A Brutally Honest Evening With Mel B, review: ‘Riotous irreverence and unabashed sincerity’
The Spice Girls UK tour may have been a sellout success, but Melanie Brown is not about to hang up her combat boots. Her Sunday night spoken-word show at London’s Savoy Theatre was a reminder that Brown has far more to sell these days than branded crisps.
Though officially “interviewed” by her friend and biographer Louise Gannon, co-author of last year’s memoir Brutally Honest, it was clear from the start that Scary Spice is more than capable of hosting herself. Indeed, with more than a few shades of “ITV chat show” about proceedings – Melanie lounging on a pair of Union Jack sofas, pulling superfans on stage to perform the “Who Do You Think You Are?” routine and introducing her Yorkshire terrier, Cookie – the whole show could be an extended audition for Saturday night prime time.
Spice Girls secrets are thin on the ground these days, but Brown did her best to throw the crowd a few bones. She and Geri, we learned, used to drive around Maidenhead topless. Simon Cowell once rejected them in a car park. And a headline slot at next year’s Glastonbury is “going to happen”, she swore. Though of course, this Spice is best taken with a pinch of salt.
For a while it looked like Cookie was in danger of stealing the show. But when conversation moved on to more heavyweight topics, from the racial othering she endured in 1980s Leeds (“I thought I was called Melanie Brown because I was brown”) to her fluid sexuality and regular savaging by the tabloid press, there came an emotional gear-shift.
With trademark candour, Brown described her abusive 10-year relationship with ex-husband Stephen Belafonte. The gradual erosion of her independence that will be sickeningly familiar to so many survivors of domestic violence; how Belafonte, referred to only as “that monster”, took away her phone and cut her off from her family; the overdose she took at her lowest ebb, and the moment she decided, at her father’s deathbed, to flee the marriage and fight for a divorce.
In another show, laying bare this kind of pain while a terrier cheerfully humped a leopard print cushion downstage might feel jarring. Surreal. But for a Spice Girls fan it’s all just part of the pick ‘n’ mix. Riotous irreverence one minute, unabashed sincerity the next.
The second half, in which Brown’s very sweet family were wheeled out to fill up the sofas, fell a little flat. It would have been nice to hear her dig deeper on the group’s origin story and the enduring relevance of girl power. But then, theirs was always a ‘show, don’t tell’ brand of feminism – and it’s hard to deny that Brown, now an ambassador for Woman’s Aid, is a living example.
Anyway, the audience – a sea of excitable leopard print including, awkwardly, Geri’s sister – were 100 per cent behind her. Perhaps too closely for comfort, as in the case of one woman who stood up to share her own experiences and was diplomatically ushered to Brown’s dressing room for a post-show chat. But brutal honesty she wanted, and there was no getting the worms back in the can. Like everything the Spice Girls have ever done, this one was wholly for the fans, not the critics.
