Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

Text © Sean Smith 2019

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Source ISBN: 9780008267568

Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008267599

Version: 2019-10-29

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Also by Sean Smith

Ed Sheeran

George

Adele

Kim

Tom Jones: The Life

Kylie

Gary

Alesha

Tulisa

Kate

Robbie

Cheryl

Victoria

Justin: The Biography

Britney: The Biography

J.K. Rowling: A Biography

Jennifer: The Unauthorized Biography

Royal Racing

The Union Game

Sophie’s Kiss (with Garth Gibbs)

Stone Me! (with Dale Lawrence)

Dedication

To Megan

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Note to Readers

5  Also by Sean Smith

6  Dedication

7  Contents

8  PART ONE: THE WANNABES

9  1 Irrepressible

10  2 Casting the Net

11  3 Mein Herr

12  4 In Search of the Magical Key

13  5 Melanie Chisholm Superstar

14  6 A Model Girl

15  PART TWO: HERE COME THE SPICE GIRLS

16  7 The Student House

17  8 Making It Happen

18  9 The Big Fight

19  10 Hang On to Your Knickers

20  11 The Power of Girls

21  12 The Genius of Geri

22  13 Spice All Over the World

23  14 A Schedule Not a Life

24  15 Stop Right Now

25  PART THREE: SPICE WOMEN

26  16 Nightmares and Fairytales

27  17 Dark Clouds

28  18 Baby Love

29  19 Look at Me

30  20 Reasonable Doubt

31  21 The Return of the Spice Girls

32  22 Olympic Gold

33  23 Spice World Again

34  Last Thoughts

35  Spice Stars

36  Acknowledgements

37  Select Bibliography

38  List of Searchable Terms

39  Picture Section

40  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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PART ONE

1
Irrepressible

The five young women who would become the Spice Girls didn’t need to be outstanding singers. Nor was proven dancing ability essential. They didn’t have to possess supermodel looks or have the wit of a stand-up comedian. They needed to be ordinary girls with a sparkle that could turn them into something extraordinary. They were not easy to find.

Melanie Brown, an irrepressible eighteen-year-old from Leeds, was the first name on the Spice Girls team sheet. She had a spark and exuberance that could poke your eye out. She had no idea that she had the ideal profile to become a member of a new five-piece girl group when she left her parents’ house in Kirkstall at the crack of dawn to catch the early coach to London.

She had seen the ad for a ‘female pop group’ in the Stage newspaper – or, at least, her mother Andrea had – but she was just as interested that day in trying out for a spell as a cruise-ship dancer. That job was for the summer months so there would be sun and sea for starters, as well as a regular wage. Still, she had never come across an advertisement for a girl band before so it was worth taking a look at that as well, especially as it was in the same building off Oxford Street.

This was traditionally the time of year when stage-school wannabes would try to secure work for the summer – seaside shows or cruises were the most popular so this was something different. The advertisement didn’t mention that one of the places would ideally be filled by a young black girl.

Her colour had seldom been an advantage for Melanie, growing up in some of the tougher areas of Leeds. She was mixed race – not black – an important distinction. The locals were confused by her heritage, not sure whether she was black or white, but that didn’t stop her being the innocent target of prejudice and bullying – even being called the N-word. Fortunately, the insults didn’t curb her natural high spirits.

While such treatment was upsetting, it didn’t signal an unhappy childhood – far from it. She had a loving and supportive family, as well as a best friend, Sherrell Russell, who lived round the corner on the council estate in the Hyde Park area of Leeds where Melanie spent her first few years. The modest family home was a mile from the famous Headingley cricket ground. Sherrell was also mixed race and the two girls became inseparable, forging a lifelong bond. It helped that their mothers were also best friends.

Melanie’s parents always encouraged her to fight her own battles, fully aware of the hurdles she would face. Life had been much more difficult for them in facing the full wrath of ignorant discrimination. Her father, Martin Wingrove Brown, was from Nevis, an island in the Caribbean renowned for its beautiful beaches and its reputation as a safe tax haven. As a baby, Martin was left behind to live on a small farm with his grandmother while his parents formed part of the Windrush generation of the 1950s seeking a better life in Britain.

Martin grew up playing cricket on the beach while his parents had to cope with the rampant racism of Britain during the post-war era when a commonplace sign in the windows of guesthouses would read, ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’. It was a huge cultural change for Martin when his parents decided the time was right for him to join them in the middle of a northern winter. He had just turned nine. His new home was in the depressed and depressing area of Chapeltown in Leeds, where the Yorkshire Ripper committed so many grisly murders in the mid- to late seventies.

Melanie describes her handsome father as a ‘cool, charismatic dude’. On a Christmas Eve night out in Chapeltown, Martin, aged nineteen, met seventeen-year-old bubbly blonde Andrea Dixon. The attraction was mutual. She lived in the district of Seacroft, an area on the east side of the city, where the black population was practically non-existent at the time and skinhead gangs were thriving – which Melanie found particularly upsetting as she grew up.

They had been going out for more than two years, as well as taking the daring step of moving in together, before Melanie Janine Brown was born on 29 May 1975 at the Maternity Hospital in Leeds. They married three months later at the city’s register office, which was the first time their families had met.

Melanie still recalls being told of bus journeys when, as a baby, she would be handed to Martin to protect him, not her, as he was less likely to attract trouble when he was holding a tiny girl. Fortunately, in time, Martin and baby Melanie were properly accepted by Andrea’s family – and she by his, although everyone understood the difficulties they would face.

For much of her childhood, Melanie shared a room with her sister Danielle, who was five years younger. They got on about as well as sisters normally do – Melanie would be mean to her sibling who would run off and tell Dad.

Nobody could fault Martin’s work ethic. For most of his adult life he worked as a welder at the Yorkshire Imperial Metals factory in Stourton, a five-mile ride on his bicycle. Melanie proudly declared, ‘He worked his backside off to raise his family, never missing a shift.’ He would often work double the hours to make sure he could afford the annual summer camping holiday in the seaside resort of Abersoch in west Wales. Many of Melanie’s extended family would make the trip, which was the highlight of her year.

Andrea had left school at fifteen and took a number of low-paid jobs to do her bit for the family’s finances. She worked at the local C&A clothing store for eighteen years, as well as cleaning in an old people’s home. Her earnings would be invaluable when they discovered that their high-spirited daughter had a passion for dancing, which proved to be a good way of channelling her boundless energy. It was the one pursuit guaranteed to tire her out.

Melanie, aged nine, enrolled at the Jean Pearce School of Dance in Horsforth, a ten-minute bus ride up the road from the new family home in Kirkstall, Leeds. Jean was the doyenne of dance in the city. She had set up the school in 1945 and over the years had choreographed many amateur productions and pantos in the north of England.

Jean had also been responsible for the dancing in the popular Yorkshire TV series Young Showtime, which helped launch the careers of Joe Longthorne, Bonnie Langford and the Emmerdale favourite Malandra Burrows.

She worked wonders with Melanie, barking at her to point her toes and helping her develop the priceless skill for a professional dancer of being able to pick up routines quickly, having been shown the steps just once. She was also anxious to broaden her young pupils’ experiences and arranged school trips to see touring productions of Miss Saigon and Cats. Another valuable contribution Jean made to Melanie’s future was in teaching her to do her best at auditions.

At dance classes Melanie made new friends, including a local girl, Charlotte Henderson, who remains her closest friend, despite all the ups and downs of later years. Another was Rebecca Callard, a petite, pretty girl, whose mother is the popular Coronation Street actress Beverley Callard, who plays Liz McDonald in the evergreen soap.

The two teenagers saw little of one another at Jean Pearce but became best pals when they started senior school and bumped into each other on the first day. They were the new girls at the Intake High School in the West Leeds district of Bramley. The focus there was less on traditional academic work and more on the arts subjects that interested them – music, drama and dance.

Rebecca, who would go on to become a successful actress, had already appeared on TV, was good fun and introduced Melanie to the delights of smoking Marlboro Lights. She also joined her for sticky-bun binges. The two girls used to spend their lunch money on cakes and pastries and eat the lot in one break. Surprisingly, Melanie never seemed to put on weight. The teenagers were very much partners in crime, even double-dating twin brothers at one time.

Neither girl was considered star material at school. They managed very small roles in a version of the musical Godspell but that was about it. The Brown household was not especially musical, and Melanie’s love of dance was not matched by an overwhelming desire to become a concert pianist or a professional singer. She didn’t have singing lessons until much later, preferring to release her pent-up energy by bashing the drums.

Like most teenagers, she watched Top of the Pops every week. Rebecca was a big fan of Bros but Melanie couldn’t bear them. Instead, she preferred two of the biggest female artists of the eighties. Both were strong figures. First was Tracy Chapman, whose multi-million-selling self-titled first album remains a pop classic. She sang ‘Fast Car’ and ‘Talkin’ Bout a Revolution’ at the seventieth-birthday tribute to Nelson Mandela at Wembley in June 1988 when Melanie was thirteen. They were arguably the highlights of the whole event, especially as she sang them twice, filling in when Stevie Wonder had an equipment problem.

Secondly, Melanie loved Neneh Cherry, who was one of the few mixed-race pop stars at the time. Neneh’s father was from Sierra Leone and her mother from Sweden. She had a distinctive style that included large medallions and rugby shirts that Melanie tried earnestly to copy.

Neneh caused a mild sensation when she performed her hit ‘Buffalo Stance’ on Top of the Pops in the autumn of that year. She was the first artist to appear on the show while heavily pregnant, which was not a look normally endorsed by the male-dominated music business. It was a bold move by a young woman who defied convention throughout her career – someone with whom Melanie Brown could readily identify. Nearly ten years later, a pregnant Melanie would follow that particular girl-power lead.

Needless to say, Neneh’s ‘stance’ caused a media storm. One male TV interviewer asked if it was safe for her to go on stage in her condition and received a sharp riposte: ‘Of course. I’m not ill.’ Neneh later elaborated, ‘I didn’t feel being pregnant took anything away from my sexuality, who I am, the woman.’

Melanie would stand in front of the mirror in her bedroom at home and pretend to be her favourite star, singing along, just as a million girls would later do when ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls was an anthem for a young female generation.

Those schooldays were basically happy and uneventful for Melanie, even though she was occasionally chased home from school to her family’s house in Kirkstall, a fifteen-minute walk but much faster when you had to run like the wind.

It came as a great shock to everyone, then, when such a vibrant girl tried to take her own life for the first time. Melanie revealed this shocking event in her autobiography Catch a Fire, published in 2002 after the Spice Girls had finally split up. Her account is of an unhappy teenager feeling miserable and out of step with a world that didn’t understand her. She even fell out with Rebecca over a cruel and thoughtless remark Melanie had made. They didn’t speak for seven months.

And then she was nearly expelled from school for her part in composing an obscene poison-pen letter. Life seemed to be going downhill very fast and Melanie started hoarding extra-strong aspirin, building up a stash by taking one or two at a time from the bathroom cabinet. Eventually she had more than enough to overdose, so she wrote a note and took the pills one at a time while she sobbed her heart out.

Luckily her mum had a headache that night and realised what was going on when she went looking for some tablets. Melanie was rushed to hospital where doctors induced her to vomit the undigested pills. Afterwards the suicide attempt became an unspoken secret at home and at school, where nobody discussed it with her.

