Spice Girls’ Melanie C speaks about their million selling singles

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Official Singles Chart, Spice Girls’ Melanie C chats to OfficialCharts.com about the group’s million selling singles Wannabe and 2 Become 1.

With 11 Official Singles Chart Top 40 hits (including nine Number 1s) and a combined singles sales tally of over 8 million, Spice Girls are THE most successful British girl group of all time.

Two of their tracks, 1996’s Wannabe and 2 Become 1, have sold over a million copies in the UK, making Geri 'Ginger Spice' Halliwell, Melanie 'Sporty Spice' C, Victoria 'Posh Spice' Beckham, Melanie 'Scary Spice' Brown and Emma 'Baby Spice' Bunton part of the elite Million Sellers Club.

”I’m just really floored by finding out Wannabe and 2 Become 1 are Million Sellers!” Melanie C tells OfficialCharts.com. “Everything I did with the Spice Girls was so… Insane! It was incredible and I’m just really, really proud that we did it. We did it for the girls, and we did it for the country on a global scale!”

Wannabe, the group’s debut single, entered the Official Singles Chart in June, 1996, climbing to the top spot a week later. And there it would stay for an impressive seven weeks.

“We had very high hopes for Wannabe, we were very ambitious; our midweek was Number 6 and on the weekend it went up to Number 3,” says Melanie. “We were absolutely over the moon, we couldn’t believe that we were going to have a Top 5 hit in the Official Chart! We were so, so excited. We thought we were just superstars, in just one week. And then we went over to Japan because we were starting to have really great success over there. The second week we were in Japan, Wannabe climbed to Number 1. It was amazing. But we couldn’t believe we weren’t in the UK the week of our first single going to Number 1. Luckily thought, it stayed there for seven weeks, so we were able to come back and perform it on Top Of The Pops.”

The group’s third single, 2 Become 1, became the Christmas Number 1 of 1996, and the first of the Spice Girls’ three consecutive UK Christmas chart-toppers, emulating The Beatles from 1963 to 1965. With this release, the band achieved cumulative sales of more than 3 million singles in their first six months on the UK chart, an opening total which no other act has matched.

Watch the full interview with Melanie C below.

The full list of the UK’s 123 million selling singles, and the stories behind them, feature in a new Official Charts Company book, entitled The Million Sellers which is published by Omnibus Press (you can purchase it online from Amazon here, or get the Kindle edition here.