Back from its trip to Saturn, No Doubt is ready to Rock Steady. By Tom Lanham.

Gwen Stefani is late. Not really late, just 15 minutes or so. But the platinum-haired, pout-lipped, pinup-perfect ska-pop goddess has a good cause – her boyfriend, the similarly pout-lipped, pinup-perfect rock icon, Gavin Rossdale of Bush renown, is her wheel man this particularly crisp autumn afternoon. He must’ve missed a Hollywood-hills turn or two. And when this oft-photographed No Doubt diva arrives? Most assuredly, she’s ready for her close up, Mr DeMille; in a flowing, floor length, red cashmere cape (complete with wolf-wowing hood), Stefani sweeps into the spacious, sparsely appointed digs of her band’s bassist Tony Kanal. She doesn’t just walk – in her patent-leather pumps, camouflage pedal pushers and baggy V-neck sweater – but sweeps and ’40s film starlets must’ve swept on Oscar night.

Stefani’s trademark blonde tresses are clustered in a humble bun today. She lets her locks down, she smiles, for the music-clip shoot of “Hey Baby” – the funky-punky first single from No Doubt’s new Rock Steady comeback on Interscope. “In the video, I have total Veronica Lake hair,” she purrs, curling into a wrought-iron chair on Kanal’s back porch.

Stefani sported a self-designed hound’s-tooth-jacket-and-golf-pantaloons number on VH1’s recent Vogue Fashion Awards, where she won Most Stylish Video, “Ex-Girlfriend” (from 2000’s platinum Return of Saturn). Startling the calm Kanal, seated opposite her at his patio table, Stefani jumps up from her chair to demonstrate the surreal hands-clasped-in-triumph victory rumba she danced when her name was announced at the ceremony. “And when I got up to claim my Award, all of a sudden the single was on; ‘Hey Baby’ was blasting!” she informs Kanal. He’s shocked; the song hadn’t even hit the radio yet, but he welcomes the well-placed leak. “So I was like ‘What song is this? Hey baby, hey baby hey!’ ” Stefani trills, shimmying around the concrete while her chum gives her the thumbs-up.

And sure, she rubbed shoulders with top-name designers like Patricia Field, Donna Karan and Stella McCartney at the event, she cedes. “But ever since puberty, I’ve always liked to get dressed up, and I’ve always made my own clothes. My Mom always took me to fabric stores like Jo-Ann Fabrics, House of Fabrics, and then with the band it was like Halloween every day. Like, ‘Oh cool! Now I have an excuse to dress up – it’ll be fun!’ And I spent a lot of time doing it, right Tony?”

Kanal (no slouch himself in designer jeans, T-shirt and a meticulously blond-streaked, prickly-hedgehog ‘do) nods, smiles sagely. And who should know better? He and Stefani dated for eight years, but broke up – with some irony – during the writing and recording of ’95’s Tragic Kingdom, their 15-million-selling sophomore breakthrough. He prepares to speak, but his ex is on a roll. Returning to the Veronica Lake theme, Stefani asserts that she did “just get so inspired by that whole starlet period of Hollywood. I’m fascinated by all that stuff; Julie Andrews and the whole Sound of Music thing, and musicals. And I definitely felt weird when Tragic Kingdom was coming out and the only girls that were around were the country or folkier style – the no-makeup singer/songwriters – or the really hard L7 or Hole-type rock bands. I didn’t feel comfortable in either one of those areas, so I just decided to be myself. And it all turned out all right.”