Looking back, Melanie stressed that nothing was ever so serious that it was worth taking your own life. Her mantra was: ‘Never let yourself get like that again, no matter what happens.’ It was sound and sensible advice that, sadly, she was unable to follow.

While she would never forget that dramatic event, Melanie resumed normal life as a young teenager. She didn’t go out much but went into town to celebrate her fifteenth birthday with Rebecca, both girls dressed to kill in hot pants. They saw the movie Ghostbusters II starring Bill Murray, but their first stop was Pizzaland where, to their surprise, they were able to order drinks, two white wine spritzers. Rebecca recalled, ‘Amazingly, I got served that night – the only time ever – and we spent the rest of the night giggling like fools.’

Melanie was restless to achieve. Even though she was not yet sixteen and still at Intake, she wanted to get on with her dancing career, which she saw as a passport to fame. She was in the middle of her GCSE revision when she decided to bunk off school and go for an audition in Blackpool. Her mum covered for her. Martin would have gone ballistic if he had discovered what was happening. He was a great believer in the value of education.

Melanie sailed through the audition and left home for the first time in June 1991, a few weeks after her sixteenth birthday. She spent the summer in Blackpool, dancing in two shows: in the afternoons she dressed in a cheerleader outfit for an open-air rock ’n’ roll extravaganza called The Jump and Jive Show. For her evening engagement she changed into a catsuit for a pre-show entertainment at the Horseshoe Bar on Pleasure Beach.

The one drawback for Melanie was leaving her home comforts in Leeds to live in digs, although her mum drove over every week to make sure she was eating properly. Her dad was particularly strict with his teenage daughter so it was a relief to have a taste of freedom. Inevitably, his old-fashioned attitude had only fuelled Melanie’s rebellious nature.

Back in Leeds she met her first serious boyfriend. She had caught the eye of handsome footballer Steve Mulrain one night when she sneaked out of home to go to the ever-popular Warehouse club in Somers Street. He noticed her straight away: ‘She looked sensational. She had on a short tight silver dress with black knee-high boots.’

Melanie pretended not to be bothered, which had the desired effect of grabbing Steve’s attention, and by the end of the evening she had agreed to go out on a proper date. He was nearly three years older than her and quite a catch.

Steve had joined Leeds United as an apprentice in the summer of 1991, at a time when the club was one of the top sides in the country. He remained her boyfriend for more than two years and she described him as her first love; a true love. She gushed, ‘Our relationship was absolute heaven.’

Originally a Londoner from Lambeth, he never made the jump to the first team, which was a disappointment as Leeds United won the last-ever First Division title in the 1991–2 season. By the end of the following year, he was the only black player on the books of Rochdale in the third division while Leeds were part of the inaugural Premiership.

At the end of her first summer season in Blackpool, Melanie enrolled at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Chapeltown Road. The college had been up and running for just six years but already had a growing reputation as the nearest thing to Fame in Leeds.

She did not thrive at the college, though, impatient after her spell in Blackpool to get on with her life in show business. She had some money saved from her dancing wages but that soon ran out and she earned some much-needed funds for bus fares and lunches by teaching an aerobics class at the nearby Mandela Community Centre.

She also entered the Miss Leeds Weekly News contest in 1992 and won, much to her surprise, although not to anyone else’s because she was a very striking young woman. She was now a Blackpool veteran, a beauty queen and still only seventeen.

Not everything was going so well, however. Like many of her contemporaries, Melanie had to trudge around to auditions, hoping that the next might be the one. She soon developed a tough skin when it came to rejections. Her future might have been entirely different if she had won the part of Fiona Middleton, a young hairdresser in Coronation Street. Despite getting to the final four, she lost out to another aspiring actress from Leeds, Angela Griffin, who had also been at Intake High. They were never best friends because Angela was in the year below but they once performed a duet in a school production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Angela was also mixed race so, inevitably, she and Melanie often went up for the same part. Usually, neither of them was hired, but on this occasion Angela’s success would lead to TV stardom. She started playing Fiona in December 1992 and stayed for six years, appearing in 257 episodes. If Melanie had been successful, there would have been no thoughts of cruise ships, Blackpool or auditions for girl bands. Ironically, Angela impersonated Mel as a Spice Girl in a 1998 celebrity special of Stars In Their Eyes.

Melanie, meanwhile, had to be content with some work as an extra. She made several fleeting appearances stacking shelves in Bettabuy’s supermarket in Coronation Street and had a walk-on role as a policewoman in the locally filmed A Touch of Frost.

Closer to home, she took a part-time job in telesales and another as a podium dancer at the Yel Bar in a side street off the city centre. It certainly wasn’t a lap-dancing club or anything remotely similar – just a fun night spot where the waiters and waitresses wore swimwear.

Melanie picked up £20 for four hours of dancing on a Friday and Saturday night in front of a mainly male audience. The moment her shift was over, she changed back into an old sweatshirt and jogging bottoms, collected her wages and went home. This was a paid professional job.

Of course, Melanie was very popular with the lads but seemed unmoved by the attention. Lisa Adamczyk, her manager at the club, observed, ‘She was a great mover, a very professional dancer, but it was all just an act. At the end of the night she’d be off like a shot to get back to her boyfriend, Steve, who she loved dearly. She’d come across as the wildest girl you’d ever meet but underneath the image was a hard-working girl who was faithful to her boyfriend.’

She was still very much a dancer, never having bothered much with singing, although she started having some lessons to broaden her chances of landing better roles. She danced on The Bonnie Langford Show and on Keith and Orville’s Quack Chat Show, starring the popular ventriloquist and his green baby duck.

Her friend Rebecca had moved to London and Melanie was feeling constrained by Leeds. She was hired for another summer season in Blackpool, this time on The Billy Pearce Laughter Show at the Grand Theatre. Billy, the son of Melanie’s old dance teacher, was one of the most popular old-school entertainers in the north of England.

This time she would be away from home for four months and so, reluctantly, decided to split up with Steve. She opted for a clean break rather than keep things dragging on when she had ambitions to see the world and be a star – or, at least, a headliner in Blackpool. She did not want to settle for a cosy, settled life in Leeds.

Melanie was very fond of Steven and is nice about him in her memoirs, but she acknowledged that his life took a few wrong turns after his football career was wrecked by injury. He was sent to prison for nine months in 2002. Now working as a decorator, he had been convicted of affray after attacking two men in the street with a machete.

In Blackpool, Melanie enjoyed her new freedom. She was more independent than she had been during her first summer there and enjoyed dating as a single woman, as well as acting as understudy to her show’s female star, Claire Cattini. As far as Melanie was concerned, Claire was the epitome of a big star and a role model for the teenager from Leeds, even though she was only a couple of years older.

Melanie fell for another sportsman – this time a professional snooker player from Iceland called Fjölnir Thorgeirsson. Fjöl (pronounced Fee-ol) was very Nordic looking – tall, blond and well built. Melanie fancied him as soon as she saw him in a café on the promenade near the Norbreck Castle Hotel where he was competing in a number of qualifying tournaments for the big professional events.

Blackpool had become an important centre for snooker. The future world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan won an amazing seventy-four out of seventy-six matches at the Norbreck in 1992.

Fjöl wasn’t as successful but he did win through to the European Open held in Antwerp in September. He had a walkover in Round 2 and lost in the next. Melanie knew nothing about snooker but she came to watch him whenever she could get away. She enjoyed a summer of love in a boy-meets-girl sort of way. The chances for any future relationship seemed slim when Fjöl returned to Iceland and promptly suffered a serious motorbike accident, which meant he could not travel.

In fact, it was Melanie who hopped on a plane, as a dancer in a troupe entertaining the armed forces in the Falkland Islands, Bosnia and Northern Ireland. Her last show business job before her life-changing audition was in Lewisham. She had one line in the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk starring Saracen from the hit TV series Gladiators – he eventually became a fire-fighter. Her heart wasn’t in it and she was sacked for skipping rehearsals, so it was back to Leeds and scouring the ads again.

Melanie had a habit of landing on her feet but her career to date seemed to be one step forward and one step back. She was still just eighteen but she badly needed something to happen.

2
Casting the Net

Imagine you were casting a sit-com. That was what Chris Herbert did. He wanted characters who would appeal to everyone. The series Friends wouldn’t start until later in 1994 but his idea of throwing together a group of young people with different personalities, characteristics and quirks was very similar to the thinking behind the classic comedy.

He wanted to cover all bases: ‘I approached it as if I was a casting director, finding characters that appealed to every colour in the rainbow – finding a gang of girls everyone could relate to. We were looking to create a lifestyle act.’

In the early nineties there was no The X Factor, The Voice or Britain’s Got Talent. The new millennium celebrations would come and go before Pop Idol heralded a new era of Saturday night TV in 2001. There was no quick fix to becoming a pop star. None of the young women who became the Spice Girls was likely to thrive in those competitions.

The era of the Spice Girls was closer to Opportunity Knocks than one of the new reality talent shows. The old favourite, originally hosted by Hughie Green, left our screens for good in 1990.

Instead, young hopefuls would rush to buy the Stage newspaper every week. Chris Herbert, too, would go to auditions, not to grab a spot on a cruise ship but to hand out flyers about his new group and see for himself the sort of personalities who were out there seeking work.

He decided not to limit his search. He went to pubs, clubs, open-mic nights, dance studios – anywhere he could get his message out: ‘My number-one focus wasn’t looking for singers. I was looking for young girls seeking opportunities within entertainment. I was trying to cast the net as wide as possible.’ He even went to Butlins and Blackpool in his search for five stars. He was unlucky not to have come across Melanie before the big audition day.

Chris might have been a young man, filled with enthusiasm and energy for a great new idea, but he wasn’t a novice in the music business. He had grown up in that world and was at ease within it, well used to coming home from school and finding pop stars sitting on the sofa enjoying a cuppa.

His father, Bob Herbert, was a millionaire accountant, drove a Rolls-Royce and had a penchant for wearing white suits. Geri Halliwell memorably described him as looking like an extra from Miami Vice, the American cop show from the eighties that perfectly captured an era obsessed with designer fashion.

More pertinently from the point of view of the future Spice Girls, he had experience of nurturing young talent. He spotted the potential of two of his son’s teenage friends at the Collingwood College in Camberley, Surrey. They were twin brothers, Matt and Luke Goss. At the time they were only fifteen but Bob could see they had the looks to engage a strong female following.

Bob was of the music school that was always seeking to copy a successful formula. He saw the twins as a late eighties version of the Bay City Rollers, the teen heartthrobs of the previous decade. When the brothers formed a band called Gloss, with young bassist Craig Logan (Goss with an L for Logan), Bob stepped in to offer them advice and, more importantly, space to rehearse in his summerhouse. He helped to plot their futures, introduced them to songwriters and financed their demo tapes but, because of their age, could not sign them to a binding legal contract until they were eighteen. When they came of age they were snapped up by Tom Watkins, former manager of the Pet Shop Boys, who secured them a deal with CBS.

The whole nightmare sequence of events would come back to haunt Bob with the Spice Girls. Under the new name of Bros, the boys released their first single, ironically titled ‘I Owe You Nothing’, which, when re-released in 1988, would be their only UK number one. At this time, a very large poster of Matt Goss was adorning the bedroom wall of an ambitious teenager called Victoria Adams.

