AFTER becoming a superstar with the Spice Girls, Mel B moved to a Los Angeles mansion and lived an A-lister’s life in the Hollywood Hills.
But after 15 years in the celeb hotspot she has returned to her Yorkshire roots — and is now happiest getting stuck into housework.
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Mel has set up home in Leeds, and said: “It’s my safe place. Just to be around green and nature. Peace and quiet.”
The mum of three added: “I’m a normal girl from Leeds. I go to the supermarket, I make my own cup of tea, I do laundry, which I’m addicted to.
“I love hoovering, too. My mum is really happy and so is anybody whose place I go and visit. I’m all, ‘Have you got a hoover?’.”
Mel, full name Melanie Brown, credits her mother Andrea and late dad Martin for instilling a work ethic that helped prepare her for the pressures of superstardom.
Since releasing debut single Wannabe with bandmates Victoria Beckham, Geri Halliwell, Melanie Chisholm and Emma Bunton in 1996 and becoming the best-selling girl group of all time, Mel has not stopped working.
She has just returned from Sydney, where she was a judge for The Masked Singer Australia.
Mel has been a judge on The X Factor here and abroad, co-presented the Australian version of Dancing With The Stars and even judged on Spain’s version of The Masked Singer last year.
Next year she is expected to reunite with the Spice Girls to mark their 30th anniversary.
Mel, 48, said: “I saw my mum and dad slog their guts out doing not just their nine-to-five job but taking on an extra job and an extra job after that.
“So my work ethic was instilled in me at a very, very young age. And nothing was given for free.
“You had to earn it, you had to work for it, and you had to respect it when you got it.”
When Mel joined the Spice Girls aged 17, the five of them were “on the dole” and living off baked beans.
After hitting the big time, Mel needed reiki healing to combat anxiety ahead of their performances.
She said: “I became a reiki master when I was 19 so I’m very in tune with chakras and energies.
“Not too much where I’m going to bore you and sound like a hippy, but just enough where I know things.
“The other girls call me Witchy Woo — but a good witch.”
Mel even reckons she sees dead people, saying: “It’s nice, it’s comforting.”
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Now she has more reason than ever to be back in her home city, because she is planning her wedding to Leeds-based hairdresser Rory McPhee.
The pair have been together for four years and confirmed in October that they were engaged after Rory popped the question at Cliveden House in Berkshire.
Bandmates Mel C and Emma cried with happiness when she told them the news, and Mel said it was the “first time in my life, I’m engaged to a beautiful, honest person who makes me feel protected, nurtured and so loved, and I want to savour that”.
This will be Mel’s third marriage. She wed Dutch dancer Jimmy Gulzar, the father of her 24-year-old daughter Phoenix, in 1998.
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She went on to have daughter Iris, now 16, with Hollywood star Eddie Murphy and married her former manager Stephen Belafonte, the father of her 11-year-old daughter Madison, in 2007.
She filed for divorce ten years later after accusing him of emotional and physical abuse.
In an interview with hypnotist Paul McKenna for his Positivity Podcast, Mel revealed it was her father’s death from cancer aged 63, in 2017, that was the catalyst for her to leave the marriage.
She said: “I left about seven or eight times. There’s many statistics out there, something ridiculous like one in three women in the kind of relationship that I had commit suicide or their partner kills them.
“I think it’s one in four women attempt to leave at least nine times before they actually leave and, for me, it was my father dying.”
Mel claims Belafonte threatened to tell lies about her and she worried most about the impact it would have on her dad Martin.
‘MY BEST LIFE’
She said: “I just thought, ‘Well, if my then partner does what he said he was going to do, like expose me and tell the Press that I was not a good mother and that I was this person and that person . . . the only person I’d be scared of . . . would be my dad finding out.
“As soon as my dad died I thought, ‘respectfully now, I can leave this marriage’.
“I have the guts and the cojones to leave and it was a big deal for me to leave because I had nowhere to stay and I was with my three kids.”
She says her bravery set a good example to her children that “you don’t have to put up with the yelling and the control”.
Mel told Paul: “When I left I did everything I wanted to do. We went travelling to Thailand.
“We got a dog. We got a trampoline. We did crazy things like splash each other’s clothes.
“But they still went to school and did their homework.”
Mel made her daughters clean their own rooms and say a prayer before meals “because not everybody gets to eat good, healthy food”.
As well as a nutritious diet, Mel combats stress with daily exercise. She said: “Working out for me is not to keep in good shape.
“It is for my mind as I do have ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia. I mean, the list goes on and on and on.
“I find working out helps me meditate, helps me get rid of a bit of my anxiety and helps me focus on me, just for that 45 minutes.
“I find it really calms my brain. It sets me up to have a really amazing day.”
Now Mel says that she is “living her best life” back in the Yorkshire countryside with Rory, who she has been friends with for two decades.
Mel said: “I feel like I’ve really made an effort to make sure I’m living my best life, the life I always wanted to have.
“Now more than ever, whether it be as a parent, whether it be in my career or whether it be in my mind and body.
“I ask myself questions all the time and I work on myself. I want to be the best version of me.
“I never do anything by half measures. As long as it comes from a good place and it’s not 100 per cent driven by money then you know that you are doing your passion, and your passion ends up being your work.
“Apart from being on stage performing in front of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium, being in the countryside is my happy spot.”
- Listen to Paul McKenna’s Positivity Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
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