Mel C has revealed how a drunken row with Victoria Beckham led to long-term battles with depression and eating disorders. Talking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, the Spice Girl recalled being threatened with the sack by the group’s managers after telling ‘Posh Spice’ to ‘f*** off’ during a clash at the Brit Awards.
Melanie Chisholm, 46, said that following the incident, she started becoming ‘really hard on (herself)’.
‘We’d all had a few bevvies and on the way out, there was a little scuffle between myself and Victoria,’ she told Lauren Laverne. ‘We can’t say this on air but I asked her to go away. I was told if that behaviour ever happened again, then I would be out.’
The incident happened during the 1996 Brits - just a few months before the group released their debut single, Wannabe. The fear of losing everything Mel had worked so hard for started to seriously impact her mental health, she explained.
‘I think that is where the start of some of my problems came because I had to be very, very strict with myself. I couldn’t allow myself to relax because if I did, I might mess it all up.’
In 2016, ‘Sporty Spice’ revealed that she’d been bullied by unnamed members of the band and had struggled to live up to her public persona as the ‘gobby’, ‘boyish’ one.
In a bid to become ‘perfect’, she developed eating disorders and depression - the diagnosis of which came as a massive ‘relief’.
‘I went from being anorexic to having a binge eating disorder. That’s when I went to my GP and I was diagnosed with depression. It was such a weight lifted off my shoulders. It was such a relief because I thought: “Oh my God, there’s a name for it and I can be helped”.’
After the group split up, Mel C went onto to become a solo artist, successful presenter and musical theatre star - and believes that she should have left the Spice Girls before she did.
‘I kind of stayed a bit longer than I wanted to,’ she said. ‘A lot of that was because I was so unwell. I was struggling being in the company of the girls. I knew I had to go because I had to sort myself out.’
READ MORE: Mel C Says She Was Bullied When She Was In the Spice Girls