Undaunted, Bob decided to have another go at finding an all-conquering band. After his son left college, they went into partnership, forming a management company called Heart, with offices in the Surrey town of Lightwater. Bob was keen to develop a project for his son to take on but, like all good accountants, he preferred to find someone else to absorb the financial risk. He immediately thought of his old music compadre, Chic Murphy.

Tall and silver-haired, Chic had a tiny cross tattooed on his earlobe and spoke in an EastEnders Cockney accent, but he frequented the upmarket Surrey haunts more usually associated with stockbrokers and golfers. Chris Herbert describes Chic as ‘old school’, which in music-business terms means he played it tough and preferred an environment in which the artists had very little control over their destiny.

He had made his first fortune importing big American cars into the UK. Subsequently, he had seen the business possibilities of bringing US pop acts across the Atlantic. In the eighties he signed up chart regulars like the Drifters, who were plying their trade in Las Vegas, and brought them over to the blossoming cabaret club scene where venues like Caesar’s Palace in Dunstable or Blazers in Windsor could pack in a thousand people a night. It was very lucrative.

From the point of view of the future Spice Girls, his most important involvement was with the Three Degrees, the popular UK girl group of the seventies. The trio, modelled more or less on the Supremes, were originally part of the Philadelphia stable, a rival of Motown in the US. They had their biggest hit in the UK, however, in 1974 topping the charts with the disco favourite ‘When Will I See You Again’ before Melanie Brown and Emma Bunton were born.

The public profile of the Three Degrees increased greatly when the media decided they were the favourite group of Prince Charles. This might not have done wonders for their musical credibility but took them off the pages of NME and Melody Maker and into the columns of the national newspapers. They became much more famous. Prince Charles invited them to perform at his thirtieth birthday party at Buckingham Palace in 1978, and they were subsequently guests at his wedding to Lady Diana Spencer three years later. It would not be the last time the Prince gave an all-girl group the oxygen of priceless publicity.

By the end of the seventies the Three Degrees were moving inevitably towards the cabaret circuit. They were still very popular, though – the sort of act that always gets work – and throughout the eighties Chic Murphy had been a familiar figure at their gigs. Bob Herbert, who did all the accounts for the nightclubs, became part of the group’s management team and forged a long-standing alliance with Chic.

If Bob and Chic had decided things, the new band would have been the Spice Boys. The initial conversation in the offices of Heart Management was about putting a boy band together. In late 1993 Take That were everywhere, with three number-one singles in a row and the platinum-selling album Everything Changes. The entire music world was looking to jump on the bandwagon of their popularity.

Fortunately, for five ambitious young women, Chris Herbert had a better idea: ‘A boy band seemed like the obvious route into the market but I wasn’t that keen on it because I thought we were sort of late to the party. There were loads of them.’ As well as Take That, there was East 17, Bad Boys Inc and Worlds Apart, with the prospect of another arriving any minute, like a double-decker bus in Piccadilly. Chris explained, ‘My feeling was that boy bands of the time were only really appealing to 50 per cent of the market – a female audience. I wanted to put a girl band together that was a bit feisty, sexy and sassy so that they could appeal to both a female and male audience. The girls could relate to them and aspire to be them. The guys would just adore them.’

Bob and, in particular, Chic took a lot of convincing that a girl band was the way forward. Chris observed, ‘They were kind of following the market and it just seemed fairly radical that we should be doing the absolute opposite of that.’ The first thing they wanted to know was the strength of the opposition. It was anything but strong. An all-girl group called Milan were signed to Polydor in 1992 and looked promising for a couple of years, featuring a teenage Martine McCutcheon before she found stardom playing Tiffany in EastEnders. They opened for East 17 on tour but a few singles failed to set the charts alight and they folded in 1994.

Eternal represented more serious opposition. They had already achieved a couple of top-ten singles and their first album Always and Forever peaked at number two. Chris, however, did not see them as direct competition. Despite being very glamorous and including the lads-mag favourite Louise Nurding, they were basically a soulful vocal group specialising in R&B. ‘They were pretty slick and smooth,’ observed Chris. ‘I felt we needed more character.’

Eventually he got his way. ‘My dad was probably the first to come round to the idea, Chic less so. His approach was “Well, OK, go out and see what you can find and we’ll reassess it.” Actually, Chic was like that all the way through. He kind of let me out on a rein to go and do it and then was slightly cynical but I suppose he was prepared to see what turned up.’

At first, it seemed as if it was going to be a hard slog – until he paid £174 to place his own advertisement in the Stage. The now famous ad that would eventually lead to the formation of the Spice Girls appeared on 24 February 1994. It read:

R.U. 18–23 WITH THE ABILITY

TO SING/DANCE

R.U. STREETWISE, OUTGOING,

AMBITIOUS & DEDICATED

HEART MANAGEMENT LTD

are a widely successful

Music Industry Management Consortium

currently forming a choreographed, Singing/Dancing,

all Female Pop Act for a Record Recording Deal.

OPEN AUDITION

DANCE WORKS, 16 Balderton Street,

FRIDAY 4TH MARCH

11.00 a.m.–5.30 p.m.

PLEASE BRING SHEET MUSIC

OR BACKING CASSETTE

On the day, more than four hundred young hopefuls queued on the stairs of the studio off Oxford Street to impress the ‘panel’, consisting of Bob, Chris and his fiancée Shelley, who was a stylist. The girls were divided into groups of ten and put through their dancing paces to the sound of Eternal’s début hit ‘Stay’. The numbers were reduced to fifty before they were asked to do an individual song.

The panel kept rudimentary scorecards that would judge the girls on four categories: singing, dancing, looks and personality. It was the best and quickest way to whittle down the possibles into a short list. Melanie Brown performed her now regular audition song, ‘The Greatest Love of All’ by Whitney Houston. Chris gave her eight out of ten across the board.

She obviously stood out. It wasn’t just that she fitted his vision for the make-up of the group. She had a personality and charisma that shone. Chris recalled, ‘For me, she was the one who walked in and seemed the full package. She was good but she also just had the look. Her image was on point. She could sing and she had a big personality. On the day, I immediately thought, We have found one.’

Melanie had enjoyed the experience so much that she decided to skip the afternoon audition for the cruise ship, preferring to chat to some of the other girls before making her way back to Victoria station to get the coach home. Chris had told her he would be in touch and Melanie was confident she’d got it. She was right.

3
Mein Herr

Victoria Adams-Wood, as she was calling herself then, carried herself differently from the other hopefuls at the Danceworks audition. She was a curvy nineteen-year old, strikingly dressed all in black, with a crop-top showing off her very tanned midriff.

On his mood board back at the office, Chris Herbert had been toying with the idea that one of the group should appeal to the more mature man. He was looking for a young woman who might turn the head of a male consumer with a dash of discernment. You don’t need to be posh to have a touch of class and that was the quality Chris was seeking.

Victoria came from a North London working-class background. Her dad Tony Adams, the son of a factory worker, had been brought up in a two-bedroom house in Edmonton that had no bathroom, an outside toilet and no heating. These were the austere years that followed the end of the Second World War when money was rationed just as much as food had been during the conflict.

In 1957 when Tony was eleven, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously said, ‘Most of our people have never had it so good,’ which was small consolation for the youngster hanging around outside the pub waiting for his father to finish his pint. Sometimes he would be pressed into collecting cigarette butts from the overflowing ashtrays for his dad to smoke. Truly, Edmonton was a place to aspire to leave in order to make something of yourself in the world – and that was what he did.

Despite its drawbacks, Edmonton then had a strong sense of community and families had pride in their modest surroundings. The planners of sixties Britain have much to answer for in retrospect, bulldozing away those strong neighbourhood bonds in favour of anonymous tower blocks. Families there pulled together and survived together. Tony absorbed that spirit and passed it on to his eldest daughter.

Tony left school to train as an electrician but dreamt of being a pop star. He was unlucky. He shone as the lead singer in two groups, first in the Calettos and then in the Soniks, which was mainly a covers band. The biggest gig he played was at the famous Lyceum Ballroom on the Strand in London.

He caught the attention of the legendary impresario and manager Joe Meek, who had been responsible for one of the biggest hits of the sixties, ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados, the first US number one by a British group. Joe signed Tony to a contract but, unknown to many in the music business, his life was falling apart because of money problems and blackmail relating to his homosexuality. In February 1967 he murdered his landlady, Violet Shenton, then killed himself with a shotgun.

The difficulty for Tony, who had just recorded his first demo, was that he was under contract at the time and subsequent legal red tape prevented him from recording for five years. This huge disappointment meant that he was always extremely careful when it came to business and, in particular, contracts – a trait inherited by his daughter that would prove to be vital in the progress of the future Spice Girls.

Tony picked up his trade again, working as a rep for an electrical company. He already had ambitions to start his own company, supported by his girlfriend Jackie Cannon, a trainee hairdresser from Tottenham, who soon gave that up to join an insurance company in central London.

Jackie’s father, George, was a stevedore in the docks, loading and unloading ships. He worked all hours to improve his family’s life, an ethic that Tony and Jackie followed over the years, in much the same way as Melanie Brown’s parents. Tony and Jackie married in 1970 but waited four years to start a family, building a better future by moving out of London before their daughter Victoria Caroline was born on 17 April 1974 in the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, which technically made her an Essex girl.

In 1977, when Victoria was three, Tony bought the Old School House in Goff’s Oak, Hertfordshire. The place needed a lot of work but he had the skills and the contacts in the building trade to do it up himself. But, perhaps more importantly, it had a large garage, which would become the hub of his new electrical-supply company.

Goff’s Oak liked to call itself a village but was quite suburban, if full of people doing rather well for themselves. One ex-teacher at the local school observed witheringly, ‘Wait outside the school gates on any given day and you’d wish you had shares in a fake-tan company and one making leather trousers. They are women with too much time on their hands. They have nothing better to do than shop and get their hair and nails done.’

The media would always make much of Victoria being dropped off at school in her dad’s Rolls-Royce. That was much later. For now, she was driven in her father’s old Hillman, which also doubled as his delivery van. Victoria was a quiet little girl, who struggled with a lack of confidence, particularly in English, and took extra lessons in reading, comprehension and spelling. She was a million miles away from the outspoken woman with the ready wit she would later become.

Tony loved listening to the Beatles and Stevie Wonder, and would dance his little girl around the house to the sound of the great Motown star’s hit ‘Sir Duke’, which Jackie said gave her daughter her love of performing. One teacher, Sue Bailey, recalled, ‘She always loved acting and enjoyed our drama lessons. She liked to sing and dance. She shone one year as Frosty the Snowman. She was a very sweet girl.’

Victoria was inspired by the iconic film Fame. She envied the energy and the exuberance of the students skipping down the corridors of the High School for the Performing Arts in New York. She wanted to be Coco, the multi-talented character played so memorably by Irene Cara. It’s easy to imagine the Spice Girls dancing on the desks and singing in the streets with the rest of the students.

She stuck a poster on her bedroom wall of the dashingly handsome Gene Anthony Ray, who played Leroy in the film and the subsequent TV spin-off. Ironically, Gene became a victim of his own fame, sinking into a life of drink and drugs and dying young, at forty-one.