Stefani is sporting tiny gold earrings shaped like plastic 45-rpm centers, her customary jungle-red lipstick, and huge knuckle-obscuring rings on each hand; one that reads GWEN, another that spells NO DOUBT. It’s a defiant yet remarkably feminine persona, one that teenage fangirls around the world have been copying for at least a half-decade (even though No Doubt coalesced, to little fanfare, way back in ‘86); a style so distinctly Stefani that it – along with her velvety vocal talent – helped propel recent duet clips from techno-maestro Moby (“South Side”) and Eve (“Let Me Blow Ya Mind”) to the winner’s circle at MTV’s 2001 Video Music Awards (for Best Male Video and Best Female Video, respectively). “Without Gwen, the video wouldn’t have gotten shown in the first place,” Moby shyly assessed at the VMAs. Stefani is still dumbfounded – she almost turned down the artists’ original offers, not wanting to be seen “as just a side dish.” And she was pleasantly surprised when countless folks from the techno and hip-hop communities recognized her at the show, waved friendly hellos.

“But the thing about No Doubt is, we were a band for nine years before we had any commercial success.” says Stefani, whose charming, self-deprecating humility can win you over in a heartbeat. “And that, in a lot of ways, has kept us really grounded in the sense that we know what’s happening when they take our picture, that’s not the real thing. We know who we really are, and that it can be gone at any moment. And we feel lucky to still be making music without having to grow up, to just sit around with each other and go to different countries and record with legends and hook up with all these different talented people.” So many people, in fact, that it’s a good thing phones are no longer in rotary. Her nails never would’ve survived dialing all those long-distance numbers.

Set to a cheeky, off-kilter synth riff (even most of his bass lines were performed on keyboards, Kanal swears). “Hey Baby” is Stefani’s humorous study of backstage barnacles, acolytes dying to kiss the ring (either one). “I’m the one they feed upon,” she vamps with neo-Norma Desmond drama, truly baffled to be confronted by “a stranger in my face who says he knows my Mom and went to my high school.” Produced by Sly and Robbie – with raucous guest toasting from rude boy Bounty Killa – during a hard-partying, beer’n'rum glugging stay in Jamaica, the track is a sassy, brassy leap forward from Saturn’s awkwardly insecure “Ex-Girlfriend” (“I kinda always knew I’d end up your ex-girlfriend… Why’d you have to go and pick me?“). Fans of Stefani’s spunky “Spiderwebs”/”Just a Girl” from Tragic Kingdom probably cringed to hear her melt into uncertainty on such somber Saturn sonnets as “Dark Blue,” “Too Late,” “Simple Kind of Life” and the painfully blunt “Marry Me.” Those same listeners will rejoice to rediscover Stefani on Rock Steady, writing and singing with newfound confidence and class. Any mistreating male who crosses her now will come to with a throbbing jaw and a ring indentation as a reminder of exactly who KO’ed him – GWEN from NO DOUBT.

By all accounts, the Glen Ballard produced Return of Saturn was a real bear, a total emotional drain on the group. It posed a tough question: How do you go about topping a 15-million seller? Especially when your founder and key songwriter (Gwen’s Svengali brother Eric Stefani, who first forced her to sing as a scaredy-cat teen) has just quit to sketch cels for The Simpsons? So yes, Kanal shrugs. “Making that record was a very laborious process. The head-space we were in for the whole Saturn phase was extremely serious.” So last November, he, Stefani, guitarist Tom Dumont and drummer Adrian Young “sat down and said, ‘OK – we’re gonna give it another shot, make another record.’ We kinda made a decision to move ahead, but this time we were gonna remove some of the restrictions that we’d had previously. We opened ourselves up to trying anything for this record, just having fun with it. So last January, myself, Tom and Gwen sat down again and started writing.”

The words and music flowed. On one of her London jaunts to visit Rossdale, Stefani paused long enough to co-pen a daffy dub-echoed ditty with Dave Stewart, “Underneath It All.” For two Cars-kitschy compositions – “Don’t Let Me Down” and “Platinum Blonde Life” – No Doubt (Kanal, 31, and Stefani, 32, are New Wave boosters from way back) enlisted the Cars’ mastermind himself, Ric Ocasek, as producer. Madonna mainstay William Orbit oversaw the OMD-ish “Making Out”; Prince personnaly retooled the Paisley Park-polished “Waiting Room”; and Bristol Sound legend Nellee Hooper finished off five cuts, including the Lene Lovich-retro “Running.” “Love is like a punishment/ Homegirl here to represent,” Stefani deadpans in the dancehall title track, but tacks on an optimistic punch line: “Our love is rock steady, rock steady…”

