Mel B 'never would have been in the Spice Girls' had it not been for this one person

Mel B "would probably never have been in the Spice Girls" had it not been for her local dance teacher. The 49-year-old pop star found global fame as a member of the world's best-selling girl group in the late 1990s alongside Geri Halliwell, Melanie C, Emma Bunton and Victoria Beckham, but only found a "passion for performance" because there was a cheap class in her hometown of Leeds at a time when her parents could not afford anything else. She told Living Yorkshire magazine: "Like I say I've grown up being very honest and telling it as it is, which served me well both as a Spice Girl and as a judge on shows from America's Got Talent to Masked Singer in Australia and X-Factor in the UK.

As a hyperactive seven-year-old I was taught dance in a local community centre by Jean Pearce. Lessons cost about 50 pence as my parents would not have been able to afford it otherwise. Those dance lessons - I was also in the first ever intake for the Northern School of Contemporary Dance - gave me a passion for performance and I would probably never have been in the Spice Girls had it not been for lovely Jean.



" The 'I Want You Back' singer has been taken all over the world by her career, but now lives back in Yorkshire on a farm and hasn't found anything else that can compare to the countryside view she wakes up to every morning. She said: "Yorkshire people are the best because they have the greatest sense of humour, they love a good time, and they are not afraid to tell it like it is. But I now live on a farm way out in the countryside, and I wake up every day with my goats, my hens, my ducks and my three dogs and spend as much time as I can outside because it is just beautiful - you cannot beat a Yorkshire view.

" The former 'America's Got Talent' judge previously revealed that she has a shed on her farm that she has decked out to celebrate her heyday with the 'Wannabe' hitmakers. Speaking on the 'Mad, Sad and Bad' podcast, she told host Paloma Faith: "I go up to the field and I spend all day with my chickens and my goats, and I've got this little shed that I've got a Union Jack and leopard print on. "And I just sit there and I stare at my animals and be by myself, and I love it.

"There's always been a bit of that in me, because I like the silence and the stillness. Because when I'm out and about, I'm like this, so you can't be like this all the time ..

. I'll just pretend I've lost my phone. I'll go and sit with the animals for hours.

".