sing.’ This was a song that demanded a ‘performance’. In the original production in 1984, the peerless musical-theatre star Chita Rivera gave it the full treatment and won a Tony award.
Melanie thrived at the Doreen Bird College. Sidcup was about as far as you could get from Widnes so it was brave of her mother to support her leaving home at sixteen to go down south. Melanie still had to deal with the dilemma all the future Spice Girls faced after leaving college of trying to get work in a crowded profession.
She signed on the dole and started the round of auditions. The closest she came to a breakthrough in 1993 was nearly being hired for the chorus of Cats in the West End, which might have set her off on a career in musical theatre. Instead, it was looking increasingly likely that she would end up taking work on a cruise ship. Fortunately, however, she picked up one of Chris Herbert’s flyers and decided to try out for his new girl group.
On the day, the dancing proved no problem and she sang the exuberant ‘I’m So Excited’ by the Pointer Sisters, a hit in the UK in late 1984. Chris was more impressed than his dad Bob, who for some reason didn’t rate her dancing but did think she was a much better singer than the other Melanie from Leeds. He wasn’t struck by the looks of either girl, giving them both four out of ten on their informal scoresheets.
Melanie hadn’t dressed up for the occasion, a simple cut-off lilac T-shirt and black trousers. Her hair was down and not in a ponytail. But, most importantly, she was just a little bit different from Victoria Adams and Melanie Brown – which worked to her advantage when Chris was back in the office making up his shortlist. He wanted contrast.
From that point of view, he noticed a younger teenager called Michelle Stephenson, who did well with a challenging ballad, ‘Don’t Be a Stranger’, then a recent top-ten hit for Dina Carroll. Michelle had only just turned seventeen so was appreciably the youngest of the probables.
Like Victoria, she was brought up in the Home Counties but was more traditionally middle class. Her father George worked for Chubb Security and her brother Simon was an artist and creative director. They lived in Abingdon, a lovely old market town on the Thames, just south of Oxford.
Unlike the others, however, she was much more involved in acting than any serious stage-school dancing. She had work with the Young Vic and the National Youth Theatre on her CV. She revealed, ‘I actually wanted to be an actress. I just went along for the audition because I had not been to an open audition before. I just went along for the experience.’
She already had a place to study theatre and English at Goldsmith’s College, part of the University of London, so a back-up plan was in place if the audition didn’t work out.
Michelle was invited to the first call-back at Nomis Studios. The building in Sinclair Road, Brook Green, had been turned into a studio complex in the late seventies by Simon Napier-Bell, who would later manage Wham!. Nomis is his first name spelt backwards. At any given time during its golden age, you might have caught Tina Turner, Queen, George Michael or the Rolling Stones enjoying bacon and eggs in the canteen there.
Chris and Bob began the recall by chatting to the girls individually, then dividing them into three groups. One group that seemed promising consisted of Melanie Brown, Victoria Adams-Wood, Michelle Stephenson and a Welsh girl from Cowbridge, near Cardiff, called Lianne Morgan. They were given three-quarters of an hour to devise a dance routine to another Eternal hit; this time Chris had chosen ‘Just a Step from Heaven’, which was in the charts at the time so at least everyone knew it. Not surprisingly, the irrepressible Melanie took the lead and the others were happy to follow her ideas.
Just when they thought they were ready, Chris and Bob threw a spanner in the works by telling them to bring another girl up to speed – Geri Halliwell. She was a riot of colour, wearing a pink jumper, purple hot pants and platform shoes, topped off with her vibrant dyed ginger hair that she had styled into pigtails. Melanie put it succinctly, ‘She looked like a mad, eccentric nutter from another planet.’ She certainly knew how to be the focus of attention in any room.
By the end of the afternoon this group of five were by far the most promising. They sent each girl away with a tape of ‘Signed, Sealed Delivered, I’m Yours’ by Stevie Wonder and asked them to return to Nomis in a week’s time to be put through their vocal paces to see how they blended together and whether they could harmonise. The media has found some of those disappointed that day but the one who came closest was Lianne. She was in and then she was out.
Chris and Bob had a rethink during the week and decided that Melanie Chisholm would better fit their concept for the girl group. Lianne was coming up to twenty-four while her replacement was twenty. She was hugely disappointed to receive a letter from Chris in which he said she was too old for what he had in mind and perhaps a solo career might suit her better.
Over the years Lianne has been quoted in various interviews commenting on what she saw as an injustice: ‘I’m a better singer than all of them,’ she maintained. That may well have been the case but singing ability was low on the list of priorities for the new band. She was older than Geri so the average age of the band dropped markedly without her.
Ability to sing or dance was completely irrelevant. In a later confidential memo, Bob Herbert was frank about how Heart Management viewed Geri: ‘We included her because she had a very strong personality and her looks seemed to suit the image we were trying to project. Unfortunately she was tone deaf and had awful timing, which meant she was unable to sing in tune or dance in time.’
6
Typically, Geri was filled with enthusiasm and positive energy at the prospect of being in a girl band and wasted no time telling everyone she knew in Watford. They included a young researcher at the BBC called Matthew Bowers, who drank in the same bars and was keen to make an impression in television.
He was working on a documentary about Muhammad Ali called Rumble in the Jungle and mentioned to the film’s director, Neil Davies, that he had a friend who was auditioning for a girl band and asked him if he thought it might make something. Neil, an ex-paratrooper, immediately saw the possibilities and the two went to the next instalment of the search – the ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’ workshop day at Nomis.
Most importantly at this stage, Neil had to make sure Chris Herbert was onside. Fortunately the go-ahead young manager could see the advantages of a film. Neil was impressed: ‘I thought he’d had a brainwave in trying to form a sort of Backstreet Girls – everybody at the time thought you would never get another girl band going. It was all boy bands – Take That dominated the scene. So I thought, “This guy is a genius”. He’s twenty-one so I could see this was going to be a great story – even if they never made it. It would be a kind of warning to teenage girls that this is what happens to you in Tin Pan Alley.’
He shook hands with Chris and started filming that day. He needed to obtain the written consent of the girls but the more pressing thing for the five on the day was making a good impression with Heart Management. Bob Herbert was there and Chic Murphy had come to watch for the first time so that he could see for himself where his money was going. Neil amusingly described the two men as observing the ‘Marbella Dress Code’ – the top three buttons of the shirt undone and a big medallion hanging in the middle of the chest.
As well as being introduced to Chic, the girls had the chance to meet each other properly. In particular, they hadn’t noticed Melanie Chisholm at Danceworks and she had missed the next audition so this was an opportunity to chat to her. She obviously had no airs and graces and seemed to fit in easily.
All the girls thought they sounded terrible together – definitely
