She’s gone from high school geek to superstar icon, but Gwen still worries about her bod like the rest of us

Gwendolyn Renee Stefani is so cool we get frostbite just from looking at her, but it hasn’t always been this way for the Californian superstar. So how did the school misfit super-size her street cred? She shares her secrets with bliss…

Have you always been a super-trendy musical genius? We bet you were the popular one at school…
Nooo! I wasn’t a cheerleader or in the choir and I didn’t have loads of friends. I thought I could never influence anyone. My whole room was plastered with Marilyn Monroe posters and I always drew myself as a bride when my teachers asked me to draw myself as a grown-up.

So didn’t fashion matter to you as a teenager?
I wore my sports shirt and zip-up  sweatshirt every day. But when I hit puberty and found music, all of a sudden I wanted to be unique. I did a lot of sewing and thrift-store shopping. I made three or four dresses which came from a pattern I created myself.

And now you’ve got your own clothing line, L.A.M.B…
It’s a dream come true. My mom made my clothes, her mom made all hers. It’s in my blood.

Did your mum used to tell you what to wear?
Mom was really conservative – everything was plain and simple. I couldn’t wait to rip my shirts and cut things up!

You sometimes name-check fashion designers in your songs – does it get you freebies?
They don’t give me free clothes. I did it because I think they’re rad.

While you were in high school, your big bro Eric formed your band No Doubt. Did he inspire you?
Everything Eric was into, I got into. He’s super-creative and he was this high school cartoonist and had wild artist friends. I don’t know if he was cool or not. He seemed cool to me.

Was it hard being the only girl in the band?
Yeah, people assumed I was a tag-along girlfriend or a groupie.

If you were such a ‘dork’, what changed and made you so cool?
Once I learned how to write songs, it was like I was human. Before that I was just this girl.

Did you go to a lot of gigs and thrash it out with the guys in the moshpit?
Not in the pit. To me, being in the mosh pit just to beat someone up is like the weirdest thing. It’s like a bunch of guys with a BIG excuse to feel each other up.

Did a load of rock lads try to pull you?
I’ve only had two boyfriends in my life, y’know. I once made out with the keyboard player from Fishbone ['80s rock band], and he tried to take advantage of the situation and I was NOT about to let him.

But you’ve bagged an English rockstar hubby [Gwen's married to Bush singer Gavin Rossdale]…
Well, if I ever sound English, slap me! No, seriously, I totally scored. I’m a big, huge pig, I love eating and I married a guy who loves to cook. My husband is amazing. I can’t fight with him because I just start crying. Period week, I cry a lot.

Have you always been super-fit?
My weight is a struggle for me, like all girls. It’s something we all deal with. But now I have no rituals. If I look bad one day, who cares?

What’s it like being seen as an international sex-bomb?
Dude, my overall thing isn’t sexy. A girl wants to look sexy, but what’s more important is that people take you seriously as a human.

What’s next for you, then?
I’d love to learn to play something so I don’t have to rely on someone to collaborate with. I’ve written songs on the guitar but I don’t play well enough to be free. If I could play every chord, I could write a million songs.
I want to appear in more movies and I want to add to my clothing line. I also want to just have time to sleep… and I want a baby. That would suit me just fine.

Did you know?

10 random facts about our Gwen

1. Her Harajuku girls,  who go with her everywhere, are named after Harajuku Station, a place in Japan where ultra-cool teens hang out.
2. Her first job was selling ice-cream and cakes in a fast food joint called Dairy Queen.
3. She lived at home with her parents until she was 30!
4. She had one line in the film The Aviator, playing actress Jean Harlow alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.
5. She sometimes checks into hotels under the pseudonym of Daria Blue.
6. Her cool cartoonist brother Eric is now an animator for The Simpsons.
7. Her clothing line LAMB and album, Love, Angel, Music, Baby (aka LAMB) are named after her childhood dog, you guessed it LAMB.
8. She married Bush’s Gavin Rossdale in 2002 after going out with him for six years.
9. Gwen wore a pink and white wedding dress on her big day, and hubby Gavin was walked down the aisle by his dog Winston!
10. Fans who copy her style are called Gwenabees!

