In 1999, while her superstar pop band Spice Girls were on hiatus due to the fact that two members were expecting their first children, Melanie ‘Sporty Spice’ Chisholm relocated to Los Angeles to work on her debut solo album, Northern Star.
In addition to being one-fifth of the world’s biggest girl band, Chisholm had demonstrated her commercial potential as a solo artist the previous year by duetting with Bryan Adams on When You’re Gone, which reached number 3 in the UK charts, and her record label spared no expense in underwriting what was anticipated to be one of the biggest pop albums of the year. Enter producers Rick Rubin (Beastie Boys, Slayer, The Cult, Red Hot Chili Peppers) and William Orbit (Madonna, All Saints), and a team of crack songwriters including Billy Steinberg (Heart, Pat Benatar, The Bangles) to assist Chisholm in crafting an album for the ages.
It was while working Los Angeles, that Chisholm learned from Rick Rubin that one of the world’s biggest rock bands had written a song about her, and recorded it with Rubin.
“He’s obviously worked with the Chili Peppers and was a great friend of Anthony Kiedis for many, many years,” Chisholm says in a new interview with The Guardian. “Rick looked at me with a cheeky grin and went: ‘Have you heard the song that Anthony’s written about you?’
“Whenever Rick would finish mixing anything he’d go out and listen to it in his Rolls-Royce,” she continues. “He took me out to it and he played me [Californication album track] Emit Remmus and I was a little bit embarrassed because it’s a bit saucy. But I was so flattered because I’m a huge Red Hot Chili Peppers fan and Anthony is such an incredible songwriter and performer.”
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Exactly what Chisholm thinks of the inarguably terrible lyric “What could be wetter than an English girl, American man” sadly did not arise in the interview.
“Were we in a relationship?” she says. “We did go on a date. We spent a little bit of time together. But it wasn’t a fully formed relationship. Being in LA was a magical time.”
Mel C was not the only iconic pop star to have a song written about her by Kiedis. I Could Have Lied, on 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik, was written about the singer’s unrequited crush on Sinéad O’Connor.
“There must be something in the way I feel, that she don’t want me to feel,” Kiedis sings in the song’s opening lyrics, which in 2026 sounds like something from an incel’s online manifesto.
Unlike Chisholm, O’Connor was definitely not “flattered’ by her RHCP song.
“I never had a relationship with him, ever,” O’Connor later commented. “I hung out with him a few times and the row we had was because he suggested we might become involved. I don’t give a shit about the song he wrote. I’m not a Red Hot Chili Peppers fan. I can’t bear them, I don’t get it.”