Stefani had suffered writer’s block for Saturn “But the thing I learned from my Dave Stewart experience is that you can write a song in, like, 10 minutes,” she says. “I wrote ‘Underneath It All’ in an instant, just sat down and wrote it right then and there. And the Tony – who’d flown over to England, too – got super-excited about the idea of going to Jamaica to work with all these dancehall producers: Sly and Robbie, Steelie and Clevie. We had maybe five songs written at the time, but Tony made it happen. Next thing we know, we’re in Jamaica. It was magic.”

“We found the balance on this album,” is how Kanal sees it. “All of it came from a very organic place, it was super-spontaneous, but it was just fun. Every single song on it was fun to write; every time we sat down together to work on music, it was fun. And it’s brought certain things to the band that we didn’t have before, like a feeling that we’re gonna be around a little longer. Whereas on Tragic Kingdom, I think people really thought we were gonna be one-hit wonders.”

Sept. 11 found No Doubt mixing in London, where they’d rented a house next to Rossdale’s. Stunned by the Worl Trade Center disaster – and trapped in Britain with no way home – the musicians wondered if such an effervescent, bubblegum-chewy effort would sound glib in light of such grim events. They got over it. “I mean, this is what we do, and what we need to continue to do,” figures Kanal. “And you hope that the stuff you’re creating will provide some sort of relief or a… a…”

“Diversion?” Stefani offers, hopefully. “Music is so powerful and it’s such a gift that we have here; I’m actually thrilled to be creating it and it’s such and uplifting album. And whether this stuff happened on the 11th or not, people can still put their headphones on and have a little fun for a minute, maybe not taking anything too seriously.”

It’s a sentiment tat might appear Pollyanna-mushy coming from any other artist. But Stefani – with her big, innocent eyes and down-home delivery – somehow makes it sound earnest, honest, a little heartfelt wish that the feel-good milestone of No Doubt’s career will make a few despairing souls out there, well… feel good.

A week earlier: Gavin Rossdale sits in a record company conference room, anxiously drumming his fingers on the table. Rossdale’s got a new record himself to discuss (Golden State, with Bush), but Stefani is definitely on his mind.

He felt her pain in London (“It was really hard for her after the tragedy – she was torn with being with me over there and being with her family in America”); understands the misgivings that fueled “Ex-Girlfriend” (“It’s very difficult in this line of work to find stability, substance, because the demands are so great, coupled with the distance and shear loneliness – for anybody in a traveling band, you’re incredibly alone a lot of the time”); and sensed her need for commitment, possibly a family, in “Marry Me” (“Although I don’t know if now is the perfect time to be breeding – we’d be like ‘Welcome to the world, kids! Here are your antidotes!’ “). And you can hear it in the singer’s voice – after six years together, his love for Stefani seems genuine, unflagging. There is, ahem, no doubt.

And as most of Rock Steady’s sugary poetry spins on a Gwen/Gav, enduring-love axis, Stefani’s report card on their relationship is equally glowing. “Gavin is so sweet, and he has a great heart,” she beams dreamily. “And he’s had to prove himself to people his whole life, even to all my friends. But this has been a great year for me and Gavin, for the band, for everyone. We spent loads of time together because he did his record here in LA while we were working, then when we went to London to mix, he was there the same time we were – it was perfect.” Stefani suddenly startles Kanal again by stomping her spiky heel. “But I’m tellin’ ya, nobody’s fucking asked me to get married! Ever! It’s weird. And everywhere Gav goes, everybody is at him about the ring, the ring. And there is definitely a baby boom right now – have you noticed that? Or at least all of our friends are pregnant. Adrian’s having a baby, too. It’s the first No Doubt baby, and it’s gonna be on tour with us.”