Victoria was obsessed by the TV show, taping every episode so that she could learn all the songs and the dance routines. She persuaded her mum to take her to see the Kids from Fame on tour and subsequently badgered her into finding a ‘Fame’ school near Goff’s Oak. They couldn’t find an exact match but the Jason Theatre School a few miles up the road in Broxbourne seemed the best option for a nine-year-old.

Rather like the Jean Pearce School in Leeds, the Jason had been running for more than thirty years, founded in North London by greatly respected local dance teacher Joy Spriggs. From the first class, Joy identified Victoria as one of her most eager students, prepared to work her tap shoes off to improve: ‘At the time, all the children wanted to do jazz dancing, with the ankle warmers and the leotards and the colourful catsuits. There was Hot Gossip on television and they wanted to copy that. It was the style of the time.’

Victoria may not have been the most talented dancer ever to grace the Jason Theatre School but she made a dramatic improvement through hard work, determination and old-fashioned practice. Quite simply, the harder Victoria worked, the better she became. Joy observed, ‘She had a certain natural ability and we just channelled it in the right way. Victoria would shine because she was a very pretty little girl, with big dark brown eyes and long dark curly hair, but she was a little bit self-conscious to start with. She didn’t hold back but she wasn’t quite as confident as some of the others. We had to build that confidence with her.’

Her self-belief was boosted when the Jason Theatre School linked up with the local amateur dramatic society for productions of Hello Dolly, Sleeping Beauty and The Wizard of Oz, in which she played a Munchkin. Her ambition was also fuelled by trips to the West End to see the most popular musicals of the eighties – Cats, Les Misérables, Starlight Express and Miss Saigon.

Week after week, dancing provided a welcome escape from real school for Victoria. After the relatively quiet waters of primary school, her parents decided to send her to St Mary’s High School in Cheshunt where she stood out like a beacon, unhappily.

By this time Tony’s business was thriving and the family had plenty of money. The Old School House was now one of the grandest homes in the village, with a swimming pool in the back garden and the Rolls-Royce, with its personalised number plate, in the driveway. It was his pride and joy, although Victoria maintained she hated it.

She had to say that because it might have alienated a million potential Spice Girls fans to hear tales of Daddy dropping her off in the Rolls-Royce. Victoria has always been careful not to describe any days that began with a ride in the Roller and ended with a dip in the pool.

One of her best friends growing up, Emma Comolli, recalled that, perhaps unwisely, Victoria would talk about how rich her family was and how she was going to be famous one day: ‘The other children would turn on her and call her names.’

Another girl said simply, ‘Victoria was considered snooty.’

The full extent of the bullying Victoria suffered at school is a grey area. She was certainly verbally abused but her younger sister Louise recalled, ‘I don’t think she was bullied that badly.’

In the early days at the Old School House the two girls shared a bedroom, but that changed when Tony had finished the remodelling and Victoria had her own pink explosion of a room with giant posters of Bros and Ryan Giggs vying for space with Gene Anthony Ray.

Louise fitted in well at school and found herself having to stick up for her elder sibling. Their different personalities highlight why Victoria had a tough time. Ironically, considering the pack appeal of the Spice Girls, she was never one of the girls. She had a natural shyness that could be exploited by others, but beneath that apparent vulnerability was a girl who was thoroughly determined and as tough as old boots.

Fortunately, there was some enjoyment to be had at school in its lavish dramatic productions. Victoria was one of the best dancers in Les Misérables and Jesus Christ Superstar. Her passion for dancing was a double-edged sword. It gave her a sense of escape but also meant she seldom socialised with classmates. Boys were not on the agenda, although she did have a date aged fifteen with an American pupil called Franco McCurio who took her to the movies. The most memorable thing about it was that it marked the first time she had ever been on a bus.

Victoria met her first proper boyfriend in the kitchen of the Old School House when she was sixteen. Mark Wood had come to fit a burglar alarm. He was three years older, six foot two, and the epitome of tall, dark and handsome. They started chatting and she readily agreed when he asked her out on a date.

She didn’t have to travel by bus, which was a relief, when they went out for a drink to a wine bar. Instead, he picked her up in his dad’s white van, having taken the ladders off the roof for the occasion. Technically, Victoria was too young to be served alcohol but that didn’t stop her getting tipsy, although Mark did not take advantage.

Being in a committed relationship with Mark was not necessarily the most important thing in her life that year. She was determined to leave St Mary’s to further her chances of a career in show business. She set her heart on going to a stage school. She still regretted not going to a ‘Fame’ school like the Sylvia Young Theatre School or the Italia Conti.

Victoria did a tour of the leading ‘finishing’ schools in and around London before deciding to apply to Laine Theatre Arts in Epsom. Joy Spriggs approved: ‘Laine is the crème de la crème really.’ The audition was itself an ordeal and a good grounding for more nerve-racking battles later on. One fellow student from Victoria’s year recalled that Betty Laine had a fiery disposition: ‘You wouldn’t want to cross her. She and the teachers present managed to convey a sort of good-cop-bad-cop aura. She was the bad cop!’

Not for the last time, Victoria had no idea if she had made a good impression so she was thrilled when she was accepted. Joy Spriggs and her other mentors at the Jason Theatre School were equally delighted, especially as Victoria was one of three that year considered promising enough to win grants from the local education authority. Joy observed, ‘I know her parents would have paid for her to go there but she deserved her place. She’d worked hard for it and it is so competitive. For the school to get three in with scholarships was quite something. They were a talented bunch.’

Victoria’s successful application demolishes the opinion that she has no talent or was in some way lucky to achieve any success. Laine accepted only serious, dedicated and talented young people. It had its Premier League reputation to maintain.

Leaving the Jason Theatre School was quite a wrench. It had been her comfort blanket and her inspiration for nine years. She never forgot how much it meant to her and in 2001, as a worldwide superstar, she went back to present the prizes when the school celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Joy gave her the Jason Anniversary Award – the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Victoria told the girls, ‘I wanted to come to the school to give back something that they’ve given me.’

She was not so sorry to leave St Mary’s, although she managed five GCSE passes and won a cookery prize. She left school and home at the same age as Melanie Brown but there was a world of difference between the bright lights of Blackpool and the gentle Surrey town of Epsom. It was too far to commute from Goff’s Oak so Tony drove her to some lodgings.

Victoria was quite young and protected for her age. One friend from Goff’s Oak remembered, ‘She was quite naïve when she went to college, not very streetwise at all.’ She made sure she went home every weekend. Slow to settle in, she rang Mark in tears. He recalled, ‘The teachers told her she was too fat. She had put on a few pounds after going on the pill. She said the other girls were awful and she wanted to come home.’

Even the slimmest of girls would be told to watch their weight at a dancing college. It’s the last thing any young woman would want to hear but Victoria was not being singled out. She was a healthy size twelve. By no stretch of the imagination was she fat – but in dancing terms she was not one of the slender visions that glide around in tutus.

Joy Spriggs explained that dance colleges would tell all the female students that they needed to lose weight if they wanted to get work: ‘They just want the girls to be slim, particularly if they are doing lift work. The boys won’t want to lift them if they’re overweight, will they?’

The girls lived in fear of putting on a few pounds. One fellow student explained, ‘It was generally accepted that if you put on a little too much weight in the holidays then Betty would have no qualms in telling you that you were too fat and needed to sort it out ASAP. We were constantly fretting about this possibility.’

Victoria liked a McDonald’s when she was out – there was a convenient branch on Epsom High Street – and her mum’s meals when she was home. She enjoyed cooking for Mark, particularly pasta. And she loved chocolate, so dieting was not an easy prospect. Like many of her peers, she took up smoking cigarettes to try to suppress hunger pangs. It was bad enough having to deal with the teenage nightmare of acne without having to worry about weight too. She was becoming very body-conscious.

Victoria did not stand out among many fine dancers in her year but she did excel in one of the courses at Laine’s. She was the star pupil in image classes. Betty Laine explained, ‘She was always very conscious of image, which is, of course, paramount to success. If they are going into the pop world, image is very important. She took it extremely seriously. She was always first or second in our image classes.’

Now seventeen, Victoria was beginning to get a better grip on things. Her parents had bought her a Fiat Uno and some driving lessons for her birthday. They also splashed out on a flat in Epsom where she lived with four girls from college. That meant they could visit her regularly and so could Mark.

She was also developing her image and plotting her professional future. She had some photographs taken locally by Geoff Marchant, whom most of the students used for their portfolios. She knew the look she wanted or, more precisely, the one she didn’t. Geoff recalled, ‘She didn’t want to make herself girly and she didn’t want to make herself pretty-pretty. She wanted this moody sort of expression, even though it meant there was a lot of shadow, which didn’t help her skin at all.’

Eventually Geoff persuaded Victoria that it might be a good idea to smile for a few shots in case an agent down the line asked her for something more cheerful. She insisted on wearing black for almost all of the pictures, though. At the time Geoff thought she was quite a cold young lady, but his view changed: ‘I think it may well have been a mixture of shyness and determination.’

Victoria had a very privileged lifestyle. For her eighteenth-birthday treat her parents arranged for her and Mark to go by Eurostar to stay in Paris. For his twenty-first, Victoria organised a surprise dinner at a West End restaurant and invited his closest friends. They spent their summer holiday at Tony and Jackie’s villa on the Costa del Sol in southern Spain.

Mark was treated as one of the family. He was now living full time at the Old School House – a big step for an eighteen-year-old girl and an even bigger one for her parents. When they got back from Spain, looking fit and tanned, she took Mark along to see Geoff Marchant for some shots, separate and together. This time round, Victoria was much more relaxed. It seemed she had designs on her boyfriend becoming a male model, although Geoff thought he lacked the extra something to make it in that competitive world.

Victoria needed to think about her own career. Despite the very obvious advantage of having wealthy parents, she retained her own personal ambitions. During her last days at Laine’s she started trying out for professional shows and, like her peers, pored over the pages of the Stage for likely auditions. She wasn’t sure if her future lay in pop or musicals.

One advertisement caught her eye but it seemed a little ambitious. She went to a call for Bertie, a new musical starring Anita Harris about the famous music-hall performer Vesta Tilley. Victoria was auditioning to be part of the ‘company’, one of the all-singing, all-dancing members of the chorus. She had continued to develop her image: she had the look (moody), she had the costume (all black), and she had the perfect song to match (‘Mein Herr’). She had decided on the classic song from Cabaret as her principal audition piece; it would prove to be an inspired choice in the future. She liked the song particularly because she felt she could put it across well, a legacy of all the drama classes she had taken over the years. As Joy Spriggs shrewdly observed, ‘She was always very good at drama. She used to do very, very well in all of her exams. I mean, she’s acting all the time, isn’t she really? She’s acting her persona. Yes, she’s role-playing.’

To her delight, she received a phone call at the Old School House saying she had got Bertie. She had just turned nineteen and was technically still at Laine’s so this was a considerable achievement. She would be going into a real show, not killing time on a cruise ship.

Unlike Melanie Brown, who gave up her boyfriend when ambition and Blackpool beckoned, Victoria decided to get engaged. Mark maintained, ‘I knew Toria was the one for me. She was the sweetest girl I had ever met and all I wanted was for her to be my wife.’ His proposal was not a surprise because they had already designed a £1500 engagement ring together. He had also asked Tony for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

He got down on one knee at a romantic candlelit dinner at a restaurant near Tower Bridge and she accepted. Tony and Jackie threw a champagne pool party so that all their friends could celebrate the good news. Everyone seemed genuinely delighted, except perhaps her sister Louise, who had never warmed to Mark.

