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
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,