The Spice Girls have spoken out about Mel B’s rather loose-lipped approach to the announcement of their upcoming tour.
While the rest of the band at least attempted to play coy in the lead-up to their reunion announcement, Mel B took a rather different tact, spending the last year telling anyone who would listen that the band was heading off on tour.
This included on the day of the announcement itself, when Mel B went on ‘Loose Women’ to confirm pretty much everything that had already been rumoured about their 2019 tour, just hours before the news was supposed to have broken on the band’s official Twitter account.
When asked about how they managed to keep everything under their hats in a new interview with Jonathan Ross, Mel B came clean about repeatedly spilling the beans, joking: “I never kept the secret, I just kept on saying we’re definitely going to get back together.”
Bandmate Emma Bunton added: “We just kept telling Melanie [B] that it wasn’t going to happen and then she couldn’t let it out.”
The group went on to reveal they came up with a code to discuss their plans privately so nothing could get leaked, with Melanie C even applying this at home.
“In my house we did have a code for Spice Girls because I was so paranoid,” she revealed. “Because I’m a good girl, and I do as I’m told, and so I kept the secret.
“My little girl said ‘Mummy, why don’t you call it Cucumber?’ So any time I spoke about Spice Girls it was called ‘Cucumber.’ And then at the other end of the spectrum, Melanie just went on national TV and said we were doing it.”
Mel B added: “They felt sorry for me because I’d been through a lot, they felt sorry for me, they were like, ‘let’s not have a go at her’.”
In earlier interviews to promote the 2019 live shows, Mel B has been trying to get the rumour mill going that the band are going to record an album, and their ‘Jonathan Ross’ appearance was no exception.
When the subject of new material came up, Mel offered an intriguing “well…”, though her bandmates seemed less enthused.
“I think it’s got to be an organic process,” Geri interjected. “If something happened and we felt like it.
“We think first things first, get out there and sing the hits, people want to hear that and if something else happened, that’s great.”
The same was true when it came to adding more dates to the tour, with Mel B needing “reigning in” by Geri, when she professed the tour would be “all over the world”.
“It’ll be one step at a time,” Geri said. “We’ve got families and we want to do it for the fans.
“We’re going to do Britain, it’s our home, it’s where we started and Britain means the world to us. We care about our fans, we want to celebrate, let’s see what happens.”
Watch the group’s full interview on ‘The Jonathan Ross Show’, airing on Saturday night at 10.05pm on ITV.