In her autobiography Learning to Fly, Victoria said, ‘I never for one moment thought that I would marry Mark.’ The engagement seemed to be an acknowledgement that they were in a strong relationship and was one less thing to think about when her career was moving forward. Even though they were not married, she decided to add his name to hers.

All seemed set fair during Bertie’s six-week run at the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham. Victoria was paid £250 a week, her first real wage, and was looking forward to her West End début. Without warning, the transfer to London was cancelled. It was back to the drawing board, poring over the new issue of the Stage and taking some promotional work handing out leaflets or plugging products. She even worked for the Daily Mirror on promotional visits to newsagents, wearing a T-shirt two sizes too small for her.

In August 1993 she noticed a small ad seeking a girl singer for a new group. This was six months before Chris Herbert’s. She had harboured a secret ambition to break into pop so sent in a CV and a picture of herself dressed in black, naturally, sporting a pair of sunglasses in the manner of her fashion idol Audrey Hepburn. It did the trick and she was called for an audition.

The ad had been placed by Steven Andrews, a professional model from South London, who wanted to be a pop star. Victoria sang ‘Mein Herr’ as usual and also danced to the club hit ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ by Baby D. Steven was impressed – even more so when at a call-back she stood out from a dozen other girls performing the crowd-pleasing classic ‘Band of Gold’ by Freda Payne.

Victoria was hired as lead singer, although, in a precursor for what was to happen later, nothing was signed and there was no immediate prospect of a deal. Twice a week, the new group of three boys and two girls would meet to rehearse. It proved to be an excellent grounding for her future. Steven recalled, ‘She was never late or moody. She just got on with it. Everybody pulled together.’

Steven did think that Victoria lacked confidence in front of the microphone. He was more concerned, however, that the only time she seemed to get upset was when Mark was there, sitting in. He put it down to Mark’s possessiveness and hated him turning up. A clue to Mark and Victoria’s relationship is found in the birthday card she gave him for his twenty-second birthday, which he later revealed to the world. It read, ‘I’ll still love you when you’re old! Lots of love, your Little Pop Star! Victoria xxx’

Considering how Victoria’s abilities were questioned by the media in future years, she was the only one of the future superstars who was actually already the singer in a band when Chris Herbert put the group together. That experience did not mean she was feeling positive during the audition.

She had no idea she was making an impact, although she did notice that girls with what she perceived to be far better voices were picking up their bags and melting away into the Oxford Street afternoon. Her ‘look’ was keeping her in, and the fact that she coped comfortably with the dance steps they were required to do.

After performing ‘Mein Herr’, she packed up to leave and Chris told her he would be in touch. He meant it. She might not have made as big an impression as Melanie Brown had, but she was not far behind.

4
In Search of the Magical Key

Back at the office in Lightwater, Chris started to sift through his notes and scoresheets to decide on the best twelve contenders for a second audition. The idea was to have a closer look at the probables and possibles and, obviously, come up with a final five. He couldn’t help noticing that his secretary, Louise, was still fielding calls from a persistent young woman from Watford. To his surprise, they seemed to be building a nice rapport.

Eventually Chris’s curiosity got the better of him and he told her to put the girl through. He soon discovered for himself that Geri Halliwell was a force of nature. She had seen the original advertisement in the Stage and had kept in touch to let them know how keen she was, but on the day she was nowhere to be seen.

Several possible explanations for her absence were volunteered. One was that she had been on a skiing trip and suffered sunburn. Another was that she had needed to make a flying visit to her grandmother in Spain. Chris was impressed by her audacity in keeping her foot in the door. He could see from the photos she sent in that she was sexy without being Hollywood glamorous.

‘She was very bubbly on the phone and we wanted to see her. It didn’t dawn on me at the time but I think she obviously knew she would have failed in an early-round audition and she wanted to bypass that. I think she’d worked that one out and I think that was her strategy.’

Geri almost admitted as much when she said, ‘I didn’t think I would have got an audition because my vocal technique was not very good then.’ If it was her game plan, it paid off because Chris took a chance and invited her to the call-back at Nomis Studios in West London.

Unlike Melanie Brown and Victoria Adams, Geri hadn’t spent half her time as a youngster attending dancing classes. She didn’t have any trophies and cups on the sideboard or framed photographs of her singing sweetly in a stage musical. But somewhere along the line she had developed an overwhelming desire to be famous. Chris noted, ‘She was incredibly hungry for fame.’

Geraldine Halliwell is one of the few women that Kylie Minogue could look in the eye. She is very petite – not much more than an inch or two over five feet. As a child she showed no inclination to grow. Her Spanish-born mother was so concerned at her small offspring that when Geri was nine she took her to see a specialist doctor to find out if she needed medical help. Her Spanish relatives helpfully nicknamed the little girl La Enana which translates as ‘the Dwarf’. It wasn’t exactly an improvement on her earlier pet name, Cacitas, meaning ‘Little Poos’.

Her mother, Ana Maria Hidalgo, was a stunning girl from a village near the historic city of Huesca in north-eastern Spain. She came to London when she was twenty-one to work as an au-pair and fell for the dubious charms of Laurence Halliwell, whom Geri describes as a ‘total rogue’. He was a ‘car-dealer, entrepreneur, womaniser and chancer’.

He spotted Ana in Oxford Street and decided to chat her up. He was forty-four when they married after just a seven-week courtship. He turned out not to be the successful businessman his new wife thought he was, and throughout Geri’s childhood her mother worked as a cleaner to keep the family above the breadline. Laurence had reached the age of fifty when Geraldine Estelle Halliwell was born in the maternity wing of Watford General Hospital on 6 August 1972. They already had a son, Max, five, and a daughter, Natalie, three. The family home throughout Geri’s childhood was in Jubilee Road, Watford, a ten-minute walk to the shops in St Albans Road.

The three-bedroom semi-detached house was in a sombre street in a poorer area of the town but there’s a world of difference between this part of Watford and the grim and dangerous sink estates of the north of England. Geri was a happy and outgoing child, who, as the youngest, was more than a little spoilt. She was also prone to telling little white lies, something she was still apt to do when drumming up publicity as an ambitious performer. Her one-time claim that her mum had aristocratic ancestry was just one of her good-natured fibs.

She shared a room with her big sister, who, for the most part, acted as a protector, although they were only at junior school together. They weren’t alike – Geri was far more extrovert – but they developed a strong bond that completely survived fame. Geri rather sweetly said that she was Natalie’s ‘little shadow’.

Her mum had been brought up a Catholic but was a Jehovah’s Witness throughout most of her daughter’s early years, which meant that they didn’t celebrate birthdays or Christmas or have Easter eggs. She used to take Geri with her from door to door, much to her daughter’s embarrassment. Geri had to listen to her mother cold-calling in the hope of persuading people, in her broken English, to join the faith or that the end was near. At other times she would sit next to her mum at meetings in the local Kingdom Hall and listen to Bible stories. She was delighted when Ana Maria decided it was no longer the belief for her.

Quite often in the school holidays Geri would have to go with her mum to the places she was cleaning because there was no one else to look after her. Even at a very young age she sensed the hardship her mum faced every day, trying to bring up her children properly. She learnt the value of money early, first by helping her sister with her paper round and then by starting her own when she was seven. She had already decided when she was six years old that fame was the best way to a better life for herself and her family. She described it in her book If Only as a ‘magical key’.

Apparently her inspiration as a little girl was watching Margaret Thatcher at the door of 10 Downing Street on her first day as prime minister. She watched it with her dad, who was a ‘true blue Tory’. She loved him dearly, even though he contributed little to the household. He always encouraged his little girl to give everyone a song when they were at home after Sunday lunch.

Occasionally, he would restore an old car and sell it on but he didn’t do much after a road accident left him with a bad hip when Geri was a child. He loved old movies, which he would watch on the telly, sometimes with his youngest daughter, while his long-suffering wife was at work. Geri grew up better acquainted with beautiful Hollywood greats, like Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth, than with the latest chart acts. These were the stars she would pretend to be in front of the mirror with a hairbrush. Her favourite film was the romantic blockbuster Gone with the Wind starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh as Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara. Geri vowed that one day she, too, would own a splendid mansion just like the Tara plantation house.

Laurence was distinctly old-fashioned in his musical tastes, and the house in Jubilee Road was filled with the sounds of Frank Sinatra and Benny Goodman. Geri observed, ‘It’s probably something to do with having an older father. I’ve always been different from my age group in liking that kind of music.’ He would often be mistaken for her grandfather when they were out and about.

Although she was devoted to her dad, her mum remained her role model, constantly displaying a determination to get things done. She was quite strict with Geri, which led to some mother-daughter tensions while Geri was growing up. Ana Maria didn’t support her plan to sign with a child agent, for instance, telling her she needed to think more sensibly about her future and plan a solid career.

Her parents eventually split when Geri was nine and she went to stay with her half-sister, Karen, who was Laurence’s grown-up daughter from his first marriage. After everything was sorted, she moved back to Jubilee Road while her dad settled into a grotty flat in a high-rise council block in a rougher area of the town, close to the M1. Once a week, Geri would go round to clean the place and make sure there was some milk in the fridge.

After she and Laurence divorced, Ana Maria found a new long-term boyfriend but she was always there to support Geri, if asked. Over the years she realised that trying to rein in her headstrong daughter was a thankless task. Those who came across her, when Geri had fulfilled her dream of fame, remarked that she had no airs and graces. Her future manager, Jon Fowler, observed, ‘Her mum was absolutely terrific. She was very respectful and modest – and always smiling.’

Not all her contemporaries at the Walter de Merton Junior School in Gammon Lane warmed to Geraldine, as her mother always called her, or Jez, as she liked to call herself for a while. One classmate described her as a ‘show-off with a big mouth’. Another threatened to throw her over the railway line until a teacher intervened. Others, though, found her sociable and fun – a natural leader who would bring out the best in everyone.

One of her close friends at the school, Sarah Gorman, recalled that they would go round to each other’s houses for tea and used to play kiss-chase with the boys in the playground.

Despite her small stature, Geri was a demon on the netball court and used to play centre because she was so nimble and nippy. She retained a strong affection for her junior school and returned there in 2008 to read to pupils from the first of her Ugenia Lavender books for children: ‘I felt more nervous reading than I ever did performing as the Spice Girls.’ She even included one of her favourite teachers, Mrs Flitt, as a character in the book.

Even though Walter de Merton had become Beechfield School, it still retained a strong link with its famous former pupil and one of the houses is called Halliwell House.

Before she left junior school, Geri went to her first concert when she joined Natalie to see Wham! on the Big Tour at the NEC, Birmingham, in December 1984. George Michael was performing the number-one single ‘Freedom’ and when he got to the last line, he pointed at Geri and sang, ‘Girl, all I want right now is you.’ She fell in love and decided on the spot that they were going to get married. Every night she would give a poster of him on her bedroom wall a goodnight kiss before getting into bed. Many of her classmates fancied Andrew Ridgeley and would gather outside his parents’ house a couple of miles away in Bushey but Geri’s heart always belonged to George.

