Melanie C

Melanie C was born Melanie Jayne Chisholm in Whiston, Lancashire, and grew up nearby in Widnes before training at the Doreen Bird College of Performing Arts in London. As Sporty Spice, one fifth of the Spice Girls, she was part of a group that has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making it the best-selling female group in pop history.

Her solo career opened in 1998 with 'When You're Gone', a duet with Bryan Adams, ahead of her debut album Northern Star on Virgin Records. The record has sold over four million copies, and its singles 'Never Be the Same Again' and 'I Turn to You' both reached number one in the UK. The Hex Hector remix of 'I Turn to You' later won a Grammy Award.

After parting with Virgin following her second album Reason, Chisholm founded her own label, Red Girl Records, and kept releasing steadily: Beautiful Intentions, This Time, The Sea, Stages, Version of Me and Melanie C. Her ninth album, Sweat, arrived in 2026 and reached number three in the UK, her highest-charting solo record.

In recent years she has performed regularly as a DJ, playing house and disco-leaning sets that mix her own catalogue with older club records. The approach is unshowy and affectionate rather than nostalgic: pop material treated as dance music, played by someone who wrote a good deal of it.