Melanie C3Olympia Theatre, Dublin★★★★☆
“Who in the room has never seen a Spice Girls show?” the artist officially known as Melanie C, better known as Mel C and born Melanie Chisholm asks the crowd at 3Olympia on Sunday. After a surprisingly thick smattering of hands fly up, Sporty Spice fuels the reunion rumours anew with a teasing “We need to do something about this.”
But tonight is not about her bandmates or anything as tediously grown-up as diary scheduling and clashing commitments. It’s about rediscovering the teenager who would go to the Costa Brava to lose herself in rave culture as part of a group of friends dubbed the “F**king Yeah Four”.
It’s this exuberant, pre-Spice Chisholm who is resurrected to infectious effect for a gig in which her old hits are a highlight but never the whole point.
She bounds on to the stage in a satin boxing robe, ready to shuffle and jab her way through Undefeated Champion, one of the superior tracks on Sweat, the clubby, cardio-pop album she released to deservedly positive notices in May.
Sweat is Chisholm’s ninth studio album (the next most musically productive Spice Girl is Emma Bunton, with four), and it’s also her best-defined one. You feel fitter just by playing it. Confidence permeates its beats, and she lets it flourish on this tour, delivering all 13 of its songs with their sense of liberation and self-knowledge intact.
During one of them, Pressure, she crouches and springs about in a dance frenzy, her body language alternating between the world’s most likable predator and the epitome of ecstatic abandonment as she covers her face with her flying hair.
She reinvents the delightful What Could Possibly Go Wrong? as an acoustic manifesto for doing whatever she likes, however imperfect, and not overthinking.
And on the album’s title track, which samples Diana Ross’s Work That Body, she exudes an irresistible 1980s vibe by pulling on the tour merchandise also worn by her keyboardist and drummer: a Frankie Goes to Hollywood-style T-shirt that marries her band and solo identities with the slogan “Sporty says sweat”.
Chisholm recently demurred when Louis Theroux repeatedly suggested to her on his podcast that she had the best voice in The Spice Girls, modestly (and accurately) insisting that it’s down to personal taste. She was, in truth, one of three members, the others being Bunton and Mel B, who contributed distinctive vocals to their hits.
Comparisons are moot in any case. Tonight she shows off her power, dexterity and sincerity, her voice both soft and strong on Emotional Memory and One Track Mind, while on Cashmere, another peak from Sweat, and Never Be the Same Again, her 2000 number one (now shorn of its rap by the late Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes), its textures are just lovely.
But, as Chisholm says, it would be “rude not to get spicy” on this tour, which began in North America and now proceeds to Britain, continental Europe, Japan and Australia. So in the mid-set acoustic section she gives us the 30-year-old Say You’ll Be There, the Spice Girls’ superb second single, the crowd effortlessly harmonising with her breezy vocal ad-libs, and later, after a sojourn behind the decks, a snippet of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit heralds Who Do You Think You Are, with all hands soon in the air for the still-joyous Spice Up Your Life.
By the time she closes the night with the Ibiza-channelling I Turn to You, another solo number one, she has done what she set out to do: make us sweat and sing along – sometimes both at the same time – in a spicy carnival of a show.