Interview: Melanie C talks new album SWEAT ahead of her DJ set at Brighton Pride
We caught up with Melanie C, an artist needing zero introductions, to talk about new album SWEAT ahead of her forthcoming DJ set at Brighton’s Pride on the Park.
Melanie C is tired when she checks in for our interview, but it’s the kind of exhaustion that only comes from doing too much in too many places, rather than anything close to burnout. New York is the latest stop on a whirlwind stretch that has taken her from filming The Voice in Australia, back to Los Angeles for promo work, through Coachella for a weekend of music immersion.
There’s a sense she is still mentally half on the move, half already heading home. “It’s been a bit of a whirlwind,” she says, smiling as she tries to account for it all. The excitement, though, cuts through the fatigue when the conversation turns to what she’s seen along the way. Coachella, in particular, left its mark.
“Such great shows,” she says, almost overwhelmed by the list she tries to recall. Disclosure, Labrinth, Iggy Pop. The big pop moments too – Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Timberlake. And then a discovery: Karol G, who closed one of the nights with a performance that felt, to her, like a statement. “It was just really, really good vibes,” she says. “And I’m being introduced to new artists all the time now.”
But if this stretch of travel has been chaotic, it is also feeding directly into what comes next: her new album SWEAT, a record that is rooted in movement, both literal and emotional. There is a shift in her tone when she talks about it. Not just a new album cycle, but something closer to a reconnection with an earlier version of herself.
Over the past decade, she explains, DJing has reshaped her relationship with music entirely. Playing festivals, clubs and long residencies in Ibiza, particularly at Pacha, has reintroduced her to the kind of dancefloor freedom she first encountered as a teenager.
“I discovered raving when I was about 17,” she says, drifting back to Spain, to holiday nights that changed something fundamental in her. Coming back to London afterwards, she and her friends went searching for it again. “We were like, ‘Right, we’ve got to find our people.’”
It is a memory that sits in contrast with her early pop years. Growing up in the UK in the 80s, she remembers nightclubs that felt far removed from the euphoric, boundaryless energy she had just discovered abroad. Then came the Spice Girls, and everything accelerated. Identity, routine, ambition, it all tightened into something relentless. “I’d almost left that part of me behind,” she admits. The dance music lover, the raver, the teenager who first found freedom on a dancefloor.
SWEAT is her attempt to bring that version of herself back into the present. This time, she says, the process was shaped less like a traditional pop album and more like a DJ set. Movement first. Energy first. Emotion built around rhythm rather than the other way round. “I was really conscious I’m very different in the studio to how I am on stage,” she says. “But I wanted the studio version of me to match the performer.”
That performer is still unmistakably Sporty Spice, something she embraces without hesitation. The physicality, the energy, the attitude. It is all part of the DNA of the record. The album’s opening statement, ‘Sweat’, leans into that idea directly. Playful, physical, slightly tongue in cheek, it sets the tone for a project built for bodies in motion rather than passive listening. When she imagines the record now, it is not in headphones or living rooms. It is on dancefloors, in gyms, in bedrooms before a night out. It is communal.
One track in particular, ‘Undefeated Champion’, has become a personal anchor. “I can’t not smile when I hear it,” she says. It is self-motivation set to music, something to lift you when things are heavy or when the day is simply too much.
That energy builds into a run of major headline dates, including Brighton Pride in August, then in October, onto some of the UK and Ireland’s most loved stages. “I feel quite emotional about it,” she says simply.
Three decades after her debut with the Spice Girls, more than 25 years into a solo career, she is still building firsts and connecting with every iteration of herself.
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