Stefani has heard all the No Doubt gossip. Or rather, the surprising lack of it – the general profile is of some nice Orange County-bred, Los Angeles-relocated kids who made good while offending the absolute minimum of bystanders along the way. “And I’m glad people think that,” she says. “Sometimes I think we should roughen up and try to get a little more” – her scarlet nails slice through the air to designate quotation marks – “you know, ‘cooler.’ ”

“It’s true – it’s really rare that people are mean to us,” Kanal chimes in. “We’re really lucky and blessed that way. And I think the reason we’re somewhat grounded, as Gwen was saying earlier, is that it was nine years before Tragic Kingdom came out, which was when we first farted having commercial success… Waidaminnut!” he stops himself, midthought. “Did I just say ‘farted’?!”

Yup, Stefani nods, laughing hysterically while Kanal hides his face in his hands. “And people haven’t heard anything yet!” she gasps, a not-so-veiled tour bus reference. “But we really do try and be nice to everybody, because we were the alternative to the alternative for a long time. It was so weird when Tragic Kingdom came out and all of a sudden we were like the mainstream, because No Doubt had always been the exact opposite of whatever was popular. And now, with Rock Steady, all we feel is lucky; really lucky to be able to try on all those different hats.”

But it’s a real red-faced Kanal who gets the last word in. Sort of. “There was a really important point I was trying to make. But now I can’t remember what it was!”

With Rock Steady, No Doubt officially joins pop-music aristocracy by Dave Wielenga

Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal were in a London bar one night last summer, taking an all-night break from a long day of mixing tracks for No Doubt’s latest album, Rock Steady, when in walks maybe the biggest rock star in the world.

“Bono came out and met us because we had a lot of mutual friends,” explains Kanal. “We drank with him. And I’ll tell you—like I was telling Gwen earlier—the cool thing, the inspiring thing about that guy is that you see Bono, and he’s totally got his shit together. He’s this great musician—legendary now—and he’s politically active, helping people beyond, like, our wildest dreams.”

“He really does it!” Stefani interjects.

“And on top of it, he likes to drink and really let go,” Kanal continues, “which, to me, makes it very real.”

“He’s Irish!” Stefani says.

“But it’s cool to find that balance in life,” Kanal says, forging ahead, “of doing the things that are important, but enjoying yourself, too.”

“Enjoying day-to-day life,” Stefani offers.

Her final comment makes a feather-light landing, and the conversation drifts away without anybody really noticing—replaced for a moment by the lingering memory of that night in London, its lessons and their implications.

This is how they do it, Gwen and Tony, interview after interview, a half-hour or an hour at a time, sometimes all day when a new album is coming out (Rock Steady is being released Tuesday). Last time, barely 18 months ago, when Return to Saturn was about to drop, they did it at Gwen’s place, a mansion in the hills near Griffith Park. This time, it’s at Tony’s home at the bottom of the hill, sitting around a table on the backyard patio of an old house he has made completely his own in a funkily gentrified neighborhood of Los Feliz. In Spanish, that means “the happy ones.”

It’s a nice, sunny day. The garden is old Southern California suburban gorgeous—a small, green lawn surrounded along the wooden fence and stuccoed house by well-troweled beds of flowers and shrubs—and the air is quiet except for the soft murmur of traffic a block or so away. We’re all sipping hot tea.

And then: “Tony!”

Kanal is startled from his lethargy to see Stefani, his long-ago ex-girlfriend, take a piece of gum from her mouth and throw it across the patio into his precise landscaping.

“Gwen! Stop doing that!” he snaps, real irritation serrating the edge of his cool. “You threw one over there, too. Earlier, you did. Did this one go on the . . . the thing—the sidewalk, I mean—or is it somewhere in the grass?”

Stefani giggles with mischief and defiance and then ignores him completely.

“This is Tony’s house,” she tells you, with sass, “so I can throw my gum”—she pulls another piece from her mouth—”like that”—and she chucks it across the patio—”and his mom’s not gonna come and get mad or anything like she used to when we were kids.”

