New poet laureate Chris Tse.
Eleanor Black talks to Spice Girl Mel C about her new autobiography
Geri Halliwell bombing up the M1 in her battered Fiat Uno. Liam Gallagher being a doink at the 1996 Brit Awards. Five Spice Girls hastily packing up their pot noodles and band posters and running away from their first managers, squealing with laughter.
Melanie Chisholm's autobiography, Who I am, is a feel-good nostalgia hit, heavy on the hijinks and halter necks. Reading it, you get the sense that the escapades of the Spice World movie were not so far-fetched after all. These were young women who got themselves in and out of scrapes all the time, zig-a-zig-ah.
But it's also intensely personal, digging into Chisholm's eating disorder, anxiety and depression, mistreatment at the hands of the British tabloids and her loneliness when the band was at the height of its fame and popularity. For a long time Chisholm, aka Sporty Spice, resisted the idea of writing a book, and she is the last of the Spice Girls to be published.
"It's been a long road getting to this point and I've still had wobbles to the very last minute," she says softly via Zoom, days before a London launch party where, predictably, her abs and Zara tracksuit are a talking point. "When I look back I am very proud of all our achievements but thinking for myself [about] what was going on behind the scenes, it makes me really sad. There was so much more enjoyment to be had. Nothing's ever completely what it seems and I suppose the more successful you become the more extreme the pressures are."
Her perspective on that period changed during the 2019 Spice Girls tour of the UK and Ireland, when they sold $128 million worth of tickets and perhaps finally understood the depth of their impact on a generation.
"In the encore we would perform 'Mama' and, looking out at the audience, we'd see fans in their 30s – some of them with their mums, some of them with their children – and it was just so emotional to see how this legacy has continued to grow … It enabled me to reflect on the past and I started feeling differently about myself and about the whole experience. It has been an incredible life and it's obviously not been without its issues. There's a lot to talk about."
One of the issues she wanted to foreground, because it was so personally devastating, is disordered eating, which she lived with for many years, presenting a brave front while punishing herself with excessive exercise and a fruit diet. In her efforts to control her body and her environment, she pushed her bandmates away.
"I'm a very honest person and I was hiding something and it made me feel dishonest," she recalls. "I was very ashamed of my eating disorder and I would hide it. It was a very lonely place."
The most joyful aspect of the memoir is the lifelong friendships of the singers and a backstage glimpse of the girl-power dynamic they established long before they were household names. Despite the advice of the men who managed them, they wrote their own songs, came up with their own band name and developed their own unique look.
This was a fairly big deal, as the convention in the mid-90s was for pop bands to wear identical clothing. The Spice Girls took their personal styles and exaggerated them, enabling each to be instantly recognisable by silhouette – the babydoll dress, the push-up bustier, the skin-tight LBD, et cetera – and to express their own personality.
"I feel so grateful that I had the other four girls by my side, because I don't think I would have been courageous enough to do it alone," says Chisholm of that push for independence.
"We shared this ambition and vision and backed each other up to have the confidence to go into, sometimes, the scariest of situations and not care, to just go out there and do the things we wanted to do. In fact, if you tell a Spice Girl to not do something, that means she's going to go ahead and do it – we were quite rebellious in that way, but it's what we needed. It's what girls and women needed at the time. We were all pushing for things to change and it was a wonderful thing to be part of."
Focused as they were on speaking for young women, they didn't expect to become LGBTQI+ allies, but embraced it, none more so than Chisholm. "We were on this mission being a girl band for girls and then 'Wannabe' was released and we were starting to meet fans and realising there was a huge demographic there that was from [the LGBTQI+] community and we quickly realised it wasn't just about girls, it was about equality and people who feel marginalised and maybe don't feel like they have a place to fit in. It's been such a beautiful relationship and it continues to grow."
Despite appearances, the band never officially broke up and Chisholm says discussion about another tour is ongoing – including a visit to Aotearoa.
"I'm a Spice Girl, all day, every day. We all feel that way… I want to get to all the territories we never played as a live band, of which there are many, Australia and New Zealand being [among] them. That would be my ultimate wish, to do that. Myself and Mel B are definitely fighting that corner."
Who I am, by Melanie Chisholm (Welbeck Publishing, $35), is out now.
1. You are our new poet laureate and people are excited for you. Do you feel pressure to blow everyone away with your fresh ideas and energy?