The reigning queen of rock & roll is flying solo for the first time in her career, and life is pretty sweet. It’s also an emotional roller coaster.

The lobby of New York’s Mercer Hotel is a haven of downtown chic – all angular furniture in shades of eggplant, with oblong over-sized lampshades atop carved wooden posts. A wall lined with bookshelves displays volumes on Toulouse Lautrec, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol alongside studies of designers Vivienne Ta, and Salvatore Ferragamo and anthologies on modernist architecture. The place is, as Gwen Stefani puts it, “super-frickin’ trendy cool,” the kind of hotel where everybody pretends not to notice when Nicky Hilton saunters past the reception desk.

But someone has taken notice of Stefani, lounging inconspicuously on a leather cafe chair on this late December evening. Stefani is is done up in the luxe street style that has made her an international fashion icon: dark-wash jeans from her own L.A.M.B label (“They look good whether I’m a bit fatter, or not,” she says), a L.A.M.B wife-beater, suede Christian Dior clogs that add three and a half inches to her height and platinum-blond hair extensions bubbling from under a blue knit ski cap. She slouches lower in her seat. “There’s this guy over there and he won’t stop staring at me,” she says.

I turn around and see a toddler – no more than a year old, big blue eyes, hair so fair it blends in almost completely with his scalp – gazing in our direction. Stefani giggles. “The little baby,” she says. “So cute.”

Stefani has always been the kind of songwriter who lives out most of her private dilemmas in public. “Don’t Speak,” the song that put No Doubt over the top in 1996, was about the break up of her seven-year relationship with bass player Tony Kanal. In 2000, after four years of dating Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, she made a video for No Doubt’s “Simple Kind of Life,” where she ran wild in a wedding dress while singing, “I always thought I’d be a mom/ Sometimes I wish for a mistake.” True to form, the first single from her recent debut, “What You Waiting For?” chronicles her intense baby lust – the “tick-tock” refrain of the chorus, she says, was inspired in part by the sound of her biological clock.

During the three days I spent with her, her desire to have children is a continual theme, whether she’s talking about how she never planned on being a pop star (“Before that all I ever did was, like, look at Tony and pray that God would let me have a baby with him”) or the joy of marrying Rossdale (“It’s such a beautiful, magical feeling, I can’t explain it. It’s like having a baby. I can imagine what it might be like. But that love I’ve never experienced”) or her plans for the future (“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ve always wanted to do the family thing”).

And like any successful woman on the mommy track, she worries about the conflicts of career and family, although most women don’t have to stress about the demands of dressing as fairy-tale characters in music videos. “At a certain point I’m going to want a family,” Stefani says, “and I’m not going to have time to be running around the world doing this shit and being greedy the way I have been. I can always write up songs. But can I always wear an Alice in Wonderland costume? I probably shouldn’t. I can be at home. I was thinking that when I have children, that I should always dress as a character for them, so they think their mom is Alice in Wonderland or Cinderella. It would be totally messed up!”

“I hope she chooses to do both things,” says Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Stefani’s label, Interscope, of the star’s career and family ambitions. “She can handle both. I think she would really miss not fulfilling her potential as an artist, and she’d regret that. But her potential as a mom is equally as powerful.”

“This is the first time in a long time that I actually don’t know what’s gonna happen next,” Stefani finally says. “You think about it as a famous person. You think about how you’re gonna end it. How you’re gonna get away and have a normal life. I imagine my children are going to save me from my vanity and be my passion and fill whatever fears I have of the amazing time I’m having right now being gone. I don’t want to drop off and not be on the radio or not be able to talk about myself for hours. But at the same time, I never expected to be here in the first place.”

Disturbing but true: listen to rock radio these days and you’ll hear a women’s voice only if it belongs to Gwen Stefani or Evanescence’s Amy Lee. Lee sure sold a lot of records in the past few years, but Stefani is the only true female rock star left on radio or MTV. “She’s toured from when she was eighteen years old playing small clubs, to playing small theaters, then amphitheaters and then arenas,” says Iovine. “She is the only woman on pop radio right now who has toured with that vigor, and she’s the only one who could tour as easily with U2, Green Day and Outkast.”