Her devotion to George also coincided with her discovery of Madonna, whose flamboyant image would be a considerable influence on her. Even as a young teenager she could identify with the artist who had become the most famous woman in pop, even though she was by no means the best singer or dancer. Instead she had a fantastic image.

After Walter de Merton, Geri was expected to follow her brother and sister to the nearby Leggatts Way Secondary Modern but she had other ideas. She asked her mum if she could try for a place at Watford Grammar School for Girls and surprised everyone by being accepted. It was an early indication that Geraldine Halliwell was someone who could make things happen.

The one drawback was that she lost touch with most of her primary-school classmates, but Geri’s lack of shyness ensured she made friends easily. The new school also gave her the opportunity to discover drama. Growing up, there had been no money for dance classes or music lessons so the highlight of her performance career to date was pretending to be Sandy from Grease and singing ‘Summer Nights’ in assembly at junior school.

Now, she was being encouraged to appreciate Shakespeare, and a trip to watch A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park was one of the highlights of her time at Watford Grammar. The school was one of the best in the area: founded in 1704 as a charity school, it had an excellent academic reputation.

Geri passed an impressive eight GCSEs, without particularly applying herself. She had no desire to continue a formal education by going on to study for A-levels, Instead she decided to follow her sister Natalie and go to the local Casio College in Langley Road, Watford, which Andrew Ridgeley had attended a few years before. If she had been a bit older Geri might have seen him and George Michael perform there with their original band, the Executive.

Geri studied a curious mixture of finance, travel and tourism, which didn’t suit her. She decided that she was just wasting precious time, promptly left and started dancing. She had no proper training so would just improvise and hope for the best. She had developed a curvaceous figure and was soon noticed around the London clubs. She was paid £40 for dancing on a Saturday night – and Sunday morning – at the Crazy Club and the house-music extravaganzas held at the Astoria in Charing Cross Road.

Geri moved out of Jubilee Road, staying for a while in a terraced house owned by her half-sister Karen and her husband in the Watford suburb of South Oxhey. She had to leave after she had invited everyone in the Game Bird pub to a party at the house. Word got round: two hundred people turned up and wrecked the place. Shamefaced, Geri moved into a squat on a nearby council estate.

Newly independent, Geri had to buy her own food. This was not necessarily a good thing because she was worrying for the first time about her weight. As a result, she did something she later claimed was ‘the biggest mistake of my life’ – she went on a diet. The trigger had been a throwaway remark by one of her fellow dancers about her being a bit plump. She had been a fussy eater as a child – avoiding vegetables if she could – but at least then her mum, who could be quite strict, could keep an eye on her. Left to her own devices she wasn’t eating properly at all.

At least she was saving money. She much preferred to spend what little she had on going out. These were carefree times in the late eighties and Geri became an enthusiastic embracer of the ‘Second Summer of Love’. This was the acid-house culture that had sprung up during 1988 and ballooned into the giant illegal rave events around the M25. Watford was the perfect starting point for dressing up, piling into cars and vans and heading off to the next party location. The Game Bird in Hartspring Lane was close to the M1 and the best kicking-off point in the area – no wonder Geri’s party was mobbed.

Geri was sixteen when she went to her first rave and at seventeen was an old hand. But her cavalier outlook on life took a temporary knock when she discovered a small lump in her right breast and needed an emergency operation to have it removed. Fortunately, it was benign but Geri always felt she was one of the lucky ones and, in the future, would strongly encourage young women to be mindful of breast cancer and make sure they checked their breasts regularly.

She found out that she could earn more money abroad so decided to try her luck in the fashionable Mediterranean clubs. At nineteen, she was a dancer at the world-famous BCM Planet Dance club in Magaluf. ‘Dancing’ is a loose term because in effect she was writhing around in a cage ten feet or so above the dance floor. To begin with, she was given a week’s trial by the manager but soon proved to be one of the most popular dancers, dressed in a variety of wigs, bra tops and leather shorts. Geri, it seemed, had mastered the art of flirtation. As one of her close friends observed, ‘She was very good at making you feel special.’

Rather like Melanie Brown in Blackpool, Geri seemed to enjoy her freedom away from her home town and, by all accounts, had a wild few months in the Spanish sun. Kelly Smith, another of her friends from those days, recalled, ‘She was a party animal and didn’t mind showing herself off.’

Aside from dancing in a cage, Geri was doing little more than thousands of teenagers enjoying a month or two in the Spanish sun. It was a rite of passage but, despite the fun, she didn’t lose her focus or ambition.

During her time in Mallorca, she shared a flat with another dancer who had some topless pictures taken by a local photographer. Geri decided to do the same. She had visions of becoming a star in the very lucrative world of glamour modelling. Perhaps this would be her passport to the fame she so desperately wanted – she never tired of telling people she was going to achieve it. Kelly remarked, ‘We thought it was funny when she went on and on about becoming a big star.’

On her return to England, she signed up with what she called the ‘dodgiest agency you could imagine’ but secured one or two decent jobs, including a jeans advert. She also did a Page 3 session for the Sun but the shots weren’t used. Geri found the topless work boring. She told the chat show host Michael Parkinson, ‘I found it very dull – standing there with a window open to keep your nipples firm was not good.’ She had to navigate a dodgy world of casting agents who for no good reason would ask her to strip at auditions for non-nude parts. On these occasions she would make a rapid exit.

Another drawback was the constant scrutiny of her shape. Apparently a photographer made a casual remark about her weight and that was all it took for Geri once again to believe she was fat. Her sparky, fearless demeanour masked an all-too-familiar story of vulnerability.

She was already displaying a fearsome energy that never seemed to run out. She had been moved out of the squat by the council and needed to earn to pay the rent on her tiny flat in another unappetising part of town. She taught aerobics, waited tables, washed hair, and found time to do a day course in television presenting run by Reuters.

Her modelling shots led to her next opportunity, providing the glamour on a Turkish game show. It was called Sec Bakalim and was a version of the old US show Let’s Make a Deal. The producer apparently noticed Geri’s photographs and offered her a job that involved flying to Istanbul every weekend. He told her that she would not be wearing a swimsuit – or less – but a tasteful evening gown. She would also have to ‘love that fridge’. Geri, who was struggling to pay the rent, needed the money so she jumped at the chance to earn a couple of hundred pounds a show.

She wasn’t the presenter. She was the attractive young woman in a movie star dress, who smiled in front of the prizes that the contestants were trying to win. An unexpected bonus was that she was asked for her autograph for the very first time. She enjoyed the experience. Spending time in Istanbul was no hardship and she decided she would accept the role again if she was asked back.

She acquired new representation, Talking Heads in Barnes, run by broadcaster and voiceover maestro John Sachs and well-known agent Anthony Blackburn. They readily saw how appealing Geri was. She was still devouring the Stage every week and going to auditions. One was for a small part in a West End comedy. It didn’t go well but, significantly, the director asked her, ‘Geri, what’s the last thing you’ve read? I bet it was Cosmopolitan.’ And it was.

She resolved to catch up on her education and so, at the age of twenty, enrolled for an English-language course at Watford College in Hempstead Road. She had grown up a lot and, for the first time, felt she ‘understood the wealth and power of words’. She studied Hamlet, loved Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence, and discovered the genius of Oscar Wilde.

She was in class when she received the message from her brother that their dad had died. She had just got back from a weekend in Istanbul where she was working on her second game-show season. She said, ‘I was distraught. I felt that he had been snatched away from me.’ She has talked openly about her grief and specifically being in denial that he had gone, even though she went to visit his body at the hospital.

Her description of seeing his body is heartbreaking: ‘He was lying there and all his nails were black – everything was black. His features were sunk. He looked like the Penguin in the film Batman II. It is a horrible memory of my father. It was hideous.’

She dragged herself into college and even joined everyone on a class trip to the West End to see Alan Cumming’s outstanding portrayal of Hamlet at the Donmar Warehouse. The actor would go on to become a familiar figure on British television through his starring roles in US series, including The Good Wife and Instinct. His 1993 Hamlet, however, was arguably the highlight of his career. Geri was enthralled and forgot her own tragedy for a precious hour or two.

After her father’s death, she suffered from bouts of both bulimia and anorexia. She was so down. ‘I wanted to kill myself. I could not function. It was awful.’ She started wearing black, not so much as a gesture of mourning but because she hoped it would make her look thinner. An unnamed family member remembered that Geri at this time would refer to herself as ‘Fatso’. She was getting by on cigarettes and black coffee.

Even her agents noticed how thin she was, although both John and Anthony thought it was because she couldn’t afford to eat properly, rather than anything more serious. They would try to encourage her to have a sandwich when she came to the office.

Outwardly, Geri appeared her normal bubbly self. She continued to go for auditions that she thought might suit her. She went to one to appear in a backing video for Pink Floyd. At another, she met one of the wannabes who would become a Spice Girl. She joined Victoria at a movie call for Tank Girl, loosely based on the comic strip. Once again it was an advertisement in the Stage proclaiming that they were looking for ‘the star of this futuristic action feature film’. The role had already been earmarked for the established actress Lori Petty, who had starred with Madonna in A League of Their Own, so this was little more than a crude publicity exercise for the movie.

Needless to say neither Geri nor Victoria was cast, which was a lucky break as the film ‘tanked’, only earning a quarter of its $25 million production costs. For her part Geri decided not to go back for another season to Turkey – and also called time on any future topless modelling. Her Page 3 ambitions were at an end.

The problem she faced moving forward was: what could she actually do? She might not have been drinking in the Last Chance saloon but she was certainly in the bar next door. Perhaps this pop group might be something.

5
Melanie Chisholm Superstar

The best-laid plans for the call-back were slightly disrupted when Chris was told one of the shortlist couldn’t make it. Joan O’Neill had rung from her Merseyside home to tell him that her daughter Melanie Chisholm had tonsillitis. Melanie obviously couldn’t speak to him herself because she was under strict orders to rest her voice. Chris had been impressed by her vitality at the first audition and was able to reassure Joan that her daughter was not going to lose this opportunity.

Melanie Chisholm lived and breathed dancing. Growing up, it was her pastime and her passion and she was brilliant at it. But, secretly, she wanted to be a singer like her mum.

Joan was already making a name for herself around the pubs and working men’s clubs of Merseyside before her eldest daughter was born. At the end of the sixties, she had joined a band called Petticoat and Vine, which is best described as a folk-rock group in the tradition of the Mamas and the Papas. She was then going by her maiden name of Joan Tuffley – although in those days she was billed professionally as Kathy Ford.

Norman Smeddles, the guitarist and leader of the group, decided they should have two female lead singers. His girlfriend and future wife, Val, was one and Joan became the other. They were blonde, pretty, and excellent singers. Norman recalled, ‘Joan was a typical Scouser with a quick wit and was not slow to speak her mind.’

Joan’s voice had a touch of Roberta Flack about it, and she adored Motown artists, particularly the cool and melodious Smokey Robinson, whom she called ‘Smokey Robbo’, much to everyone’s amusement. She was so skinny that her friends used to refer to her as Joan the Bone.

They secured a record deal with the Philips label in 1970 and released a début single called ‘Riding a Carousel’, a pleasant enough song. It led to their TV début in October that year on The Harry Secombe Show, alongside other guests Jimmy Tarbuck and the popular Irish singer Clodagh Rogers.

