BBC (January 1999)
Ginger
snapped over cancer campaign
Geri
Halliwell left the Spice Girls so she could concentrate on
her breast cancer campaigns, she has told the BBC.
In her first British TV interview since the split, she told
chat show host Michael Parkinson the Spice Girls' tight schedule
would have prevented her from doing an interview on the issue,
so she walked out on the spot.
Ms
Halliwell had a lump removed from her chest at the age of
18 and has become a prominent campaigner since she left the
group in May.
"The
day I left the Spice Girls I wasn't planning to leave, it
made me check out my own principles," she told Parkinson.
"I was meant to be doing the National
Lottery show and the schedule wouldn't permit me to do a breast
cancer interview and I thought, 'Hold on a minute, what are
your principles?'
"So
I had to question myself. That is the reason I left on that
day - there was never a good day to leave."
She
added she was always planning to leave the group anyway -
and had told Melanie Brown, Melanie Chisholm, Victoria Adams
and Emma Bunton four months earlier she was planning to quit
in September 1998. Halliwell added the split was still "quite
tender in my heart" and her relationship with the others
was "like a marriage".
She
said: I fell in love completely, passionately,
I needed it." But she added: "Like
one in three marriages, under the pressure of work schedules
the marriage broke up, it imploded."
Halliwell
added the decision to go was "nothing
to do with any of the girls really". She also spoke
of her stint as a topless model before she was successful
- which came back to haunt her at the height of her fame.
"To be honest it was boring. I found
it very, very dull in the end. Standing there with the window
open to keep your nipples firm was not good," she said.
Since
leaving the Spice Girls Geri has signed a solo deal with EMI,
and has already written lyrics for her songs. She said: "It's
totally schizophrenic with mood swings so that every woman
in Britain will identify with it."
source:
BBC