Kanal is exasperated, but he has known Stefani since 11th grade. He has seen much worse than this playful rebellion against his mother’s long-ago scolding. Hell, everybody who heard Return to Saturn—which dripped with the what’s-it-all-about lyrics of Stefani’s turning-30 depression—realizes there’s worse than that.

Kanal waits out Stefani’s little button-pushing episode and then steers the interview back on course. “We had a really good time making the record,” he says slowly and then looks expectantly at Stefani.

“Yes,” she says dutifully, “we did.”

They go silent for a moment before simultaneously breaking into laughter.

This is how it has been for Tony and Gwen for—well, it seems like forever. Rock Steady is No Doubt’s fifth album, but nobody noticed the first two. They were doing this long before Gwen could tell about the time one of her idols, Joni Mitchell, complimented her for “Simple Kind of Life” when they saw each other on the same plane. They were doing it long before Tony could sheepishly apologize to Ric Ocasek for writing a song influenced so much by the Cars (“Platinum Blonde Life”)—and before Ocasek could sheepishly apologize that he really hadn’t noticed the resemblance.

Not that Gwen and Tony seem to drop these names with arrogance or calculation. “I mean, can you believe we had the opportunity to write a song with the guy who wrote ‘Sweet Dreams’?” Stefani gushed, in reference to Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. And, speaking of gushing, she reports that Puff Daddy approached her at a party to report that he had heard the new record. “He said he had to change his pants after hearing it—that he peed his pants, he liked it so much,” Stefani says, perhaps offering an inadvertent insight into the hip-hop mogul’s new P. Diddy moniker.

Mostly, however, these illustrious names seem to emerge naturally in conversation, which, in this case, illustrates the essential message of the new album: with Rock Steady, No Doubt has officially ascended into the pop-music aristocracy.

Sure, Orange County’s long-ago house band has been world-famous for seven or eight years. But the 15 million sales of Tragic Kingdom could have been a Spice Girls aberration. And the 1.4 million sales of Return to Saturn was nearly a Hootie and the Blowfish disappointment. But rather than descending into the world of Geri Halliwell or Darius Rucker, Gwen and Tony have emerged as something like their generation’s Sonny & Cher. By now, the crème de la MTV has become No Doubt’s for-real runnin’ buddies. In half an hour, they mention Bono, Prince, Kid Rock, Puff Daddy/P. Diddy, Ric Ocasek, Nellee Hooper, Steely & Clevie, Joni Mitchell, the Neptunes, William Orbit, Sly & Robbie, Bounty Killer, Dave Stewart, Eve, Jimmy Iovine, and Dr. Dre. There are times during the interview when it’s obvious Gwen and Tony are trying not to mention a celebrity, perhaps self-conscious about the impression they may be creating. But by now, Gwen and Tony get their names dropped as often as any of the others.

In fact, the fuel for Rock Steady is nothing less than the interface of the internationally famous. No Doubt literally traveled the globe to write, record and produce it with the people who helped compose Mother Earth’s late-20th-century soundtrack. Prince co-produced and sang background on the gushy-funky “Waiting Room.” Ric Ocasek gave a Cars overhaul to “Platinum Blonde Life” and “Don’t Let Me Down.” William Orbit plugged in “Making Out.” Hip-hop crew the Neptunes co-wrote “Hella Good.” But high-profile mixmaster Nellee Hooper provided the closest thing to a production theme, turning the knobs on five of the songs. Additionally, the band traveled to London and Jamaica—their demos stored in ProTools computer programs—to work with Dave Stewart and the dancehall production teams of Steely & Clevie and Sly & Robbie.

This is a long way from that garage on Beacon Street.

