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

Melanie wasn’t entirely happy playing Mrs Lyons, the wealthy woman who persuades her cleaner to let her raise one of her twin boys as her own; she would have preferred to be cast as ‘the Scouse mum’, as she called Mrs Johnstone. The main character had all the best songs and was played over the years by some famous names in musical theatre, including Stephanie Lawrence, Marti Webb and Barbara Dickson. Melanie was determined that one day she would have the starring role and sing the unforgettable ‘Tell Me It’s Not True’.

The consolation for now was that she saw plenty of Ian, who said, ‘We just clicked.’ They went out for a few months, remained friends after they split and could often be seen having a catch-up in the years to come at the Ring o’ Bells pub in Pit Lane, even when Melanie had moved down south.

More seriously, she went out for two years with another pupil, Ryan Wilson. He was her first love and she was his. Importantly, his mum Gail liked her: ‘Melanie was a charming girl – very feminine and very pretty.’ They used to walk home together – Ryan lived with his parents in a large five-bedroom house – and talk about their ambitions. Melanie’s plans seemed to revolve around dancing. He remembered, ‘She once said to me the hardest thing about life is deciding what you want. Getting it is easy.’

Intriguingly, her old schoolmates do not remember Melanie as a tomboy, kicking a ball around with the lads. Ryan recalled she was a quiet girl, the quietest of all the prefects. Another friend, Mark Devany, agreed it was rubbish that she was a tomboy: ‘She was always very girly and ballet mad,’ he said.

Blood Brothers was not the only school production Melanie was in, but she never secured the lead. In fact, for The Wiz , she had to make do with playing the part of one of the four crows. She was a girl who wanted fame and fortune away from the mean streets of a Cheshire town, scrawling ‘Melanie Chisholm Superstar’ on the cover of one of her school books.

Throughout her childhood and into her teenage years, Melanie won many dancing trophies. She kept her dancing world separate from school but two evenings a week and the whole of Saturday were set aside for classes. Originally she wanted to be a ballerina but realised as she got older that she was better suited to being one of the dancers on Top of the Pops , which, naturally, she watched every week.

Her dancing training helped with sport at school. She excelled at gymnastics and could execute a mean back flip, was better than average at netball and athletics but less good at football, even though she was a lifelong fan of Liverpool Football Club.

While she preferred to spend her pocket money on her Saturday dancing rather than on trips to Anfield she has never wavered in her support and would watch the games on telly on a Sunday afternoon with the rest of her family, who were also big fans. These were the glory days of the 1980s when Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush and Graeme Souness would thrill the Kop. Her favourite player was goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, who always had a great rapport with the home fans: ‘I loved it when he used to walk on his hands up and down the pitch.’ As an older teenager, she fancied Jamie Redknapp but he didn’t join the squad until she was seventeen and already on her way to college.

Melanie knew what she wanted at this point in her life – to leave school at sixteen and go to dance college. She passed nine GCSEs before she left, even though she was more interested in her next dance class than knuckling down to revision. She retained some affection for her old school and was reportedly disappointed when it closed in 2010 and was subsequently demolished to make way for a new housing estate and a cemetery.

She impressed at her audition at the Doreen Bird College of Performing Arts in Sidcup, Kent. This was another such school founded in the post-war years by a strong-minded woman, who became much admired in the dancing world. Melanie’s audition notes read, ‘Melanie has a nice appeal. She is strong with a flexible body. Her audition piece was very nice. She is very bright and has good potential. Should do well.’ When she applied, Melanie had to mention her ambitions in entertainment and wrote, ‘I want to play Rumpleteazer in the musical Cats – the part Bonnie Langford played – and to record.’

Melanie was still primarily a dancer. The school’s artistic director Sue Passmore observed, ‘She was a very strong, technical dancer. She was a hard-working and single-minded pupil.’ At this stage she still saw her future as a dancer and not as a singer. Her college musical director Pat Izen did not think her voice was that good when she arrived: ‘It was gutsy but she had an excellent ear – and she was a real individualist.’

Melanie’s breakthrough as a singer, at least as far as having her confidence boosted, occurred when she took part in a college revue and performed ‘Chief Cook and Bottle Washer’, a showstopper from the Broadway musical The Rink . She was delighted when the audience started whooping: ‘In that moment, I knew I wanted to sing.’ This was a song that demanded a ‘performance’. In the original production in 1984, the peerless musical-theatre star Chita Rivera gave it the full treatment and won a Tony award.

Melanie thrived at the Doreen Bird College. Sidcup was about as far as you could get from Widnes so it was brave of her mother to support her leaving home at sixteen to go down south. Melanie still had to deal with the dilemma all the future Spice Girls faced after leaving college of trying to get work in a crowded profession.

She signed on the dole and started the round of auditions. The closest she came to a breakthrough in 1993 was nearly being hired for the chorus of Cats in the West End, which might have set her off on a career in musical theatre. Instead, it was looking increasingly likely that she would end up taking work on a cruise ship. Fortunately, however, she picked up one of Chris Herbert’s flyers and decided to try out for his new girl group.

On the day, the dancing proved no problem and she sang the exuberant ‘I’m So Excited’ by the Pointer Sisters, a hit in the UK in late 1984. Chris was more impressed than his dad Bob, who for some reason didn’t rate her dancing but did think she was a much better singer than the other Melanie from Leeds. He wasn’t struck by the looks of either girl, giving them both four out of ten on their informal scoresheets.

Melanie hadn’t dressed up for the occasion, a simple cut-off lilac T-shirt and black trousers. Her hair was down and not in a ponytail. But, most importantly, she was just a little bit different from Victoria Adams and Melanie Brown – which worked to her advantage when Chris was back in the office making up his shortlist. He wanted contrast.

From that point of view, he noticed a younger teenager called Michelle Stephenson, who did well with a challenging ballad, ‘Don’t Be a Stranger’, then a recent top-ten hit for Dina Carroll. Michelle had only just turned seventeen so was appreciably the youngest of the probables.

Like Victoria, she was brought up in the Home Counties but was more traditionally middle class. Her father George worked for Chubb Security and her brother Simon was an artist and creative director. They lived in Abingdon, a lovely old market town on the Thames, just south of Oxford.

Unlike the others, however, she was much more involved in acting than any serious stage-school dancing. She had work with the Young Vic and the National Youth Theatre on her CV. She revealed, ‘I actually wanted to be an actress. I just went along for the audition because I had not been to an open audition before. I just went along for the experience.’

She already had a place to study theatre and English at Goldsmith’s College, part of the University of London, so a back-up plan was in place if the audition didn’t work out.