Joan cheekily managed to buttonhole Jimmy and secure an invitation for the group to appear on his own show. All was going well and national stardom beckoned. The one potential difficulty was that Joan had fallen in love with Alan Chisholm, whom she had met one evening at the Cavern Club, arguably the most famous music venue in the country, thanks to the Beatles’ performances there.

As Petticoat and Vine became better known, they had to spend more time in London, which didn’t suit Joan at all. She wanted to get back up to Liverpool to see Alan as much as possible, which led to some tensions within the band. When the group were offered a tour of Canada, she decided to leave. Ironically, the trip across the Atlantic never happened, but Petticoat and Vine battled on, eventually calling it a day in 1973. Norman and Val went on to achieve greater exposure with a new line-up called Champagne, a light group that was more Eurovision than anything psychedelic. They appeared on Opportunity Knocks, The Morecambe and Wise Show and The Jim Davidson Show but didn’t make a chart breakthrough. Val and Norman continued to enjoy a career as Champagne, touring internationally as well as remaining popular on their native Merseyside.

Meanwhile, Joan had married Alan, who worked as a fitter for the Otis Elevator Company in Liverpool, and settled into a neat semi in Kendall Drive, Rainhill, a suburb about ten miles from the city centre. Their daughter Melanie Jayne Chisholm was born at the nearby Whiston Hospital on 12 January 1974. She was always Melanie – never Mel.

Money was tight, especially when Joan and Alan split up when Melanie was three. She had to divide her time between the two and felt something of an outsider in both homes: ‘I felt like I was in the way and I had to make my own life and be independent.’

Home was a series of flats on council estates in some of the rougher areas of Runcorn. When they moved a few miles south to Widnes, she went to Fairfield Primary School in Peel House Lane and was able to move further along the road to start senior school at Fairfield County High. Joan found work as a secretary with the local Knowsley borough council but she didn’t give up singing or performing. She found new love with a taxi driver, Den O’Neill, who was a bass guitarist, a bit of a rocker and another familiar figure in local music venues. They set up home together in a small terraced house in Widnes.

Den already had two sons, Jad (Jarrod) and Stuart, from his first marriage. He and Joan married while she was pregnant with their son Paul. Melanie’s father Alan also married again and his new wife Carole had two boys, Liam and Declan. That meant Melanie was the only girl with five brothers. She didn’t know until she was a Spice Girl that she had a secret sister called Emma, Alan’s daughter from another relationship, who was brought up quietly in Llandudno, North Wales.

Melanie later admitted that she felt a little isolated when her father remarried and started a second family – caught between two households and feeling, temporarily, that she was ‘completely alone’. Looking back as an adult, she thought that even though her parents never bad-mouthed one another and relations were amicable, she started to blame herself for their divorce.

For a while, she might have given her mother a tough time, shrieking, ‘I want my dad,’ if she wasn’t getting her own way, but Joan and Melanie have a strong mother-and-daughter bond. According to Melanie, they are similar because they’re both ‘dead soft’. Her mum was also a terrific cook and, unusually among their friends in Widnes, she owned a wok. She introduced her daughter to Chinese food, which Melanie loves.

Melanie was also particularly close to her brother Paul, who, with her support, would grow up to be an ace racing driver and engaging TV commentator. They weren’t always best buddies, of course. She used to punch him when he farted. He hated her habit of cracking her knuckles constantly, especially if she was anxious about something. There was a mutual respect, however, and he would always tell her to stand up for herself even though he was five years younger.

Joan didn’t give up singing. She and Den formed various bands over the years, including Love Potion, with friend Stan Alexander, who had once been a guitarist with do-wop band Darts. They released a single on Polydor in 1977 entitled ‘Face, Name, Number’, written by Stan. The song was one of the light disco songs of the time that might have been recorded by a seventies group like the Real Thing. It made a few ripples but didn’t reach the charts. Joan also sang with the Ken Phillips Country Band, was in a group called T-Junction and yet another, River Deep, which was a tribute to Tina Turner and named after her most famous hit ‘River Deep Mountain High’.

From an early age, Melanie was used to musicians popping into the house to catch up and rehearse. She would lie in bed and listen to the bass line throbbing through the floorboards. She used to go to watch her mother perform: ‘I’d sit at the front, miming every word she sang. I felt quite special – you know, when you just want to go, “That’s my mum!”’

Joan 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.

She didn’t much feel like singing when she had to take holiday jobs to help pay for her clothes and dancing. One of the worst was when her dad Alan moved into the tourism industry and found work as a holiday rep in France and Spain. That meant great vacations in the summer but she had to earn her spending money. One particularly unpleasant task when she was fourteen was collecting the dirty sheets from a Spanish apartment block where Alan was working. It was worth it, though, because she loved the continental lifestyle – late dinners and playing in the squares of picturesque villages – all a far cry from Widnes, where not many of her friends went abroad. ‘I felt a bit sophisticated,’ she admitted.

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.

Melanie wasn’t entirely happy playing Mrs Lyons, the wealthy woman who persuades her cleaner to let her raise one of her twin boys as her own; she would have preferred to be cast as ‘the Scouse mum’, as she called Mrs Johnstone. The main character had all the best songs and was played over the years by some famous names in musical theatre, including Stephanie Lawrence, Marti Webb and Barbara Dickson. Melanie was determined that one day she would have the starring role and sing the unforgettable ‘Tell Me It’s Not True’.

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.

Throughout her childhood and into her teenage years, Melanie won many dancing trophies. She kept her dancing world separate from school but two evenings a week and the whole of Saturday were set aside for classes. Originally she wanted to be a ballerina but realised as she got older that she was better suited to being one of the dancers on Top of the Pops, which, naturally, she watched every week.

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.

She impressed at her audition at the Doreen Bird College of Performing Arts in Sidcup, Kent. This was another such school founded in the post-war years by a strong-minded woman, who became much admired in the dancing world. Melanie’s audition notes read, ‘Melanie has a nice appeal. She is strong with a flexible body. Her audition piece was very nice. She is very bright and has good potential. Should do well.’ When she applied, Melanie had to mention her ambitions in entertainment and wrote, ‘I want to play Rumpleteazer in the musical Cats – the part Bonnie Langford played – and to record.’

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 Rink. She was delighted when the audience started whooping: ‘In that moment, I knew I wanted to 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
A Model Girl

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 a cat’s chorus. To their surprise, Chris, Bob and Chic seemed a little hard of hearing that day, although the purpose of the get-together was to see if they had a future, not how they sounded in the present. As Chris explained, ‘We wanted to create a band as a unit so it did not matter so much if, individually, they weren’t so strong.’ It went well enough for Chris to move on to the next stage.

He booked the five into a bed-and-breakfast in Knaphill, Woking, which was a few miles down the road from the Heart offices. Ostensibly the week was for them to rehearse, but that was only part the plan: ‘It was just for them to spend a little time together, and see whether they actually got on and started to bond. Initially we wanted to observe and see if there was something there or if we had to make changes.’

He introduced them to working together in a studio, picking them up from the B&B and dropping them off at Trinity Studios nearby. That sounded grander than it actually was. It was little more than a glorified village hall in urgent need of a lick of paint and a decent central-heating system. The building had once been a dance studio, so at least provided the space for the five girls to hone their dancing skills. Trinity was run day to day by Ian Lee, who remembered that first week: ‘They were like five schoolgirls – a bit giggly and a bit insecure.’

After a general discussion, it was decided that for the moment they would be called Touch, a pretty uninspiring name – sounding more like a group who would perform at Eurovision than one that would inspire a generation of female devotees. Chris was keen, though, for the group to have a five-letter name. More significantly, he began putting together a team who could help shape their future during this training period.

Once more the Three Degrees provided the link. He asked their former musical director, Erwin Keiles, to come up with a song or two to get the girls started. The first they had to learn was called ‘Take Me Away’, a mid-tempo unchallenging number. Chris brought in the gloriously named Pepi Lemer, a coach of considerable experience and a backing singer since the sixties, when she missed out on stardom.

Pepi realised that collectively the girls had a lot of work to do: ‘I remember them being quite attractive in their various ways but terribly nervous. They were shaking and, when they sang, their voices were wobbling. It has to be said that they weren’t very good.’ At the end of the week, Touch gave Chris, Bob and Chic an exclusive performance of that first song. They were dressed in a manner that would, in the future, never work for the Spice Girls – they were colour-coordinated in black and white. They were the Five Degrees.

It was all exciting, though. Apart from Michelle, this was a bunch of seasoned auditionees, thrilled that they were involved in something so new. Even the cosy, old-style guesthouse was stirred by their vitality. Victoria shared a room with Geri, who complained that she was taking up all the space with her two suitcases full of designer clothes. They clicked immediately. ‘You must come with me to a car-boot sale,’ said Geri – as if that was ever going to happen.

Victoria was the first of the five to give Chris some concern when he found out that she was already in a band called Persuasion. He told her that she needed to make a decision: ‘Are you in or are you out?’ Victoria was much cannier than people realised. She kept her options open just in case Touch came to nothing. She told Persuasion that she was going away on holiday for a week or two and would have to miss rehearsals.

Chris had to keep his fingers crossed where Victoria was concerned but another potential problem was building within the group. Four of the girls – Geri, Victoria and the two Melanies – were getting on famously but the fifth, Michelle, was becoming more distant. This was not the gelling unit Chris wanted: ‘Even when they broke for lunch or a coffee break, the four would be inside having a coffee and Michelle would be outside. She seemed a bit separated from the others. We spotted it and thought there was a problem developing even during that initial week.’

A bigger concern was their lack of progress at Trinity Studios. Clearly they needed much more time to practise and improve. Chic came up with the solution. He happened to have a spare three-bedroom house in Maidenhead. The girls could move in right away. It was basically a drab semi on a grey estate in Boyne Hill Road. Geri had clearly already had enough of sharing and bagged the tiny single room for herself. She was the oldest so there was no argument. Michelle and Victoria bounded up the stairs and managed to grab the twin-bedded room. That left Melanie Brown having to put up with Melanie Chisholm snoring away in one double room. Having two Melanies in the group was slightly problematic especially as they both preferred the longer version of the name. Chris began to call Melanie Brown ‘Mel B’ to help differentiate between the two.

Relations within Touch continued to slide throughout the first month. The gang of four were exasperated by what they perceived as Michelle’s lack of commitment. She wasn’t putting in the work to improve her dancing, preferring, they said, to top up her tan at lunchtimes rather than copy Geri’s lead and practise hard to try to catch up with the dance-school veterans. Perhaps, tellingly, Michelle still had every intention of going to university in the autumn. She also had a Saturday job in Harrods that she didn’t give up.

Melanie Brown, in particular, tried to motivate her but in the end the gang of four felt they had no choice other than to express their misgivings to Chris and Bob, echoing the thoughts the Herberts already had. Bob explained, ‘She would never have gelled so we had to let her go.’

Did Michelle go of her own accord? Was she pushed? Or was it a mutual decision? There were two sides to the story. While it was true that the other girls questioned her desire, Michelle, herself, was struggling with a family crisis – her mother Penny had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She was also the youngest of the group – five years younger than Geri. There’s a world of difference between just leaving school and hosting a game show on Turkish TV.

