Name: Melanie C, christened Melanie Chisholm, who is also known as Mel C and Sporty Spice …
Age: She’s 52.
Where did all that time go? Yes, it truly does fly. Melanine C, on the other hand, is brand new.
Melanine C? Sounds like a health supplement – protection against UV radiation and scurvy, maybe? Actually it refers to the same person, Melanie C.
She spells her name in two ways, sometimes slips a cheeky ‘n’ in? Not so much her.
Who then? What’s this about? So she’s got a new album out.
I’ve seen the adverts, everywhere. Sweat by Melanie C on the front cover. But on the spine of the vinyl release …
No! Melanine C? Afraid so.
Who spotted it? Melbourne-based Brad Bellman, who posted a TikTok showing the spelling mistake, saying: “So I think someone’s getting fired.”
Do we know how many are like this? No, but Andrew Isaac from the UK commented: “It’s on all five of my vinyl variants 🤣”.
Five! He’s a Mel superfan. Or maybe he thinks the typo will make it more valuable one day. Some of the replies have suggested that.
Has anything like this happened before? As it happens, yes. My favourite is Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood’s Electric Light Orchestra 1972 album.
Go on. So someone at United Artists, failing to get through to the ELO contact on the phone to check the name of the album, wrote No Answer in their notes. And that’s what got printed on the record.
What should it have been called? The Electric Light Orchestra, it being the band’s debut.
Ha! More please! Well, there’s the Zombies’ 1968 release, Odessey & Oracle.
Ouch! What happened? Well, for ages they tried to claim it was intentionally idiosyncratic, before Terry Quirk, the illustrator who did the cover art, finally admitted he got it wrong. Thought he knew how to spell odyssey, didn’t he?
I guess spellchecks weren’t widely available then. More recently, there is Oasis’s Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. But is that a spelling mistake or misquotation? Or just the Gallaghers being the Gallaghers? I quite like the idea of several giants with one shoulder to be fair.
And it’s not just album covers, band names can be misspelled too. Yes, Led Zeppelin did it on purpose so that people wouldn’t pronounce it like the thing between you and your dog.
Unconditional love? Lead! Also intentional: Def Leppard, The Monkees, and Limp Bizkit.
Do say: “Totally intentional, Sweat is Melanie’s ninth studio album. Hence Melanine, see?”
Don’t say: “Bit rich laughing at typos, the Guardian …”