These aren't the best times to be a former Spice Girl. According to some tabloids, Victoria seems busier sorting out David Beckham's future, Emma Bunton's solo career is floundering and Mel B and Geri Halliwell are missing in action. Meanwhile, Melanie C is coming back in a municipal building peppered with fading posters for Rod Hull and Emu. Surreal isn't the word.

You could almost forget that Melanie Chisholm was ever in the biggest teen-pop phenomenon of the 1990s, which may be the point. She has ditched the short skirts, sporty tracksuits and cropped vests of her ill-advised "indie Spice" period - but her whole solo career has been about rapid, if not hasty, reinvention. Now she has a sleek new image in a top slashed racily at the shoulders. She looks fantastic, and often sounds quite good.

She is certainly a more confident performer than the one who tiptoed into solo performance in 1999. Backed by a proficient band (including two goth girls who could have been loaned from the Cramps), Chisholm proves that she was indeed the most vocally talented Spice.

However, the songs offer no further clues as to who she really is. The product of innumerable co-writers, they are sometimes strong but could have been written for anybody. One minute, Chisholm claims she is a danger to herself. The next, she is bizarrely purring: "You're golden delicious... all roads lead somewhere." The fruit and veg aisle at Asda, perhaps?

It's a shame her music does not really reflect the intriguing person revealed between songs: a Dad-dedicating, occasionally swearing, ordinary multimillionaire in an extraordinary job. What's it really like being a Liverpudlian, working-class megastar? Despite her excitement during hits like Never Be the Same Again, you never get the impression that she listens to much music - certainly not the AOR that dominates her current album, Reason. If Melanie C has a musical soul, it's metal, and the energy and passion she puts into rockier cuts like Yeh Yeh Yeh and Goin' Down is a fairly thrilling contrast.

One day, perhaps, she will be allowed to do a whole album of hard rock and really let her hair down. Meanwhile, her audience are just delighted to witness Melanie C, former Sp... oops, the plan hasn't quite succeeded, after all.

· At the Royal Court, Liverpool, tonight. Box office: 0151-709 4321. Then touring.