Mel C Says ‘Fall Out’ With Victoria Beckham Almost Got Her Kicked Out of Spice Girls (Exclusive)

Sporty Spice was almost kicked out of the Spice Girls! Mel C, whose full name is Melanie Chisholm, is opening up about her years in the hit girl group in her new tell-all memoir, The Sporty One: My Life as a Spice Girl. 

The 48-year-old singer spoke with ET’s Rachel Smith at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in New York City about a situation early on in the group’s iconic late ’90s run. 

“Something happened quite early on in the Spice Girls’ journey, and I have a little bit of fall out with Victoria [Beckham] at the Brits (Brit Awards) in ’96 — not the Union Jack dress [year], but year before. So [we were] unreleased but a few people knew us. And there was a little fall out, and I was threatened to get kicked out the band,” Mel C shares. “And from that moment on I realized — because I didn’t think it was a big deal, I didn’t think I’d done anything particularly bad — and it freaked me out. I was like, I have to control myself. I have to control what I do.” 

Control became a difficult theme throughout the musician’s life in the spotlight. She developed an eating disorder due, in part, to her persona as Sporty Spice. 

“At this point I was controlling what I ate. I was controlling how much exercise I was doing,” she acknowledges. “I mean, I think because in a situation like that so much is out of your control, the things you can control I became very obsessive about.”

She says she was offered help for her eating disorder, but at the time she “wasn’t ready to accept it.”

“This is the thing with these issues, you know, you can’t really help somebody until they’re willing,” she says. 

As for where she stands with the other Spice Girls today, Mel says her relationships with the band are “better than they’ve ever been.” 

“We love each other and it’s like a sisterhood, you know?” she explains of her bandmates. “We started together as kids. We came from nothing. We achieved all of these things. We love each other’s children. We know each other’s families, they’re siblings. It’s a huge, huge family and that’s never going to change.”

As for a Spice Girls on stage reunion with all five members, Mel says “we would love that.”

“At the moment we’re talking four at the moment,” she says. “Victoria, the offer is always there, she’s always invited and always really involved, actually. We’re still very much a five piece, like behind the scenes.”

Beckham previously said that the group’s performance at the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics would be her final one as a Spice Girl. 

“I think it was too much for her. It was, like, she was so nervous, like, going out there,” Mel says of Beckham. “She was like, ‘You know what, girls? I think that’s me done.’ And you know what? It’s an amazing place to bow out because it was huge.”