[Harry!]

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"Sometimes when you're in a band like the Spice Girls and your first album is a huge success, and you're instantly playing arenas and stadiums, you kind of feel like you've cheated."

It's hard to completely agree with Melanie C as she offers that little confession over the phone from her London home. As the Sporty flavour of the Spice Girls, she was the strongest voice among a group that moved 55 million records during their '90s heyday, raked in more than $200 million on their comeback tour and had a generation of kids believing in a fuzzy concept called Girl Power. You can't cheat the world out of that much love and profit. Maybe it would be more accurate to say the pop star -- who's about to begin a major Canadian solo tour -- has simply done everything backwards.

Spice Girls was the beginning. Now, more than a decade after first packing stadiums with backflips and bubblegum pop, Melanie C has opted not to hock designer clothing lines or launch a lucrative career in reality TV. Instead, she's giddily anticipating what most musicians struggle for years to outgrow: a gruelling road tour of small clubs from Montreal to Vancouver. It's her chance, she says, to pay her dues.

The last show Melanie C performed in Canada was on Feb. 26 at Toronto's Air Canada Centre, the sold-out final stop of the Spice Girls tour, possibly the final Spice Girls show ever. The next time she's in Toronto, she'll play the much smaller Phoenix Concert Theatre, which boasts a capacity of approximately 1,000 people.

But she doesn't see it as a demotion. "I love it," she insists. "It's more intimate. It just feels more real."

"It's nice for me to go back, kind of earn your stripes, you know," says Melanie C, who remembers her first live performances as big arena gigs with the Spice Girls.

She's making the Canadian jaunt to show off her fourth album, This Time, which was released in Canada April 8 -- nearly a year after it hit shelves overseas.

There are no plans to steer the tour bus south of the border this year. Once her Canadian trip wraps on May 17, Melanie C says she'll be turning her attention to a few European dates and then writing another album.

ON THE ROAD

May 4: Montreal

May 5: Ottawa

May 8: Toronto

May 9: London

May 11: Winnipeg

May 12: Saskatoon

May 14: Edmonton

May 15: Calgary

May 17: Vancouver