There’s a leaked Spice Girls song from the 1999 Forever sessions (sans Ginger Spice Geri Horner) believed to be called ‘Give You What You Want (If It’s Lovin’ On Your Mind)’ — a track that’s similar in sound, as well as absurd punctuation, to Britney Spears’ ‘(You Drive Me) Crazy’.
“Which one?” enquires Melanie C. “How does it go?”
With the humbling realisation that I possibly know the Spice Girls oeuvre better than they do, I launch into the intro.
Thankfully, Melanie’s face lights up with recognition: “That is a good song!”
There’s little more satisfying than a member of your favourite pop group indulging you on a trip down memory lane. What about ‘W.O.M.A.N.’, performed live in 1999 — will it ever get a digital release? I ask.
“Biff [frequent Spice Girls co-writer Richard ‘Biff’ Stannard] had some lovely ideas around that,” Melanie smiles. “Maybe there’s another life for ‘W.O.M.A.N.’. But you’ll have to wait and see. It needs a banging remix! I just don’t think it was ever as fully formed as we needed. But, in essence, it was definitely an evolution [of the girl power message].”
Whether waxing lyrical about music or moving the needle on LGBTQ rights, Sporty Spice is everything this 90s baby gay hoped she would be.
“It’s greed, isn’t it?” she opines of FIFA’s decision to host this December’s World Cup in Qatar, where gay sex is punishable
