“Sadly, Robbie did behave badly.” Mel C on her short-lived relationship with Robbie Williams.

Chisholm writes how she knew that Williams was troubled, but says they kept in touch as he understood the pressures of fame thanks to his time in ’90s boy band, Take That. 

While the other Spice Girls had boyfriends, most notably Victoria was seeing footballer David Beckham, Chisholm had been told by manager Simon Fuller that she mustn’t date anyone because of her ‘vulnerability’ and fragile mental health. 

“Throughout my time in the Spice Girls, I was pretty much the only single one. I’d had boyfriends at school and a couple of relationships through college but I had been single for a while when I joined the band.”

Chisholm writes that after a couple of years of feeling lonely and often ridiculed in the press for her single girl status, she was lonely, fed up, and “craved attention”. Her supposed knight in shining armour? A smiling Robbie Williams at rehearsals in Rotterdam for the 1997 MTV Europe Music Awards.

“As I looked out to the empty venue, who do I see, right at the front, watching me, with a big grin on his face? Robbie bloody Williams. I think, I guess, he must have asked me out that night. Not like, ‘Do you want to be my girlfriend?’, but a more casual, ‘When you gonna come and see me play then?'”

When they went on their first dates in November 1997, Williams was on the cusp of releasing his mega-hit ‘Angels’, so he was still unsure how things might turn out. They met up in locations around Europe after gigs.

“We fitted it all around our schedules. It was very exciting, albeit short-lived. The truth of the matter was we had a couple of dates, but he was a mess; I was a mess. Nothing came of it, and it broke my heart. We’d spent the last year talking about our lives and bonding over this shared experience. He let me know what it was like to be a solo artist and the highs and lows that came with that. I thought I’d found someone, someone of my very own.”