Emma Lee Bunton (born January 21, 1976) is an English singer, originally in the girl band the Spice Girls, where she was known as "Baby Spice". Bunton was born to parents Pauline, a karate instructor, and Trevor, a milkman, with one sibling, a younger brother. Her parents split up when she was eleven, and she stayed with her mother. Bunton grew up in the north London suburb of Woodside Park. She attended St Theresa's Roman Catholic Primary School in Finchley, and then went on to go to the Dame Sylvia Young Drama School in London. She joined the Spice Girls in 1994 after the original fifth Spice Girl, Michelle Stephenson, left the group. The Spice Girls stopped recording in 2000. Her first solo album entitled A Girl Like Me (2001) spawned the number one hit "What Took You So Long", top five hits "What I Am" and "Take My Breath Away" and top twenty hit "We're Not Gonna Sleep Tonight". The album sold around 125,000 in the U.K. but this was not sufficient for her record company, who dropped her. She also recorded a track "(Hey You) Free Up Your Mind" for Pokémon: The First Movie (1999). However she soon recovered from being dropped, and signed a contract with 19 Management which included TV work and releasing music. In spring 2003 she returned as Emma (losing the Bunton), with the top five hit "Free Me" and later that year released "Maybe" which also went top ten and outsold the previous single. In spring 2004 the single "I'll Be There" and the album Free Me were released. The album contained sixties style pop gems and went on to outsell her first album, something other solo Spice Girls have yet to achieve. In the run-up to the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, rumours circulated that Emma was being lined up as a rare big-name representative for the UK, in an attempt to wipe away the national humiliation of the 'nul points' achieved by the previous year's inexperienced entrants Jemini. This didn't materialise, but the fact that she ended up performing the interval act in the UK's Eurovision pre-selection show Making Your Mind Up suggested there may have been a glimmer of truth in the rumours at some stage. The performance gave her another outlet to indulge her passion for sixties pop - she started with a nostalgic burst of the UK's winning song from the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest, "Puppet On a String", which then melted into her own hit "Maybe". The album Free Me was released in the United States on January 25, 2005, peaked at #183 on the top 200 albums and selling over 2,817 copies. The first single in the U.S. is a dance remix of the title track, which reached the top five of both the Dance Airplay chart and the Club Play chart. "Maybe" also followed "Free Me"'s success in the U.S. Dance charts.
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