Marti Stelling

Mel B, or Scary Spice as she is known, made headlines after calling out her former bandmates for not wanting to do a Spice Girls reunion.

It has been reported she was removed from the band’s group chat earlier this year and when questioned about why a reunion hasn’t materialised on TV’s Never Mind The Buzzcocks 90s special, she said: “Because they’re d***heads.”

This year marks 30 years since Spice Girls was formed following an advert in a trade paper. More than 400 women auditioned for the group with Mel B, Melanie C, Emma Bunton, Geri Halliwell-Horner and Victoria Beckham making the final cut.

With over 100 million records sold worldwide, the Spice Girls are the best-selling female group of all time.

The Spice Girls got their nicknames from a “lazy journalist” according to Mel B who said: “It was actually a lazy journalist that couldn’t be bothered to remember all our names, so he just gave us nicknames.”

Peter Loraine was the “lazy journalist” who edited Top of the Pops magazine in 1996. In an interview he said: “We laughed the most when we came up with Scary. Jennifer Cawthron, who was also from Leeds, came up with that one because Mel B was so loud and had tried to take over our whole photo shoot.”

Speaking on the nickname, Mel B said: “I’m very kind of in-your-face. I was even more so back then. I was, what, 17, 18, like, ‘What! What do you want?!’ So I guess I could have come off as Scary. But I like my name.”

Melaine Brown (Mel B) was born in Harehill, Leeds, and grew up in the Burley area. She studied performing arts at Intake High School in Rodley before joining the Spice Girls. 

Before the Spice Girls broke up Mel B debuted as a solo artist in September 1998 with the release of I Want You Back which reached number one on the UK Singles Chart.

She hosted This is My Moment, a talent show for ITV 1, and presented the MOBO Awards on two occasions, in 1998 with Bill Bellamy and in 1999 with Wyclef Jean. She also featured in advert for the Yorkshire tourist board in a series which included contributions from other Yorkshire-born celebrities.

After the Spice Girls split in 2001 Mel B went on to have a successful solo career with the release of her album Tell Me debuting at number four in the UK charts with 40,000 copies sold in its first week.

In 2018 Spice Girls returned for a 13-date UK and Ireland stadium tour Spice World – 2019 Tour, their first in a decade. In November 2018 she became a patron of the domestic violence survivors’ charity Women’s Aid. 

She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to charitable causes and vulnerable women and in July this year she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Leeds Beckett University. 

Recently Mel B spoke of her nickname and said she would not be given it today.

She said: “In this day and age, somebody would of taken offence by that. But I don’t take offence by it. Whether you’re black, white, mixed, there’s a bit of scary in all of us.”

Published for the Yorkshire Post