Spice Girl Mel B has been spotted taking on a new role – washing customers’ hair in a salon in her hometown of Leeds.
In these photos, first published by the Yorkshire Evening Post, Mel B, 48 can be seen working at Rory James Salon in Horsforth, a suburb of the northern England city of Leeds.
But all is not quite what it seems: Rory James Salon is owned by Mel B’s fiance, Rory McPhee, and she was putting in a shift at his salon as part of a competition for fans.
A handful of competition winners got the chance to meet Mel, have their hair styled by her fiance and take home a signed copy of her acclaimed memoir Brutally Honest.
The Post reports that the hair salon session took place just one day after Mel B’s former Spice Girls bandmate Victoria Beckham’s star-studded 50th birthday bash in London last week.
That event gave fans the rarest of sightings: A five-piece Spice Girls reunion. All five members of the 90s pop group posed for photos and even danced to a few of their hits together at the party. It was the first time all five had been photographed together since 2018.
Fellow Spice Girl Melanie C – aka Sporty Spice – arrived in Australia shortly after the Beckham bash, where she’s in the midst of a DJ tour visiting cities as remote as Cairns and Albury.
But Mel B’s telling comments in an interview published last week suggest Mel C might be wishing she was here with her Spice bandmates instead.
Asked by Attitude Magazine which Spice Girls song she would choose to describe each of her bandmates, Mel B offered the caustic banger Tell Me Why for Melanie C.
“She’s so sensitive, questioning ‘why? Why did it end up this way? What’s going on?! Why am I in Australia doing a DJ tour when I want to be with you girls on stage?!’ It’s that panic,” she revealed.
Mel B moved back to Leeds several years ago to be closer to her family. After a long period of estrangement during her allegedly abusive 10-year marriage to ex Stephen Belafonte, she now lives down the road from her mother, back in the town where she grew up, some 275km north of London.
She revealed in an interview with news.com.au last year that the Spice Girls’ 2019 UK and Ireland reunion tour was the catalyst for the move home, as her children asked during the tour why they had to return to America – then took matters into their own hands.
“All my kids were like, ‘Why are we going back to America, mum?’ I’m like, ‘Because that’s where we live and that’s where we’ve been living for the last 25 years.’ And then they were like, ‘Well, I found a school here.’ I’m like, ‘You found a school in Leeds? Not just London, Leeds, my hometown’.”
Next on the agenda for Mel B: Planning her wedding to McPhee, after the pair got engaged in 2022. Eleven years her junior, he’s reportedly a longtime family friend who first worked with Mel as her hairdresser before their relationship eventually turned romantic.