group in the future. Later she moved on to Stevie Wonder, whose timeless classic ‘Sir Duke’ remains her favourite song.

      Her first crush was on swashbuckling chart topper Adam Ant until she turned her attention to George Michael, just as Geri Halliwell had done. She was also a secret fan of tough guy actor Bruce Willis, whose album The Return of Bruno came out as Melanie turned thirteen in 1987. His cover of the old Drifters standard ‘Under the Boardwalk’ was a big hit that year and Melanie could be heard singing it constantly. The first song she ever performed in public, though, was ‘The Greatest Love of All’, the Whitney Houston classic that coincidentally Melanie Brown performed at the Danceworks audition.

      Her all-time worst job was in a local chippie. She couldn’t bear the smell. She had always enjoyed fish-and-chips night on a Friday at home but working in the shop was something completely different. The only consolation was that it helped pay for her dance classes.

      Melanie describes herself as a ‘fat, plain, tubby, frumpy kid’, which sounds suspiciously self-effacing. By the time she had taken up dancing she was clearly a very pretty girl. Unavoidably, Melanie grew up surrounded by music but it was as a dancer that she shone.

      Despite her natural shyness and insecurity about her appearance, Melanie was an attractive teenager and had a succession of boyfriends at Fairfield High School, often connected with school drama. She dated a boy in the year above called Ian McKnight, who was very charming and popular with the girls. They connected when Melanie was cast as his mother in a school production of Blood Brothers. Willy Russell’s hit musical had started out as a school play in Liverpool in the early eighties and quickly became a mainstay of local culture.

      The consolation for now was that she saw plenty of Ian, who said, ‘We just clicked.’ They went out for a few months, remained friends after they split and could often be seen having a catch-up in the years to come at the Ring o’ Bells pub in Pit Lane, even when Melanie had moved down south.

      More seriously, she went out for two years with another pupil, Ryan Wilson. He was her first love and she was his. Importantly, his mum Gail liked her: ‘Melanie was a charming girl – very feminine and very pretty.’ They used to walk home together – Ryan lived with his parents in a large five-bedroom house – and talk about their ambitions. Melanie’s plans seemed to revolve around dancing. He remembered, ‘She once said to me the hardest thing about life is deciding what you want. Getting it is easy.’

      Intriguingly, her old schoolmates do not remember Melanie as a tomboy, kicking a ball around with the lads. Ryan recalled she was a quiet girl, the quietest of all the prefects. Another friend, Mark Devany, agreed it was rubbish that she was a tomboy: ‘She was always very girly and ballet mad,’ he said.

      Blood Brothers was not the only school production Melanie was in, but she never secured the lead. In fact, for The Wiz, she had to make do with playing the part of one of the four crows. She was a girl who wanted fame and fortune away from the mean streets of a Cheshire town, scrawling ‘Melanie Chisholm Superstar’ on the cover of one of her school books.

      Her dancing training helped with sport at school. She excelled at gymnastics and could execute a mean back flip, was better than average at netball and athletics but less good at football, even though she was a lifelong fan of Liverpool Football Club.

      While she preferred to spend her pocket money on her Saturday dancing rather than on trips to Anfield she has never wavered in her support and would watch the games on telly on a Sunday afternoon with the rest of her family, who were also big fans. These were the glory days of the 1980s when Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush and Graeme Souness would thrill the Kop. Her favourite player was goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, who always had a great rapport with the home fans: ‘I loved it when he used to walk on his hands up and down the pitch.’ As an older teenager, she fancied Jamie Redknapp but he didn’t join the squad until she was seventeen and already on her way to college.

      Melanie knew what she wanted at this point in her life – to leave school at sixteen and go to dance college. She passed nine GCSEs before she left, even though she was more interested in her next dance class than knuckling down to revision. She retained some affection for her old school and was reportedly disappointed when it closed in 2010 and was subsequently demolished to make way for a new housing estate and a cemetery.

      Melanie was still primarily a dancer. The school’s artistic director Sue Passmore observed, ‘She was a very strong, technical dancer. She was a hard-working and single-minded pupil.’ At this stage she still saw her future as a dancer and not as a singer. Her college musical director Pat Izen did not think her voice was that good when she arrived: ‘It was gutsy but she had an excellent ear – and she was a real individualist.’

      Melanie’s breakthrough as a singer, at least as far as having her confidence boosted, occurred when she took part in a college revue and performed ‘Chief Cook and Bottle Washer’, a showstopper from the Broadway musical The

Скачать книгу