Beat magazine × June 01, 2000
DATE UNKNOWN: Day and month are just an estimate based on the events mentioned within the article.
No Doubt by Neala Johnson
Adrian, the drummer, has an aversion to wearing pants. Gwen has pink hair. Tony, the bass player, has a bleach-blonde thing going on. Tom, the guitarist, well, he’s just opened the door to his Japanese hotel room, and the phone is already ringing. “Amazing timing”, he says, with a more sunny disposition than many in the same situation would do.
No Doubt have just flown into Japan from Germany, at the beginning of a world tour to promote their new album Return of Saturn. “There’s this level of stress from not speaking the language, ” says Tom Dumont of his comfort in foreign climes, “and I guess we’re so used to conveniences in America, that things just operate a little differently. But we’re getting better at it, so no real complaints. The worst bit is jetlag at the moment, and dealing with that, but that goes away as well. ” Does it go away, perhaps, with the help of the right stimulants?
“Oh well, “demurs Tom with honest ease, “we don’t take stimulants much, we just do it the old-fashioned way. ”
Although they’ve been less than visible for a couple of years now (re-emerging last year with the single New from the Go soundtrack), No Doubt are practiced in dealing with the rigors of touring. They spent more than two years on the road playing shows behind their album, Tragic Kingdom – with multi-platinum sales and pop stardom the triumphant result. But with all the doors success opens up for a band, Tom makes a convincing case for No Doubt’s stimulant-free integrity. Have No Doubt ever been the sex and drugs and rock n’ roll types?
“Honestly, not really. We’ve been together for a long time, and just this year we’ve started having more fun than we ever have, and I don’t know why that is. It’s something about having a girl in the band, it’s certainly not a big groupie scene, which a lot of other bands probably have. Our fans, they’re there for Gwen for a different reason, maybe from seeing a male band. ”
Tom believes that he and his bandmates feel more comfortable letting their hair down in the knowledge that they can now deal with the ramifications.
“Just from having gone through the whole thing, and having a little perspective that time gives, and we’re a little older, I think we understand things a little better, we’re not as naive as we used to be. It was such an exciting thing to go from local garage band to pop success, but it was also really draining. We toured for like 26 months, which messes with you a little bit. But getting to go home, sit down and readjust to life and figure out what it was we just went through makes it easier now to deal. ”
“It’s one of those intense lives”, he continues, “where what we do is really amazing and beautiful and and all my friends envy me, because I e-mail them from Germany or whatever, but it’s also tough because most people go off to work and they say, ‘I’ll see you at 6′, and I say, ‘I’ll see you in May’. It’s a 24-hour a day grind in its own way. What we learned is that the bad days that we have, when we’re all arguing and upset and unhappy, it comes from a combination of being hungover and not sleeping enough, and that’ll instantly cause volatility in the band. If we don’t so that, if we sleep and drink moderately, then everyone’s happy. ”
Everyone’s happy, that is, except for Gwen Stefani – if the lyrics on this album are anything to go by. Okay, so she’s not utterly depressed and there are some seriously fun moments (check out Staring Problem), but this is Gwen laying bare her soul for all to see, from wedding bell fantasies to red-eyed revenge. Unwaveringly honest and straightforward as a group, before Return of Saturn was released, before the critics had a chance to poke around looking for Gwen’s deeper meanings, No Doubt straight up told Alternative Press in America that:”The last album was about Tony and this album is about Gavin”, referring to the men in Gwen’s life around the making of each album. Tony being Tony Kanal, that bleach-blonde bass player, and Gavin being Gavin Rossdale, better known as GavinFromBush.
Although he admits that it’s likely many people are thinking “GavinFromBush” in the same instant that they think “No Doubt”, Tom swears that this causes no angst.
“We’re really very used to it. It’s weird on two levels, because on a personal level, it’s just our friend, Gwen’s boyfriend, and the guy comes around once in a while and whatnot. But on another level, I guess everybody knows him and it’s interesting when people imagine pop singers together… Um, it’s, yeah, I don’t know, I guess, again, we’re just used to that sort of thing. I mean, he’s been in her life the last few years, and she is so honest, so there’s some connection there to what she’s writing about. There’s worse things people could think about us”, he chuckles.
“It’s definitely become more pronounced on this record”, says Tom of Gwen’s candid lyrics. “I know she made a real conscious effort to try and better herself. Whe we were making Tragic Kingdom, the writing of the lyrics fell into her lap accidently – her brother(Eric) left the band, and all of a sudden, it was her job to write the lyrics, and that’s when things started happening, because it made so much more sense when she was singing about her own life. It wasn’t planned, she was just writing and those things were connecting in little ways with people”.
“It’s funny, you know, she talks about the music she loves to listen to and – with a few exceptions – she never talks about lyricists or anything, so I don’t know what her model is for writing lyrics. I guess she doesn’t have one, she just made up her own little system. She just has her own viewpoint on life, and certain things are profound to her, and I guess she’s found this way to… oh, it’s such a weird thing to talk about. It’s just there, isn’t it? Her life… it’s all on there”.
Two years of work, four lives… yes, it’s all on Return of Saturn. But does an album really have to take so long to make?
“I suppose it it would be nice for it to just take a month or two, but for us, it just takes us a long time, the writing process”, Tom explains.
“Tragic Kingdom took around three years on and off from the beginning to the end to make, and we learned that when we push ourselves to keep writing, things come out that are really good, little gems pop out. We did it this time, and everybody feels really proud of the result. It would have been a shame to maybe have put out a record after six months of writing and recording and missed out on so many great songs that we ended up coming up with by the end. We went into this like: let’s just make this like this is our last record. What are we gonna leave the world, what are gonna look back on? Let’s just put as much effort as we can into it. And it just, you know, it took a while.”
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