Emma Bunton reveals her horror after she started lactating during Spice Girls’ first comeback tour
EMMA Bunton has admitted she accidentally started lactating on stage during a Spice Girls show - and had to run off in a bid to stop it seeping through her designer outfit.
The Wannabe singer was wearing a Roberto Cavalli dress when the mortifying incident happened just four months after she welcomed her son Beau.
It took place during the group’s Return of the Spice Girls comeback tour in December 2007 when she was breastfeeding and using formula because of her hectic schedule.
In an exclusive extract shared with The Sun from her book Mama You Got This, she wrote: “I have memories of lactating quite heavily during one of my first performances on that tour, at the STAPLES Center in LA.
“Our costumes had been designed by Roberto Cavalli, who Victoria knew, and oh my goodness they were beautiful.
“But stage costumes are different to evening wear. These were heavy, highly structured pieces (they had to withstand quite a lot of activity!) and there were frequent changes.
“I remember it happened during Say You’ll Be There – I was wearing a rose-gold dress with an empire line and a high neck, with gold lamé that was quite close-fitting over my boobs.
“I had to get through a whole other track, Headlines, just hoping nothing was showing.”
Emma, 45, said she then had to dash off stage and get help from her boyfriend Jade Jones, 42, who was waiting in the wings of the 20,000-capacity arena.
She continued: “As it ended I came running off stage screaming at Jade, ‘Babes, get the pads! Get the pads!’
“Luckily, as it turns out, gold lamé isn’t very porous and most of the milk had just drizzled down my stomach. But anyone looking close enough would definitely have been able to spot wet patches on my boobs during that number.
“I can look back and smile about it now, but when I look at the pictures I also see a woman who really wasn’t ready to be throwing herself into that kind of physically demanding regime.”
Emma, who has kids Beau, 13, and Tate, ten, said she beat herself up and felt emotional about the whole process as she was so busy.
She added: “I simply hadn’t understood the huge processes that my body would be going through after birth and, in particular, how breastfeeding would require so much energy.
Most read in Bizarre
“They say it burns around 300 calories a day, which I’m sure it does, because it takes a lot of power and strength to keep producing all that nutritious milk.
“To try to combine that with an energetic stage tour and sleepless nights was, with the benefit of hindsight, not a great idea. There were a lot of tears and a fair amount of self-recrimination.”
Extracted from Mama You Got This by Emma Bunton (Ebury Press, £16.99).