Spice Girls. Sean Smith
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.’