SPICE GIRLS RETURN

Canada.com- Melanie C earns her stripes

“Sometimes when you’re in a band like the Spice Girls and your first album is a huge success, and you’re instantly playing arenas and stadiums, you kind of feel like you’ve cheated.”

It’s hard to completely agree with Melanie C as she offers that little confession over the phone from her London home. As the Sporty flavour of the Spice Girls, she was the strongest voice among a group that moved 55 million records during their ’90s heyday, raked in more than $200 million on their comeback tour and had a generation of kids believing in a fuzzy concept called ‘Girl Power.’ You can’t cheat the world out of that much love and profit. Maybe it would be more accurate to say the pop star - who’s about to begin her first major Canadian solo tour - has simply done everything backwards.

Spice Girls was the beginning. Now, more than a decade after first packing stadiums with backflips and bubblegum pop, Melanie C has opted not to hock designer clothing lines or launch a lucrative career in reality TV. Instead, she’s giddily anticipating what most musicians struggle for years to outgrow: a grueling road tour of small clubs from Montreal to Vancouver. It’s her chance, she says, to pay her dues.

Melanie C on why she wants to do a road tour of Canada: “Sometimes when you’re in a band like the Spice Girls and your first album is a huge success, and you’re instantly playing arenas and stadiums, you kind of feel like you’ve cheated.”

The last show Melanie C performed in Canada was on Feb. 26 at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, the sold-out final stop of the Spice Girls tour, possibly the final Spice Girls show ever. The next time she’s in Toronto, she’ll play the much smaller Phoenix Concert Theatre, which boasts a maximum capacity of approximately 1,000 people.

But she doesn’t see it as a demotion. “I love it,” she insists. “It’s more intimate. It just feels more real.”

“It’s nice for me to go back, kind of earn your stripes, you know,” says Melanie C, who remembers her first live performances as big arena gigs with the Spice Girls. “When you play in big arenas, a lot of them sound the same, look the same. But when you’re going and travelling around and seeing places - because you can play New York and that’s really exciting, but you know, I’ve been to New York tons of times, but some of the places I’m going in Canada - I mean, maybe some of them may be places you’ll visit and you’ll never want to go back. But it’s just fun to explore new places.”

She’s making the Canadian jaunt to show off her fourth album, This Time, which was released in Canada April 8 — nearly a year after it hit shelves overseas.

Her third CD, 2005’s Beautiful Intentions (which she describes as “quite an aggressive record”), never made it to North America. According to Melanie C, the wild reception to last winter’s Spice Girls reunion tour gave her label hopes of an eager Canadian audience for her solo work. Full of sweeping radio ballads, This Time is a much gentler affair than any of Melanie C’s Spice Girls output or even her previous solo material, which took a rockier bent. (You may remember her duet with Bryan Adams, “When You’re Gone,” her Sid Vicious-in-a-miniskirt incarnation from first solo video “Goin’ Down,” or the near trip-hop of her first UK No. 1 “Never Be the Same Again,” where she collaborated with the late Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes.)

“I felt like I wanted to show a different side to myself and I wanted my vocals to be more exposed, you know, work more acoustically at times, to be very vulnerable, to be able to express emotions in a much more gentle way,” she explains. “But you know, I get the feeling that my next record is going to be a bit tougher again.”

There are no plans to steer the tour bus south of the border this year. Once her Canadian trip wraps on May 17, Melanie C says she’ll be turning her attention to a few European dates and then writing another album. New York and L.A. are the only U.S. cities who’ve gotten a taste of her current solo work. During the Spice Girls reunion, Melanie C managed to sneak away from the stadiums to perform a couple of small, acoustic sets — shows she says she booked for the sake of her own sanity, as much as anything else.

The life of Spice sounds mildly schizophrenic. “Going back to the Spice Girls and rediscovering Sporty Spice was really fun but it can put you off balance for a little bit,” she says, comparing the experience of living as her Spicier persona to living life in a nightclub that never closes.

You know when you’re out with a group of friends and you go out and you act a particular way and then when you’re at home and you’re alone and you’re maybe more introspective and a bit quieter - it’s like everybody has different sides. And that’s how I see myself. Spice Girls is like girls’ night out and solo work is like at home, you know, in thought.”

“It was great to get out and do some solo work ’cause it just reminds me of who I am, as an individual, rather than just part of that huge thing that is the Spice Girls.”

She can sort out her own identity, but reminding the public that she’s her own artist and not just one fifth of a pop phenomenon is another story. As a solo artist, Melanie C doesn’t go through elaborate costume changes and dance routines, nor does she perform Sporty’s signature backflip (”No, I don’t. I don’t do backflips now. Hopefully I’ll be in heels if I’m not too lazy. That would be dangerous”).

“When people come to my live shows people are always really, really shocked. It’s really nice that I’m able to impress people but it’s also really frustrating that people aren’t aware that there’s a lot more to me than just Sporty Spice. In fact, that’s just such a small part of what I do,” she says.

“Or they’re not interested because of the feelings they have about the Spice Girls. Even the misconceptions people have about the Spice Girls, like somebody asked me the other day ‘Did you really sing live on tour?’ And I told him he was a fucking idiot. [laughs] So it’s just one of those things, isn’t it?”

Teaching the public a lesson one club show at a time may be the only way to establish her solo cred, but Melanie C insists there’s only one reason why she’s putting herself through cramped quarters and endless stretches of Canadian highway.

“Paying your dues, yeah,” she says. “But I’m not doing that to prove it to anybody, I’m doing it because I enjoy it.”