I'm excited too - and still a bit nervous! Since the announcement there have been moments where the pressure has felt overwhelming but I've been telling myself that I just need to keep doing what I've been doing these past few years. The difference is now I might have a bit more influence to get things happening.
2. You have said you want to uplift all poets - past, present and future - and build a community. What will that look like?
We already have a strong poetry community and some very engaged readers, so my job will be to keep that momentum going and bring new poets and readers into the fold. Some people have commented that my appointment will help to inspire the younger generation, but I also hope it will inspire those older than me to get into poetry because we need their stories too, particularly if they're from marginalised groups that have been missing from our literature. We have a rich history of poetry in Aotearoa but it's far from complete or representative of who we are as a country – there are many gaps to fill.
3. You have worked in public sector communications, what is your current day job? (And will you be able to give it up for two years to focus on poet laureate-ing?)
I manage the engagement team at the Office of the Auditor-General, which is about as far from poetry as you can get. I won't be giving up my day job but I will reduce my hours to make time for the Poet Laureate role. I've never wanted to be a full-time writer – I like having a foot in both worlds because it keeps all the different parts of my brain entertained (and it helps to pay the bills).
4. What is the question you most dread at writers' festivals?
I've fielded some really bizarre and problematic questions from both moderators and audience members in the past, ranging from people asking me how to solve racism and comments about how good my English is. The best questions I've ever received have been from children. One asked me whether being a poet makes me a better rapper. Answer: sadly not.
5. What are you reading and loving right now?
There's a tower of poetry piling up next to my bed – this year has been epic in terms of what's being published in Aotearoa alone. I've just started Joanna Cho's debut collection People Person (out in October), which is terrifically clever and captures what it's like to be a young person navigating the complexities and mundanities of the modern world. Two other great recent books are Simone Kaho's HEAL! and No Other Place to Stand, an anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Chris Tse is the newly appointed New Zealand Poet Laureate. His most recent book is Super Model Minority (Auckland University Press, $25).
There's a scene in Chloe Lane's second novel, Arms & Legs, where a line from a short story by Mississippi writer Barry Hannah is referenced. In hindsight, an unfaithful spouse regretfully reflects on a past tryst as simply being "just arms and legs, not worth a damn". Georgie is a New Zealand-born lecturer living in Florida with her husband Dan and their 2-year-old son Finn who has difficulty with language. They're a young couple, but the gloss of the relationship is starting to fade. Georgie has an affair with Jason, a librarian she meets when taking Finn to Music & Movement sessions.
Initially with Jason, she feels the frisson of the new. She is charmed when he attentively calls her arms "beautiful" but it's not long before she realises that Jason, in an almost throwaway manner, just refers to everything as being beautiful, "including one of his more boring-looking house plants". It's nothing more than just arms and legs. The affair is a catalyst for reassessment and recalibration as Georgie strives to be present for Finn, but grapples with desire, betrayal, guilt, restlessness, and a disconnect between her inner world and her domestic life with Dan. This is a novel that sensitively deals with the thorny and murky intricacies of relationships.
Georgie has a lot on her mind. In addition to her recent indiscretions, while out on a prescribed "burn" (planned burns are where small sections of land are burned to prevent large sprawling forest fires and are used routinely in Florida) she discovers the decomposing body of one of her engineering students, a 20-year-old who recently went missing. She goes into shock that she never quite shakes off. Her brain flickers briefly from the horror of the real into the horror of the uncanny.
Uncanny too is the setting of Florida both urban and wild. This isn't pastel-washed frippery. This is an eerie suburban Florida with an underbelly of unrest and malaise. It's a humid and moody setting with sickly racoons, frogs, termites, snakes, middle class houses with swimming pools and neat lawns. Lane is such a sharp observational writer and she evokes a strong sense of place and also an atmosphere where it feels like Georgie's world is cracking open to possibilities and change.
Lane is particularly good at bringing interiority to life. Georgie is an anxious, flawed, worried and intensely observant character. At one point she describes herself to Dan as "porous". The trauma of her marriage in peril, the crossroads in which she finds herself, the burns she attends, and the discovery of the student's body are contrasted with beautifully observed moments of mundane domestic life — meal prep for Finn, putting him down for naps.
Like her first novel, The Swimmers, Arms & Legs has a bright intelligence and intensity. Lane is a wonderfully attentive and insightful writer. It is also at times tartly funny with an eye not just for the quiet moments in life but also the absurd.
Arms & Legs by Chloe Lane (Te Herenga Waka University Press), $30
Matariki celebrations will be taking place across the country throughout the weekend.