Halliwell 'quit Spice Girls over interview'

Friday, April 2 2010, 21:42 BST

By Oli Simpson

WENN

Geri Halliwell has revealed that she decided to quit the Spice Girls after her bandmates refused to let her do a solo interview for a British breast cancer charity.

During the peak of the Spice Girls' '90s success, the singer found a lump in her breast that sparked cancer worries. Following an all-clear from doctors, UK charity Breast Cancer Care approached the star in 1998 to help publicise the cause by giving an interview about her scare.

However, Halliwell has now claimed that her fellow Spice Girls did not want her taking part in any interviews alone - a ruling that prompted her to walk away from the group at the height of their fame.

In an interview for Piers Morgan's Life Stories, she said: "I was asked to do an interview for Breast Cancer Care and they asked me because I had a scare a long time ago and I was like, 'Fantastic'.

"Sometimes I just wanted to show up as just myself and for some reason it got stopped. They (the band) said, 'We all want to do it or you're not doing it'. I was like, 'Do you know what? I haven’t come this far in the game to be told not to do that'. So that was the defining moment.

"We were on this tiny private jet flying into London and I was just went, 'Bye girls'. And I thought, 'Maybe you're going to be happier without me'. I didn't say I was leaving but the next day I said, 'I'm not coming back'."