скачать книгу бесплатно
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 (#litres_trial_promo)
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 (#litres_trial_promo)
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.”’
