Mel C’s ‘disgusting’ comment to Victoria Beckham almost led to her being kicked out of Spice Girls
Topics: Celebrity, Victoria Beckham, Spice Girls, Music
Rhiannon Ingle
Featured Image Credit: John Stanton/WireImage
Topics: Celebrity, Victoria Beckham, Spice Girls, Music
Mel C has opened up about the 'disgusting' comment to her bandmate Victoria Beckham that almost led to her being kicked out of the Spice Girls.
The 52-year-old singer, who makes up 1/5 of the best-selling girl group of all time, recently sat down to discuss what almost cost her her career on The Louis Theroux Podcast.
Delving back into the 1990s, Louis, 56, opened up the discussion saying: "There was a moment where you were policed by the bandmates. They felt, and it sounds so trivial, you’d taken your hair out, so you no longer had a ponytail.
"This was before you even had released any music, but you were at the Brits, so you were under scrutiny, and your fellow bandmates thought, 'What are you doing? You’re f*cking with the look of the band. We’ve all got certain hair that we have."
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Louis continued: "And they criticised you, and you told one of them to f*ck off, and then the next day they all came on very heavy, sort of telling you that you were out of line, your behaviour was disgusting."
Mel C, who was in the band alongside Victoria, Mel B, Geri Halliwell and Emma Bunton, recalled waking up in 'terror' after being convinced she was about to 'lose everything' after that fateful night.
"You know, those dreams as a child, which now were a possibility, I might have f*cked it all up," she explained.
"And I thought it was very trivial as well because, to put some more meat on the bones of that evening, it was the Brit Awards in 1996, which fall around February time. So, we hadn’t released anything. Nobody in the public knew us.
"But in the industry, people had started talking, and we were there, signed to Virgin Records, and we were sitting at a table with Lenny Kravitz. Obviously, we were these young girls, so this was an amazing night for us. We had a great night."
The group, who were all in their early-20s at the time, enjoyed a 'few champagnes' that night with Mel C continuing: "We were going to find our car and whatever the situation was, I just turned around and said to Victoria, 'Oh, f*ck off'.
"Unbeknownst to me, go home, go to bed, wake up the next morning, and I was in a lot of trouble."
Mel C, who has since gone on to launch a very successful solo music career, had been living with Mel B at the time, with Geri living nearby, woke up to her two bandmates giving her a pretty serious debrief of the previous night's events.
"They were just disgusted with my behaviour," she shared. "You know when you’ve had a night out, and you wake up in the morning, and you’ve got beer fear, right?. You think, 'Oh, f*ck, I know what I did last night'.
"I didn’t even have that. I just woke up going, 'Oh, last, last night was fun,' where I had completely brushed off that situation.
"But obviously, it had really affected people in a way I hadn’t realised."
And the hangxiety-inducing ordeal didn't stop there as Mel C was later pulled into band manager Simon Fuller's office where he informed her 'in no uncertain terms' that 'if anything ever happened like that again, I would be gone'.
"So that completely freaked me out, one, because I didn’t realise I’d done anything that terribly bad, and two, because my actions may have led to me losing everything I’d ever wanted, you know?" she added.
Fortunately, the band were able to put the drama in the past as they went on to sell 100 million records worldwide, making them the best-selling girl group of all time.
Tyla has reached out to Victoria Beckham's representatives for comment.