Melanie C is at the end of a run that would flatten someone half her age: two months in Australia filming The Voice, promo in Los Angeles, a weekend at Coachella and a final stop in New York before flying home. “I am good, I am exhausted,” she says. The festival detour doubled as homework. Disclosure and Iggy Pop were among her highlights, and Karol G, an artist she admits she knew little about, “definitely brought a fantastic end to the festival on Sunday”.
There is a reason for the pace. Sweat, released on 1 May via Virgin Music Group, closes a loop that has been open since she was a teenager. “Every album I’ve ever made, it’s really been a reflection of that moment in my life,” she says. This moment belongs to the dancefloor. She has spent the past eight years DJing at festivals around the world, the last five of them at Pacha in Ibiza, and “it just really reignited a passion that I have for dance music”.
That passion has a precise origin story. She discovered raving at 17, on holiday in Spain with friends. Her first rave memory is “probably discovering The Prodigy”, she says. “I think ‘Charly Says’ was the tune that was out at that time, and I was like ‘what is this?!’” The conversion was instant. “Everybody’s so free when they’re dancing and we were just completely hooked from the get-go. So when we got back to London we were like, right, we need to find our people, we’ve got to find out where these raves are happening.”
For someone raised on 80s British club culture, where “it was all a little bit step touch, step touch when you were dancing”, rave felt like a generational inheritance arriving right on time. “It was like my parents grew up through the 60s, of course they had the Summer of Love, and this was almost like our version of that.”
Then, at 20, she auditioned for the band that became the Spice Girls, and the raver went on an extended hiatus. “All of my priorities changed. We were so focused, so determined to succeed.” Dance music never disappeared entirely; the Hex Hector remix from her debut Northern Star was a big dance hit around the world. But, she says, “I’d almost left that part of me behind.” Sweat is the retrieval mission. “I’ve just been able to kind of reclaim who I was before I was a Spice Girl,” she says. “I really wanted to bring my work as a solo artist closer to what I play as a DJ. I play multi-genre house when I’m out.” She apologises for the scale of the answer (“That was a long answer sorry!”), but the enthusiasm is rather the point.
The harder job was smuggling her stage self into the studio. “As a live performer I’m very energetic and I’ve got loads of confidence and quite a lot of attitude, and when I’m in the studio I’m a very different beast,” she says. As for the persona interviewers still ask her about living up to:
“I’ve tried to not be her and it’s impossible,” she says. “I am very energetic, I’m very sporty.” Hence a title track that sets the tone: “It has that energy, it’s a little bit tongue in cheek, it’s like a fitness banger.”
This is an album mixed for movement rather than the sofa. “It was about wanting to motivate and inspire people either on the dancefloor or in the gym,” she says, though she allows one domestic use: “I think it’s a good album probably to listen to with your mates while you’re getting ready for going out.” The track she is most excited to perform live is ‘Undefeated Champion’. “I can’t not smile when I hear this song. It’s kind of one of my anthems of self-empowerment, you know, picking yourself up when things have gone to sh*t.”
In New York and Los Angeles she previewed the album for small groups of fans, around 30 at a time. “I think you forget as a young person like how powerful the effect of your music is on people,” she says. “What I’ve also learned is how powerfully affected your fanbase is on you, because it’s such a two-way street.”
Britain gets the personal touch too, via an in-store tour of record shops beginning at Liverpool’s Jacaranda on release day, complete with an afterparty where she will DJ. “It feels very appropriate that I should go home and you know and thank my city for how, how supportive they’ve been over the years of me as a Spice Girl and a solo artist.” The itinerary also takes in places new to her, among them Nantwich, near where she grew up in Cheshire, and Bury (“I don’t think I’ve ever been to Bury in my life”). She has a theory about the route: “The further north you get, the more friendly people become.”
The record shop tour also scratches an older itch, for the girl who once saved up her pocket money for Woolworths. She is delighted the physical format has hung on: vinyl she understands, but “now people are back into CDs, which is wonderful”.
In October she takes it all on a headline tour: Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham, plus a first solo show at London’s O2 Academy Brixton, her biggest UK headline date since Wembley Arena in the Northern Star era. “This for me is, you know, I feel quite emotional about it,” she says. “I actually saw Madonna there way back in the noughties, which was an insane venue to see her.” The milestones stack up neatly. “It’s 30 years since I started with the Spice Girls, it is over 25 years since I became a solo artist, I’m in my 50s, I’m 52 years old, and I’m playing this brilliant iconic venue for the very first time. So that show is going to be extra special.”
Anyone worried about a set of album cuts can relax. “I am going to cram in as many hits as I can. I know, I know as a gig-goer I wanna hear the hits, right! I’m not going to leave anybody disappointed.” Her ambition for the room is characteristically aerobic: “When they leave I want them to be exhausted, but elated, and really sweaty.”
Thirty years in, the influence now flows the other way, with a new generation of artists citing her band as formative. “It blows my mind,” she says. The tributes that surprise her most come from “the ones that weren’t even born when the Spice Girls first came out. And I’m like, how do you know?”
Asked to sum up the Sweat era in three words, she lands, after a long pause, on “Joyous, Energetic and Fun!” And Friday nights: overrated or essential? “Essential. Life philosophy.”
Sweat is out via Virgin Music Group. Melanie C plays Dublin 3Olympia (18 October), Glasgow Barrowland Ballroom (20 October), Manchester O2 Ritz (21 October), London O2 Academy Brixton (23 October) and Birmingham O2 Institute (24 October).
Five things worth knowing — new openings, exhibitions, fashion drops, music releases and travel finds across Brighton, London and the South East. Sent every Saturday.
Just your email — that's all we need.
No spam. Unsubscribe in one click.
