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SAN DIEGO — Melanie C brought “The Melanie C World Tour” to House of Blues San Diego on September 25, joined by experimental pop artist Sur Back for a night that celebrated movement and the unmistakable joy of performing.

Touring behind her ninth solo studio album, Sweat, Melanie C arrived in San Diego during a particularly bright chapter of an extraordinarily varied career. Nearly 30 years after the Spice Girls changed pop culture, she is still finding new ways to move forward, and Sur Back proved to complement Melanie C perfectly.

Sur Back Finds Joy on the Dance Floor

Sur Back, the musical project of Caroline Sans, opened the evening with a set that made an immediate impression, not least because of Sans’ obvious joy in performing. Whatever emotional territory the music entered, there was a genuine enthusiasm in the way she inhabited the stage.

At moments, Sans’ set brought to mind the atmospheric art-pop of artists like BANKS or Billie Eilish. The handful of tracks currently available on Spotify reveal a much brighter and dancier electronic side. There are flashes that may remind listeners of Purity Ring or CHVRCHES, only pushed further toward the dance floor. “BLIND (RAVE MIX),” in particular, practically explodes with bright rave energy, while the “Party People – KFR Remix” further reveals the dance-floor side of her music.

That combination of electronic pop and dance-floor momentum made Sur Back an especially fitting opener for this chapter of Melanie C’s career, pairing well with the club-minded energy of Sweat.

Some of the most intriguing music Sans performed isn’t readily available to revisit yet. Before “The Only Thing That Turns Me On Is Forever,” Sans spoke candidly about experiencing heartbreak, giving the unreleased song an added emotional weight. After the show, I asked Sans whether she had a CD or another format of her music available to buy and learned that the new material she had performed hadn’t been released for purchase yet.

Her current Spotify presence only tells part of the story. Sans has been releasing music as Sur Back for years, with a deeper catalog available through Bandcamp that includes Kitsch, Kitsch II, Nostalgia in Motion, and Finish Line. That earlier work explores electronic, experimental and art-pop territory, while the new material heard in San Diego was like an invitation to pay attention to where Sur Back is headed next.

San Diego also marked Sur Back’s final performance on this run with Melanie C, and her visible happiness onstage provided an appropriate beginning to a night in which joy itself would become a recurring theme.

Melanie C Enters the Ring

Melanie C walked onto the House of Blues stage dressed like a fighter. Wearing a boxing robe reading “Undefeated Champion,” she opened the set with the song of the same name, immediately establishing a visual and musical motif that would carry all the way through the performance. By the end of the night, she would be punching her fists triumphantly into the air.

Chisholm is in extraordinary form, and not simply in the physical sense one might expect from the woman the world has called Sporty Spice for nearly 30 years. Her energy and stage presence were victorious from start to finish. More striking, however, was the lightness about her. She looked like someone genuinely thrilled to be doing exactly what she was doing.

The beautiful House of Blues was packed so tightly that navigating the room in any direction was a challenge. Men appeared to make up a particularly large portion of the San Diego crowd, something our Content Editor, Brianne Dunn, also noticed at the Los Angeles show two nights earlier. There are likely several factors behind that demographic, but Chisholm’s longstanding support of the LGBTQ+ community and the unapologetic sex appeal surrounding the Sweat era may both be part of the equation.

After the show came an unexpected connection to home for Burning Hot Events: among the crowd were at least six fans who had made the trip from Arizona.

I happened to meet them in the merch line after overhearing Josh H., one of the six, exclaim, “It felt short because we were having such a great time!”

Running into a group from Arizona more than 350 miles from home made an already memorable night feel a little closer to it.

Every Version of Melanie C in One Show

For all the attention rightly paid to Melanie C’s voice, her solo career has also been defined by an impressive refusal to remain in one musical lane.

Northern Star introduced a solo artist willing to move among pop, rock, dance and alternative influences. Later records would take her through heavier rock territory, adult pop, electronic experimentation and dance music. Stages even found Chisholm interpreting songs from musical theater and film, a natural extension of a stage career that has included acclaimed roles in Blood Brothers and Jesus Christ Superstar.

Then there is The Sea. Released in 2011, the album remains criminally underrated and is a personal favorite, moving through atmospheric pop, electronics, rock, dance and darker emotional territory. In her 2022 memoir, The Sporty One: My Life as a Spice Girl, Chisholm herself reflects on the album’s underwhelming reception. But fifteen years later, in this new era, that may be water under the bridge.

That is not because the music no longer matters, but because the Melanie C who stood onstage in San Diego appears to have reached a very different place. The difficult chapters belong to the same story as the joy she projects now.

That history also makes the genre collisions in her current show feel less surprising. At one point, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” crashed directly into the Spice Girls’ “Who Do You Think You Are.”

It was wild.

The mashup brought the rock edge that has surfaced throughout Chisholm’s solo career crashing into the pop exuberance of the Spice Girls, all filtered through the sensibility of the DJ she has since become. It was another reminder that even while Sweat puts her firmly on the dance floor, there is unmistakably still rock in her soul.

And while another rock-oriented Melanie C album would certainly be welcome someday, Sweat feels exactly right for where she is now.

Sporty Spice Never Really Left

Melanie C has been DJing for years now, and that side of her musical life has increasingly become part of her identity as a performer. On this tour, she doesn’t leave it outside the concert experience. She brings it directly into the show.

During the DJ portion in San Diego, familiar pieces of dance history including Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam,” Snap!’s “The Power” and Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” kept the House of Blues moving before the show shifted back toward Chisholm’s own catalog.

That makes sense for Sweat, an album built around physicality and dance music. It also feels inevitable for Sporty Spice.

