Sean Smith - Spice Girls - The Story of the World’s Greatest Girl Band

As Petticoat and Vine became better known, they had to spend more time in London, which didn’t suit Joan at all. She wanted to get back up to Liverpool to see Alan as much as possible, which led to some tensions within the band. When the group were offered a tour of Canada, she decided to leave. Ironically, the trip across the Atlantic never happened, but Petticoat and Vine battled on, eventually calling it a day in 1973. Norman and Val went on to achieve greater exposure with a new line-up called Champagne, a light group that was more Eurovision than anything psychedelic. They appeared on Opportunity Knocks , The Morecambe and Wise Show and The Jim Davidson Show but didn’t make a chart breakthrough. Val and Norman continued to enjoy a career as Champagne, touring internationally as well as remaining popular on their native Merseyside.

Meanwhile, Joan had married Alan, who worked as a fitter for the Otis Elevator Company in Liverpool, and settled into a neat semi in Kendall Drive, Rainhill, a suburb about ten miles from the city centre. Their daughter Melanie Jayne Chisholm was born at the nearby Whiston Hospital on 12 January 1974. She was always Melanie – never Mel.

Money was tight, especially when Joan and Alan split up when Melanie was three. She had to divide her time between the two and felt something of an outsider in both homes: ‘I felt like I was in the way and I had to make my own life and be independent.’

Home was a series of flats on council estates in some of the rougher areas of Runcorn. When they moved a few miles south to Widnes, she went to Fairfield Primary School in Peel House Lane and was able to move further along the road to start senior school at Fairfield County High. Joan found work as a secretary with the local Knowsley borough council but she didn’t give up singing or performing. She found new love with a taxi driver, Den O’Neill, who was a bass guitarist, a bit of a rocker and another familiar figure in local music venues. They set up home together in a small terraced house in Widnes.

Den already had two sons, Jad (Jarrod) and Stuart, from his first marriage. He and Joan married while she was pregnant with their son Paul. Melanie’s father Alan also married again and his new wife Carole had two boys, Liam and Declan. That meant Melanie was the only girl with five brothers. She didn’t know until she was a Spice Girl that she had a secret sister called Emma, Alan’s daughter from another relationship, who was brought up quietly in Llandudno, North Wales.

Melanie later admitted that she felt a little isolated when her father remarried and started a second family – caught between two households and feeling, temporarily, that she was ‘completely alone’. Looking back as an adult, she thought that even though her parents never bad-mouthed one another and relations were amicable, she started to blame herself for their divorce.

For a while, she might have given her mother a tough time, shrieking, ‘I want my dad,’ if she wasn’t getting her own way, but Joan and Melanie have a strong mother-and-daughter bond. According to Melanie, they are similar because they’re both ‘dead soft’. Her mum was also a terrific cook and, unusually among their friends in Widnes, she owned a wok. She introduced her daughter to Chinese food, which Melanie loves.

Melanie was also particularly close to her brother Paul, who, with her support, would grow up to be an ace racing driver and engaging TV commentator. They weren’t always best buddies, of course. She used to punch him when he farted. He hated her habit of cracking her knuckles constantly, especially if she was anxious about something. There was a mutual respect, however, and he would always tell her to stand up for herself even though he was five years younger.

Joan didn’t give up singing. She and Den formed various bands over the years, including Love Potion, with friend Stan Alexander, who had once been a guitarist with do-wop band Darts. They released a single on Polydor in 1977 entitled ‘Face, Name, Number’, written by Stan. The song was one of the light disco songs of the time that might have been recorded by a seventies group like the Real Thing. It made a few ripples but didn’t reach the charts. Joan also sang with the Ken Phillips Country Band, was in a group called T-Junction and yet another, River Deep, which was a tribute to Tina Turner and named after her most famous hit ‘River Deep Mountain High’.

From an early age, Melanie was used to musicians popping into the house to catch up and rehearse. She would lie in bed and listen to the bass line throbbing through the floorboards. She used to go to watch her mother perform: ‘I’d sit at the front, miming every word she sang. I felt quite special – you know, when you just want to go, “That’s my mum!”’

Joan never achieved her ambition of playing Carnegie Hall, although Love Potion did support Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes in 1978 at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. But she’s still gigging around her old haunts – in June 2019, when the Spice Girls performed at Wembley Stadium, the Joan O’Neill Band was playing Woodwards wine bar – Woodies – in Formby.

Tina Turner was not one of Melanie’s idols while she was growing up. The first record she bought was The Kids from Fame album that had also proved such an inspiration to Victoria Adams. But, more significantly, she was a fan of Madonna. She wasn’t so keen on the music but loved the image. She was nine when Madonna started having hits with ‘Holiday’ and ‘Borderline’ and she would dress up, pretending to be the unmistakable star in front of the mirror at home – just as a million and more young Spice Girls fans would impersonate the girl group in the future. Later she moved on to Stevie Wonder, whose timeless classic ‘Sir Duke’ remains her favourite song.

Her first crush was on swashbuckling chart topper Adam Ant until she turned her attention to George Michael, just as Geri Halliwell had done. She was also a secret fan of tough guy actor Bruce Willis, whose album The Return of Bruno came out as Melanie turned thirteen in 1987. His cover of the old Drifters standard ‘Under the Boardwalk’ was a big hit that year and Melanie could be heard singing it constantly. The first song she ever performed in public, though, was ‘The Greatest Love of All’, the Whitney Houston classic that coincidentally Melanie Brown performed at the Danceworks audition.

She didn’t much feel like singing when she had to take holiday jobs to help pay for her clothes and dancing. One of the worst was when her dad Alan moved into the tourism industry and found work as a holiday rep in France and Spain. That meant great vacations in the summer but she had to earn her spending money. One particularly unpleasant task when she was fourteen was collecting the dirty sheets from a Spanish apartment block where Alan was working. It was worth it, though, because she loved the continental lifestyle – late dinners and playing in the squares of picturesque villages – all a far cry from Widnes, where not many of her friends went abroad. ‘I felt a bit sophisticated,’ she admitted.

Her all-time worst job was in a local chippie. She couldn’t bear the smell. She had always enjoyed fish-and-chips night on a Friday at home but working in the shop was something completely different. The only consolation was that it helped pay for her dance classes.

Melanie describes herself as a ‘fat, plain, tubby, frumpy kid’, which sounds suspiciously self-effacing. By the time she had taken up dancing she was clearly a very pretty girl. Unavoidably, Melanie grew up surrounded by music but it was as a dancer that she shone.

Despite her natural shyness and insecurity about her appearance, Melanie was an attractive teenager and had a succession of boyfriends at Fairfield High School, often connected with school drama. She dated a boy in the year above called Ian McKnight, who was very charming and popular with the girls. They connected when Melanie was cast as his mother in a school production of Blood Brothers . Willy Russell’s hit musical had started out as a school play in Liverpool in the early eighties and quickly became a mainstay of local culture.