Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Spice Girls will soon be making their long-awaited comeback – albeit with a slightly tweaked line-up.

After Victoria Beckham and Mel Chisholm categorically ruled themselves out of taking part in a reunion tour (Beckham to focus on her skyrocketing fashion career, Chisholm out of a desire to work on her own music and protect her mental health), the remaining Spice Girls are reportedly on the lookout for two replacement singers to join them onstage in 2017.

But while Beckham doesn’t intend to perform with Emma Bunton, Melanie Brown and Geri Horner (née Halliwell) again, she has now said that she also doesn’t want the band to sing their old hits during a reunion tour.

In an interview with Claudia Winkleman in the Sunday Times Style, Beckham, 42, said that while she wished the trio well – “Of course, as a new group, I do” – she would also prefer them to leave their old material alone.

“I do think they should sing their own material though, because what we did in the Spice Girls was so special,” said Beckham. “If they sang Spice Girls songs I think I might be a bit sad.”

Read more: How feminism went pop during the reign of the Spice Girls

She continued: “I think I learnt a lot from the Spice Girls, most importantly how you can have everything one minute and then lose it the next.

“I've been given a second chance, so I'm not going to lose it again.”

Beckham also revealed that she hates appearing on the red carpet. “I just can’t wait to get down the carpet and be done with it,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s the years of being photographed or the criticism, but I just feel exposed and vulnerable, and I can’t be myself.”

Her comments echo those of her former bandmate, Melanie Chisholm – aka Mel C – who penned a powerful essay for LOVE magazine in August explaining that her “relationship with fame has changed over the years”.

Read more: The Spice Girls need two more people for their reunion tour

“I’m a singer and songwriter. Not a celebrity,” she wrote. “The two are very different things. You can earn a fortune being a ‘celebrity’ depending on how much dignity you want to keep intact.”

In a September interview, meanwhile, Chisholm explained that she had turned down a £2 million offer to take part in the Spice Girls reunion in part to protect her mental health – after suffering from “depression, eating disorders [and] obsessive over-exercising” during her time in the band.

It’s not yet known whether the reunited Spice Girls – whose website refers to them simply as GEM, after the initials of their first names – intend to perform the songs that made them famous during their reunion tour.

The one-time Spice Girls producer, Eliot Kennedy, reportedly posted two tweets in May indicating that he had been working with Bunton, Brown and Horner again. He has since closed his Twitter account.

“Now that was a day for the history books. Like 20 years never happened. Proper friendship! Hit song!” Kennedy apparently wrote, adding: “Two long but ab-fab days with a stonking hit at the end of it! We’ve still got it kids!! #20years”.

In June, Mel B confirmed that the trio had been working on new music together. “We’ve been in the studio kind of experimenting with some different sounds and stuff like that, but nothing to be able to share just yet,” the former X Factor judge told Access Hollywood Live. 

Images: Rex Features