Mel B 'never would have been in the Spice Girls' had it not been for this one person
Mel B "would probably never have been in the Spice Girls" had it not been for her local dance teacher.
Mel B "would probably never have been in the Spice Girls" had it not been for her local dance teacher.
The 49-year-old pop star found global fame as a member of the world's best-selling girl group in the late 1990s alongside Geri Halliwell, Melanie C, Emma Bunton and Victoria Beckham, but only found a "passion for performance" because there was a cheap class in her hometown of Leeds at a time when her parents could not afford anything else.
She told Living Yorkshire magazine: "Like I say I've grown up being very honest and telling it as it is, which served me well both as a Spice Girl and as a judge on shows from America's Got Talent to Masked Singer in Australia and X-Factor in the UK. As a hyperactive seven-year-old I was taught dance in a local community centre by Jean Pearce. Lessons cost about 50 pence as my parents would not have been able to afford it otherwise. Those dance lessons - I was also in the first ever intake for the Northern School of Contemporary Dance - gave me a passion for performance and I would probably never have been in the Spice Girls had it not been for lovely Jean."
The 'I Want You Back' singer has been taken all over the world by her career, but now lives back in Yorkshire on a farm and hasn't found anything else that can compare to the countryside view she wakes up to every morning.
She said: "Yorkshire people are the best because they have the greatest sense of humour, they love a good time, and they are not afraid to tell it like it is. But I now live on a farm way out in the countryside, and I wake up every day with my goats, my hens, my ducks and my three dogs and spend as much time as I can outside because it is just beautiful - you cannot beat a Yorkshire view."
The former 'America's Got Talent' judge previously revealed that she has a shed on her farm that she has decked out to celebrate her heyday with the 'Wannabe' hitmakers.
Speaking on the 'Mad, Sad and Bad' podcast, she told host Paloma Faith: "I go up to the field and I spend all day with my chickens and my goats, and I've got this little shed that I've got a Union Jack and leopard print on.
"And I just sit there and I stare at my animals and be by myself, and I love it.
"There's always been a bit of that in me, because I like the silence and the stillness. Because when I'm out and about, I'm like this, so you can't be like this all the time … I'll just pretend I've lost my phone. I'll go and sit with the animals for hours."
