Melanie C is celebrating her milestone 50th birthday with a one-off show at London’s KOKO. 

The Spice Girls icon will be joined by “special guests” when she takes to the stage on January 12, 2024 for the special performance. 

“I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be celebrating my 50th birthday next year by performing at the iconic London venue KOKO,” tweeted the I Turn To You singer, “and I would love for you all to join me!”

Tickets go on sale from Friday, September 15 at 10am BST.

Last year, RETROPOP caught up with Melanie to celebrate the release of her first-ever memoir, ‘Who I Am: My Story’, with the Liverpudlian star admitting that for many years she sought to distance herself from the Sporty Spice image she created within the group.

 “I’m very proud to be Sporty Spice,” she said. “I used to see her as a character and at one point she was somebody I wanted to distance myself from because I was so determined to be taken more seriously than maybe the Spice Girls were being taken at that time. Now I fully embrace her.”

Despite the numerous highs of her decades-spanning legacy, however, Melanie’s still not at ease with life in the limelight. “I still struggle with being a celebrity,” Melanie tells Retro Pop’s October 2022 issue. “It’s something I often feel very uncomfortable with.

“But I’ve suffered with things that many people go through – eating problems, anxiety – and I think it’s really important to go, ‘You know what, I’m just like you’. We achieved incredible things with the Spice Girls but at the end of the day I’m just human and fallible. Reading about other people having those issues made me feel less alone and it’s important for me to share that same connection.”

That’s why putting pen to paper and telling the story of her life has been rewarding in so many ways. “It felt like such a momentous occasion and there was so much reflection and a realisation of all the incredible things we’d achieved, how we’d affected so many people in such a positive way,” she beams. “I had this moment of going, ‘Fucking hell, I’ve done so much,’ and it put everything into perspective. 

“It allowed me to go ‘I can be a Spice Girl, a solo artist, a mum and all the other guises I have in life’. I’m all of those things all of the time. It’s not like I can only do one thing at a time. Also, there’s so much information out there, isn’t there? There’s so much out there about everybody in the public eye, myself included, so I thought ‘Maybe it’s time for me to put it out there in my own words’.”

READ MORE: Melanie C: ‘At one point I wanted to distance myself from Sporty Spice – now I fully embrace her!’ [Exclusive]