“Well, it is, and it isn’t,” says Stefani, blowing at a wisp of straight, bleached-blond hair that has escaped from the clip intended to keep it out of her face. “In some ways, this record feels as though we sort of went backward toward what we used to be. Because No Doubt has always been kind of an up, positive band. This record has that approach. It’s really spontaneous and fun. It has a lot of our roots, which are, like, the ska-reggae-dance-hall thing. It all kinda comes from that same place, of making music with our friends. In some ways, it feels like we are coming home in a way. Except we’re more mature and maybe a little bit better musicians . . . hopefully.”

And except that their friends are more famous and more talented. And, again, that the members of No Doubt are, too.

The band has never before displayed such elasticity and command, such mastery of modern pop songs and production. Stefani bends and shapes her voice into the styles of chanteuses ranging from Janet Jackson to Nelly Furtado, from Pat Benatar to, well, Madonna—whom she appears to have supplanted on the throne of over-the-top queen—without falling into imitation. The contributions of Kanal, Tom Dumont and Adrian Young—who often have seemed overlooked in the light of Stefani’s stardom—remain in the background. But now their presence seems essential, not only for their emotional stability (the band-ness of No Doubt) but for their musical virtuosity as well. Maybe it’s that we’re just noticing, but these guys are good.

“When Tragic Kingdom came out, people had a tendency to write us off—not necessarily as one-hit wonders, but as one-album wonders along the lines of a bubble-gum pop situation,” Kanal says. “I think we had that chip on our shoulders when we went into Return to Saturn. For lack of a better word, that was a ‘labored’ process. But I think we proved ourselves as songwriters and musicians. There’s not a day that goes by that somebody in our peer group doesn’t tell us how much they liked that record.”

Many from that “peer group” also wanted to work on the next one.

“But this time around, it was more like, ‘Let’s just fuckin’ have fun,’” Kanal says. “It was really free. We took off all the restrictions we previously had. Tom and I even said, ‘If we don’t play our instruments on some of these songs, that’s okay. Whatever’s best for the song.’ So sometimes we’ve got Tom on keyboards and me on keyboard bass—and when we do ‘Hey Baby’ onstage, we’re going to have four of us playing keyboards. But the key was we wanted to work with people we’d never worked with or people you’d never think we’d work with.”

Like Bono, for example. He didn’t do any work on the album, but their all-nighter in that London pub led to the mini-tour as U2’s opening act that No Doubt just finished.

And considering the way No Doubt’s world is expanding, you wonder aloud whether, like Bono and U2, there might potentially be a political or humanitarian or somehow activist side to Gwen and Tony and No Doubt? And it turns out that Gwen has been wondering, too.

“You know what? The world is changing,” she says excitedly. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Because at the VH-1 Fashion Awards, they were asking that. And I was thinking, ‘I’ve never written a song about those things before, but it will be interesting to see how the changes in the world affect us creatively.’”

Tony seems uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation.

“I just think that we—that’s No Doubt—have been about fun, about having a good time, just kind of a release for people who come to see us to get away from all those serious things,” he says. “So I think the way we help is by lending ourselves to charity events, things that everybody does. That’s how we help, rather than songs that are political statements. That’s never been our thing, you know?”

Another of those small silences ensues. Tony turns to Gwen and continues, backtracking a little, perhaps concerned he’s stepped on her toes.

“That’s not to say that you wouldn’t do it . . . like, write lyrics about that in the future,” he says. “We’ll just see if it happens naturally.”

Stefani isn’t mad, but she is a little ruffled.

“I know, I know—that’s what I was saying,” she tells Kanal. “I was saying, ‘I wonder if, in some way, it’s going to affect everyone.’”

“Like, if you get inspired someday,” Tony offers.

“Look, I’m just wondering how it’s going to affect us creatively,” Gwen says. “I don’t know. It’s going to affect us, no matter what. And I’m wondering if it will be beyond, you know, where everyone’s like, ‘Did you wear a different outfit tonight because of the whole terrorist thing?’ And I’m, like, ‘No, I didn’t! I’m not!’ Oh, you know what I mean. We hear the stupidest questions.”