There was a period around Northern Star when Chisholm understandably wanted to establish Melanie C as something more than the identity the world already knew. But Sporty Spice never really disappeared. Over the years, Chisholm has increasingly spoken about that identity as an authentic part of herself, and she has actively embraced her Spice Girls history for a long time.

In The Sporty One, Chisholm recalls the Spice Girls’ determination to distribute vocal parts as equally as possible among all five members. Yet even within that deliberately democratic arrangement, her powerhouse voice could make Sporty Spice feel like the group’s natural vocal anchor. Hearing that voice fill a comparatively intimate venue decades later makes it easy to remember why.

Chisholm didn’t ration the Spice Girls material, nor did she allow it to consume the evening. Instead, those songs existed comfortably alongside Sweat, her earlier solo work, acoustic performances, and the DJ portion of the show.

“Never Be the Same Again” became particularly interactive when Chisholm invited an audience member onstage to perform Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes’ rap, handing one of the song’s most recognizable moments over to a fan.

When she told the crowd that San Diego had chosen “Viva Forever,” the response was immediate. With lights waving in the air, voices throughout the packed room joined hers on a song that has followed many of those people through much of their lives. I learned to play “Viva Forever” on piano as a kid and even introduced it to chorus classes at two different schools, both of which warmly embraced and performed it. Hearing it in that room all these years later made the moment especially meaningful for me.

Then there was “Spice Up Your Life.” With the live band driving the song and the crowd throwing itself into every word, there was a fervor in the room that made the performance feel remarkably complete. Chisholm’s voice had more than enough power to lead it, but it was the combination of performer, musicians, and audience that made the song feel so enormous.

Familiar Songs Become Something Else

The concert itself unfolded with a clear shape. The opening stretch belonged largely to Sweat, immediately establishing who Melanie C is right now before the show deliberately pulled back for a handful of acoustic songs.

“What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” was a particularly surprising choice for that portion of the concert. On record, it registers as a dance track, making its stripped-down live arrangement an unexpected reinterpretation. It gave the song a different character and allowed the show to breathe before the energy began building again.

From there, the intensity began to swell. Songs like “Flick of the Wrist” helped propel the concert toward its most physical stretch, eventually giving way to Chisholm behind the decks and a DJ sequence that sent the room fully into club territory. By the time she returned to songs like “Who Do You Think You Are” and “Spice Up Your Life,” the energy had been building in waves rather than remaining at full throttle all night.

At the opposite extreme from the acoustic interlude was the closing song, “I Turn to You.” It had far more intensity live than its album version might lead someone to expect. Calling it epic almost feels insufficient.

A significant part of that transformation came from hearing the song played with live instruments. The familiar dance track suddenly had a physical force that a recording can’t entirely replicate. Chisholm attacked the song while the band drove it forward, and the crowd sang along until the distinction between performer and audience began to blur.

“Spice Up Your Life” benefited from that same live-musician intensity. Both songs demonstrated how material rooted in pop and dance music could become something more visceral when played by a band in a packed room.

The intensity reinforced something the Nirvana mashup had already suggested: the rock singer who emerged on Northern Star never disappeared; rather, she became one part of a much broader musical identity.

Another Prime

For American fans, seeing Melanie C perform a full solo show remains a rare opportunity. Her solo career has brought her to the United States before, including appearances dating back to the Northern Star era, but those performances occurred more than half a lifetime ago for some of the people who grew up listening to her.

Sweat also arrives with some significant career milestones. The album reached No. 3 in the UK, becoming the highest-charting solo album of Melanie C’s career and surpassing the No. 4 peak of Northern Star. According to the UK’s Official Charts Company, it also became the highest-charting solo album by any Spice Girl in UK chart history.

The success comes at a moment when dance music is having another cultural surge. Just two days after the San Diego show, Madonna became the biggest winner at the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards, taking home seven awards during her own return to dance music with Confessions II, including Artist of the Year and Best Dance.

Maybe there is something about the world right now that has people especially hungry for music that lets them move, escape for a while, and simply feel good.

I was not really old enough to see Melanie C during those earlier American appearances. I didn’t even know those shows were happening at the time.

There was an obvious temptation, then, to view a concert like this as finally catching up with something missed in youth. But seeing her now felt more like moving forward and meeting Melanie C where she’s at today.

That feels especially relevant because Chisholm herself has previously spoken about wondering whether she had already missed her prime, only to reach her 40s and discover another opportunity to go for what she wanted and enjoy herself.

Now, in her 50s, newly married, continuing to explore DJ culture, touring behind new music, and visibly throwing herself into the experience of performing it, she did not look like an artist living in the aftermath of her prime. She looked like someone in another one, and there is something profoundly hopeful and inspiring about that.

Popular culture has a habit of treating a person’s prime as though it has an expiration date, particularly for women. Youth gets framed as the period of discovery, possibility, and reinvention, while middle age is too often discussed in terms of what someone once was.

Melanie C offers another possibility… Perhaps life doesn’t contain one prime. Perhaps there can be several.

And perhaps reaching middle age doesn’t mean looking backward at the most exciting version of yourself. There may still be versions you haven’t met yet.

That feeling lingered throughout a show filled with movement, communal singing, and an almost startling amount of joy. In difficult times, it is restorative to watch someone step onto a stage and so visibly love being there.

And then, somehow, after an evening built around joy and togetherness, an actual brawl broke out among audience members scrambling for setlists. Apparently somebody took the boxing motif a little too seriously. It was a bizarre ending to an otherwise remarkably uplifting night.

But the image worth keeping came just before it: Melanie C, fists raised in the air, still moving forward. Undefeated, indeed.

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Photographer: Katherine Amy Vega

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Melanie C & Sur Back – House of Blues San Diego 9-25-2026

Photography © Katherine Amy Vega, Kataklizmic Design
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