Michelle went travelling around Europe before starting her degree. She has had to live with the label of being the Spice Girl who wasn’t – although, at the time, Touch was nothing like the Spice Girls. She didn’t enjoy the music they were rehearsing, considering it far too poppy for her taste. She was not a fan of Take That, for instance, much preferring the harder edge of Oasis and the Prodigy. She later told Neil Davies that she became frustrated by the slowness of it all and she ‘didn’t think the girls would make it’. She added simply, ‘I had different plans for my future.’

Of the four who remained, Victoria was by far the rudest about Michelle, describing her voice as ‘cruise-ship operatic’, her dancing as ‘having less rhythm than a cement mixer’ and saying that she ‘couldn’t be arsed to improve’. The normally more outspoken Mel B described her as ‘sweet, very upper class and very well turned out’. In fact, Michelle was probably more posh than Victoria, although she didn’t have the wardrobe full of designer labels. Michelle remarked, ‘Victoria had some beautiful clothes.’

Michelle has made her own way in music. She has recorded her own songs, acted as a backing singer for Ricky Martin and Julio Iglesias and presented for Channel 4. She once said, ‘Of course I regret I’m not a multi-millionaire like them. But at the time I left the group I knew I was doing the right thing – and I still think it was the right thing.’

Eight years after she left, Chris and Shelley were in the Pitcher and Piano bar in Richmond when he recognised the waitress. It was Michelle. He recalled, ‘We shared a fond welcome and had a good chat.’ By that time, they both had cause for some regret. She would continue to be involved in music by hosting club nights before eventually marrying Hugh Gadsden, the manager of Madness.

Michelle’s departure created a vacancy. Chris and Bob didn’t go back to their original shortlist but decided to try to find someone new. They still wanted a five-piece band but they couldn’t face going through a drawn-out audition process again just to find one girl so they asked Pepi Lemer if she could think of anyone. She could – one of her former students, Abigail Kis, a half-Hungarian girl with a stunning, soulful voice.

She proved to be a non-starter. She had a steady boyfriend who, by all accounts, was not that keen on her moving into the house in Maidenhead. She also had a place at university to study performing arts, which seemed a better option for her. With hindsight, she was probably a fraction too young, and putting a boyfriend first was not in keeping with the ethos of the rest of the band. She became another ‘fifth’ Spice Girl, observing sadly, ‘I would have loved to be that famous. Every time I see them I think, “It could have been me.”’

While they searched for the right replacement, there was some good news for Chris when Victoria told him she had decided once and for all that her future lay with his all-girl band and not with Persuasion. She had talked things over with her parents and realised that everything was much more professional with the Herberts and she could not keep both going if she was going to continue living in Maidenhead. This was business and she seemed to have no compunction in ditching her former bandmates.

Nothing was etched in stone as far as the make-up of the new group was concerned. It seemed a good idea, however, that the fifth member should be the youngest – thereby lowering the average age of the five. It was back to the drawing board for Pepi, whose next thought was a bubbly blonde girl she had taught three years previously at Barnet College. She remembered that her name was Emma Bunton but, in those pre-Facebook days, had no idea how to contact her. She had to pop into the college to search through old records before eventually coming up with a phone number. Emma’s mother, Pauline Bunton, answered and Pepi explained that she wanted to invite her daughter to try out for a new girl group.

Emma was thrilled to be asked. She had the advantage of being another stage-school veteran and had attended many auditions. Chris drove over to North London to meet her and her mum, and they had a pleasant chat over a coffee before going back to Pepi’s house where Emma sang ‘Right Here’, a top-three hit in the UK the previous year for the all-girl American R&B trio SWV (Sisters with Voices). It was a good choice. Chris Herbert thought she was perfect: ‘She was very cute, very nice with a sweet voice, a very “pop” voice. I really liked her character a lot. It was one of those light-bulb moments when I realised she was definitely something we didn’t have. It was immediate for me.’

Chris had to explain, though, that it all depended on her being accepted by the other four. They would have to look at the dynamic between her and the current residents of the house in Maidenhead. One thing stood in her favour – that she was from a working-class background in North London. When Emma Lee Bunton was born in the Victoria Maternity Hospital, Barnet, on 23 January 1976, her father, Trevor, was a delivery driver. She would be the youngest of Touch but was actually older than Michelle.

Trevor subsequently became a milkman and sometimes took his daughter out on his rounds during the school holidays. Her mother did her bit for the family finances, working as a home help for a well-to-do local woman. Pauline was raised in Barnet but her father – Emma’s grandfather – was Irish, Séamus Davitt, from County Wexford. They were Catholic and Emma had a traditional baptism and attended mass growing up. Sadly, she never knew her grandfather, who died before she was born.

She has an older half-brother, Robert Bunton, from Trevor’s first marriage and she would go to the park and watch them play football in the local league at weekends. Her younger brother, Paul James, known as PJ, is four years her junior and the two of them are very close. They shared a room until Emma was twelve. Because money was tight they sometimes needed to share their dinner as well.

Emma might have been the baby of the new band but, more relevantly, she had the most extensive CV. She seemed to have been in showbusiness all her life. She was a natural blonde and a very photogenic little girl, who was much in demand as a child model, getting work from the age of two onwards.

Pauline had done some modelling when she was a child so it seemed natural to sign her daughter up with the prestigious Norrie Carr agency, putting aside Emma’s earnings so that she would have a nest egg when she was older. In the end the money proved invaluable when she needed fees for theatre school. Over the years Emma featured in so many promotions that it was a rare household that hadn’t come across a picture of her cherubic face plugging some product or business, or on the front cover of a magazine in the dentist’s surgery.

She was the poster girl for Outspan oranges, the girlfriend of the Milky Bar Kid, smiling sweetly on the tins of Heinz Invaders spaghetti-shapes and standing next to a pretend mum in ads for Mothercare and Argos. She was a cover girl for Woman’s Weekly and Womancraft magazine. She was the face of best-selling games including and, arguably most famously, the timeless favourite Pop Up Pirate. One of the agents at Norrie Carr said, ‘She never stopped working and had that special something we were looking for. She had a twinkle in her eye and loved the camera.’

Hardly a week would go by when Emma wasn’t whisked out of school so that her mum could take her off to a shoot. If it was in the West End, she always made sure to include a trip to the Science or Natural History Museum to make sure her little girl wasn’t falling behind in her educational progress. She was at St Theresa’s, a Catholic primary school in East End Road, Finchley, close to the North Circular Road.

Emma loved her modelling days, spending time with the other boys and girls or sometimes inviting her own friends along to join her. Occasionally someone at school might be jealous if they saw her picture in a catalogue but mostly she had a very happy childhood. It helped that she developed such a close bond with her mum. Emma said, ‘She’s got such a soft nature, so unselfish. But she’s also a very solid person.’ The biggest drama for her parents came when she was hit by a car at the age of four. She needed hospital treatment and still has a scar on her leg as a permanent reminder of a lucky escape.

One huge bonus of modelling was that every year from the age of about six until she was twelve she was one of ten boys and girls chosen to shoot a catalogue abroad for two weeks. Family summer holidays were always spent in a caravan in Clacton-on-Sea so trips to Corsica, Lanzarote and Mallorca were very exciting for a young girl.

Emma’s other great love was dancing. She had started ballet classes aged three and had a natural talent. When she was five, her mum had spotted a flyer locally for the Kay School of Dance in Finchley and managed to enrol her daughter even though she was younger than the other children there. She was always far more interested in ballet, tap and disco dancing than in taking part in any sports at school. Her parents could only afford the ballet lessons but the school gave her the other classes for free. Her early ambition to be a professional dancer was dashed at fourteen when she fell and injured her back. By coincidence, when she was eight she came across Victoria Adams once or twice in dancing competitions in North London.

When she was ten, Emma was accepted by the Sylvia Young Theatre School, which had rapidly become one of the leading performing-arts schools in the country. Sylvia was an East Ender from Whitechapel and had originally become involved with teaching by organising fundraisers for her daughter’s primary school in Wanstead. She enjoyed that so much, she moved on to charging 10p a lesson for talented local youngsters. In 1981 she started a Saturday school in Drury Lane but that soon proved so popular that she decided to look for a permanent base. Two years later she took over a disused former Church of England primary school just north of Marylebone station in Rossmore Road.

Sylvia liked to call her pupils her ‘babies’ or ‘young ’uns’, which led her to adopt Sylvia Young as her professional name. Legend has it that she expelled her own daughter, Frances Ruffelle, from the school for being ‘disruptive’, although the award-winning actress and singer was already eighteen when the permanent school was founded. Discipline, however, was an important ingredient of life at Sylvia Young’s – not so much abiding by a long list of rules but, more importantly, cultivating an ability to work hard and be a step ahead of the competition in the tough world of entertainment.

Sylvia was always looking for ‘someone who has a certain amount of ability but is trainable’ – mirroring Chris Herbert’s expectations for his girl group. Another mantra from the school also fitted perfectly with his strategy: ‘If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.’

She also insisted that her students learn everything equally so they could audition for a television soap one day and for a new pop group the next. It’s easy to see how Emma would be a perfect candidate for Touch.

By the time Emma joined Sylvia Young in 1985, the school seemed to have a direct conveyor-belt to Central Casting for some of the most popular programmes on television – if you needed a young Londoner for a market stall in Albert Square, Sylvia’s establishment was the first place to look. Adam Woodyatt (Ian Beale), Nick Berry (Simon Wickes) and Letitia Dean (Sharon Watts) were just three of the alumni who became household names in EastEnders.

You had to be good to be accepted at the school in the first place, passing an audition, an interview and a written test. Her mum waited nervously in the street outside throughout the process and was as pleased as Emma when she was accepted. Parents had to be able to afford the fees, which weren’t cheap and were an obvious drain on the Bunton family finances. It didn’t help matters when Pauline and Trevor split up a year later, although he still lived locally and, according to Emma, the disruption to her life was minimal. She remained on very good terms with her dad throughout her teenage years. Pauline retrained as a martial-arts teacher and taught her daughter the finer points of Goju-kai karate. Emma might look sweet but you wouldn’t want to get on her wrong side.

Apparently much more traumatic than her parents’ split was the news that she would have to leave the theatre school because her mum and dad could no longer pay. She was enrolled for a week or two at a local secondary school, which she hated. ‘I cried so much,’ she later said. All ended well when she was awarded a scholarship back to Sylvia’s.

By this time Emma and her mum had moved to a third-floor flat on a small estate in Rogers Walk. There was no garden so Emma and her friends would spend a lot of time in the local park. One of her best friends as a young teenager was Kellie Bright, then another budding actress. They would spend weekends at Alexandra Palace in North London, roller-skating or messing about in the rowing boats on the lake. Much later Kellie would become one of the best-known faces on British TV playing Linda Carter, landlady of the Queen Vic pub in Albert Square.

Another classmate was star actress Keeley Hawes, the daughter of a London cab driver, who lived in a three-bedroom council flat practically across the road from the school in Marylebone. She and Emma were London girls and became firm friends; Keeley was a welcome guest at the caravan in Clacton. She, too, had won a scholarship to Sylvia Young’s. In those days she didn’t sound anything like her famous creations, Mrs Durrell in The Durrells or the home secretary, Julia Montague, in Bodyguard. A series of elocution lessons gave her the cut-glass vowels of one of television’s most recognisable voices.

When she left Sylvia Young’s, though, she became a model before her breakthrough as an actress, and didn’t need to speak. She had been working in the fashion department of Cosmopolitan

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