Mel B: Six things we learned when she spoke to Kirsty Young

In her BBC Radio 4 podcast, Young Again, journalist and broadcaster Kirsty Young takes her guests back to meet their younger selves and asks the question: if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?

Mel B is best known as a member of the pop group Spice Girls, but as well as being a singer and songwriter, she is a talent show judge and television personality. She was born and brought up in Leeds, her father was born in Saint Kitts and Nevis while her mother is from England. Since 2018 she has been a patron of the domestic violence survivors' charity Women's Aid. In 2022 she was awarded the MBE for services to charitable causes and vulnerable women.

Here are the things we learned when she met Kirsty Young...

1. Did she always want to be famous?

It turns out the opposite was always the case. As Mel says: “I don't think I ever wanted to be famous. I knew that I had a voice and I knew that I wanted to say certain things and represent certain things, and it wasn't until I met the other four [members of the Spice Girls] that I found my pack and we were all on the same page.”

“That's when we came up with Girl Power, and it was, ‘Well, we're doing this for the women,’ which at that time was just not heard of - it was all boy bands.”

“It's something that we all did believe in and still do to this day. Why would we want to be manufactured and told what to wear and told what to sing when we had so much to give lyrically and musically anyway between all five of us?”

2. Mel’s happy place is on stage

“Doing an interview like this one-on-one, I get really nervous,” says Mel about talking to Kirsty. “[But] put me in Wembley Stadium with the Spice Girls music and I'm just in my element. Nothing can go wrong. Everything's just perfection.”

“It's like something takes over my senses. Sometimes, I'll come off stage at Wembley after two hours and I can't even remember everything that I've done because it was such a high and your body goes into automatic response and you just do it."

Comparing performing as part of the band with working as a solo artist, Mel says:

“Even though you take all the rewards back personally... it's quite a lonely place, really very, very lonely. Whereas to be able to share it with the other girls, it's magical and you don't feel that alone. It bonds you like glue together forever and ever, amen.”

3. How did she get into an abusive relationship?

Coming off the back of the end of her relationship with actor Eddie Murphy, the man she describes as “the love of my life”, Mel says she was very vulnerable at this point in her life.

"I’d just had a baby [Angel, with Eddie Murphy] and not like I wasn't in desperate emotional distress because I now had a baby to look after, I now had to figure out my future. And don't forget, I've already got Phoenix [her first child], who I've already been single parent to. But I know what I need to do, I need to gather my tribe together and get the support and just be in that love bubble of just having a new baby.”

“But, you know, my emotions are all over the place. And that's when this person swooped in and I'm guessing, which is what always happens: they stalk you online, they find out your weaknesses, they watch you in interviews and they build up an already pre-made character and they know how to get into the cracks and that's exactly what he did.”

And what advice does she wish she could have given her younger self at this time?

“I would say whoever comes into your life, check the red flags because there's a certain pattern and a certain way that they present themselves and it's very, very obvious when you know it. That's why I'm adamant to teach it in schools, what a healthy and what a non-healthy relationship looks like.”

“When somebody is so over the top and so insistent on love bombing you, it's not really meant to happen like that. That should make somebody go, ‘Let me just hold on a second. I don't even know you properly. Let me just go through the paces.’”

Friends and family tried to warn Mel about the dangers of the relationship, but this only ended up in driving a wedge between Mel and those closest to her.

“That's also what they're good at now, knowing that you're going to be told. It is all a bit too much and very confusing and it's very controlling... I've spoken to many, many survivors, being patron of Women's Aid and it's exactly the same steps that they go through. I wish I would have known.”

4. How hard was it to escape her abuser?

“It can happen to anybody, I'm proof of it,” says Mel. “And I think the more outspoken, confident, very successful at what you do or passionate you are for what you do, the more of those traits you have, I think the more that you're a target for abuse, because the thing that they want to do is take that crystal shining person and have it all for themselves, and try and destroy it. That is their goal at the end of the day, just dim your light, take away your passions, your confidence, your money, your self-respect, your dignity. The satisfaction for an abuser is to actually manage to control that person and dim their light.”

“And then as the abuser, you can make that light go on and off because you are fully in control of them and you become like a robot.”

"They're very good at sensing when you're pulling away - then the flowers would come. Or another engagement or wedding ring would come, or a beautiful dinner would happen by surprise. And your friends and family have been invited. So it's like, ‘Oh, no, he does love me.’”

“Or then you're busy and he'll go to the accountant to meet him because you're so busy. ‘Well, that's nice,’ but then when you think about it, ‘No, it's not nice actually, because you're going to be financially abusing me also’, but you don't think of it at the time because you are literally in flight or fight mode constantly. And when you leave that, you are literally left picking up the pieces and that's why so, so many women go back and it took me about seven times to leave.”

"I'm leaving and I'm going, ‘Where? Where am I going? I haven't spoken to my friends or family. I don't have a credit card. How am I actually gonna go with three kids I've got? Well, then I have to go back. It's the same vicious circle.”

5. It was the illness and death of her father that helped her finally leave her abuser

Kirsty asks Mel what was it that finally enabled her to leave her husband and she replies: “My dad, my dad got seriously ill with cancer.”

Mel was appearing in Chicago on Broadway when she got the phone call from her sister telling her that their father was sick. He’d “battled cancer on and off for seven years,” says Mel. “He’d go into treatment, he’d get better, it would go, but then it would come back... I wasn’t really talking to my family at the time but then my sister called me yelling and screaming and saying, ‘This is it! It’s really, really bad.’”

"Me and my ex were kind of living separately because I was in New York, he was in LA,” says Mel. Having returned to LA she planned to go and see her father but in the meantime her and her children’s passports disappeared.

“They vanished... right when I was taking that flight back to London so I had to apply for an emergency passport.”

“When you're in that kind of situation, he would never have been able to say to me, ‘You can't see your dad, your dying father’. In the past, he would have said, ‘Oh, he'll get over it,’ but my dad was on his deathbed so he knew that I was going.

Mel made it to Leeds spending all the time in the hospice with her father and her sister.

Mel recalls, near the end, whispering to her father “because I could feel that he was he was going and I said, ‘Dad, I promise you, if you go peacefully, I'll get back to America and I'll be done with this marriage. I'll leave that abuser.’ By that point, I'd already flown his mum over from Nevis, and his sister was there so he was surrounded by family.”

“He just looked at me and took his last breath and I was like, well, that's a promise that I can never go back on. And that's what gave me the strength to leave.”

“Because I don't think I would have had the strength just by myself. But my dad gave me that.”

6. Despite her turbulent past Mel describes her life now as happy

“It's very calm and I'm very much a part of my own world, which I wasn't for so long and it just feels safe and cosy,” says Mel B of her time now. She puts it down in part to “being back up North and being surrounded by friends and family, being in the place that I grew up.”

"Just going full circle, having travelled all over the world, lived in LA, lived in Australia. My kids have been to school here, there and everywhere and I'm now back where I was born. Forget the city centre, Leeds, if you go a little bit out, it's so green and there are woods and forests and parks. Being really back in contact with what's important, the earth and the soul of your life again.”

Melanie Brown’s ex-husband was invited to respond to this interview. He told us he strongly denies the allegations, which he claims are false.