Spice Girls album details

Despite marriage, kids, solo recordings and other personal endeavors, girl power will continue into the next millennium. Pop group Spice Girls, which has sold 40 million albums worldwide, is back in a British studio laying down the foundations of its third album.

According to Melanie Jayne Chisholm, aka Melanie C. or Mel C. aka Sporty Spice -- who is in Toronto this week to play a gig (last night) and promote her debut solo album, Northern Star (due Oct. 26) -- the Spice Girls has been working for two week stretches with various producers.

Among the producers on the new album, she says, are "Elliot Kennedy who we worked with on Spice, new collaborators Jam & Lewis, which is very exciting, and Rodney Jerkins."

Chisholm, cute blonde Emma Lee Bunton (Baby Spice), wild-haired newly-wed Melanie Janine Gulzar (Scary Spice) and sexy Victoria Adams (Posh Spice) have all been assembling in London's Abbey Road Studios to work on the sessions. Occasional visitors have included Scary and Posh's newborn children Brooklyn Beckham and Phoenix Chi Gulzar.

"We like to have our weekly visit (with the babies) because we like to catch up and do our fair share of bouncing," says auntie Melanie. "But we've got work to do as well, so daddies look after them some days."

The work includes co-writing the songs, a contribution Chisholm says the Spice Girls have done since forming in 1993. "When we were first put together as a band in the very early days with our first management (1993), the reason we left that management is because they didn't want us to write. That's why we went our own separate way. We wrote all of our album, then we approached Simon Fuller, who then went on to manage us and then we signed with Virgin.

"Every single song we've ever written, we've all been there," says Chisholm. Although, Geri isn't there this time (she left the band a year and a half ago). But we always write altogether. Sometimes we'll come to the studio with a lyric idea, with a song idea, with a melodic idea, whatever, and then other times, especially with Biff, we've worked with him for such a long time and we're such great friends, sometimes, we'll say, 'What about this?' It's such a group vibe."

Chisholm says it isn't likely a new Spice Girls single will be released before Christmas. "There's so much happening. I've got my solo stuff. Emma's got her solo single in the UK [a cover of Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians 'What Am I' recorded with Tin Tin Out]. All the girls are doing TV stuff as well. So we're concentrating on other things. And musically, we have to concentrate on getting the album together for next year."

However, Spice Girls will perform eight U.K. concerts in December, four in Earl's Court and four in Manchester.