Almost ten years after “Just a Girl” hit airwaves, Stefani has an instantly recognizable voice, and inimitable sense of style and an impact on popular culture on par with Madonna’s. “There will never be anyone else quite like her,” says Garbage singer Shirley Manson, who has known Stefani since the mid-Nineties and toured with No Doubt in 2002. “She’s like the perfect Trojan horse: She seems very benign and wholesome, but underneath lurks an incredible toughness and powerful directness. Nobody can copy her, because she’s this uniquely extraordinary contradiction.”

Indeed, Stefani is one of the only Nineties stars who has managed to hold the attention of the ever-churning teenage audience. Her solo debut, Love, Angel, Music, Baby, sold over half a million copies in its first two weeks. She recently scored a pair of Grammy nominations: one for “What You Waiting For?” and one with No Doubt for their cover of Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life.” (If she wins both, her Grammy collection will span to five.) In December, she made her big-screen debut – albeit in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role – playing Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator. And last night, she went to the holiday party for her clothing line, which is preparing its fourth collection for fall 2005.

Love, Angel, Music, Baby is the kind of Eighties-style electro dance album that Stefani grew up on in Orange County, California. It’s so Eighties, in fact that members of New Order are the backing band on “The Real Thing,” alongside collaborations with OutKast’s Andre 3000, Dr. Dre and Eve, the Neptunes, Dallas Austin and Linda Perry. “Right now in my life, I’m all about trying things I’ve never done.” Stefani says. “I’m a woman and I’m thirty-five. I don’t have that much time left to do this kind of a pop record. Let’s be real about it.”

The idea for the album, she says, came to her one morning during No Doubt’s Rock Steady tour two years ago. She heard one of her favourite dance tracks from the Eighties, Club Nouveau’s “Why You Treat Me So Bad,” turned to Kanal over breakfast and said, “I want to do that song.” It was Kanal, after all, who had introduced her to that kind of music when the two were teenage sweethearts, before she turned him onto ska, before No Doubt had a record deal.

I was super ska girl when I met Tony,” she says. “I wore only black and white and these hoop earrings. Tony went to Anaheim High School, which is a big cholo school. He came over here from Anaheim at eleven. He has Indian parents, and he was the first born, so he didn’t have any influences. He thought he was Prince. Because I had a crush on him, he turned me on to Prince and Lisa Lisa and Debbie Deb, and that stuff has always had a special place in my heart.”

Then No Doubt got to the end of the tour in late 2002, everyone in the band was ready for a break. Stefani had just married Rossdale, Kanal “had his first real girlfriend,” guitarist Tom Dumont was engaged, and drummer Adrian Young’s wife had given birth to their first baby. “Everyone started changing,” Stefani explains. “All those years we were only committed to each other, but then we grew up. You could tell certain people in the band needed a break.”

The night before she is scheduled to perform at the 2004 Billboard Music Awards, Stefani sits on the couch in a Las Vegas hotel room looking like Alice in Wonderland on casual Friday. Her hair is held off her face with a thick velvet headband, and she’s dressed in a black sweater, jeans and white sweat socks. A keyboard with colored tape marking specific keys sits next to the couch so that Stefani can rehearse the intro to “What You Waiting For?” in her spare time. She starts by showing me a big white blister on her thumb that she got after one of the candles in her hotel room tipped over and spilled hot wax on her. “I can’t stop playing with it,” she squeaks.

I was in such a shit mood before you came,” she says. “I’m really on my period right now, really bad. I’m so emotional. I’m gonna cry just talking about it.” Many of Stefani’s stories involve her either crying, or nearly crying. “I’m just emotional,” she says. “I don’t fight with people – like, I can barely fight with my husband because I’ll just start crying instead. I’ve learned not to do that so much. Period week, I cry a lot. And the week when I was to Anaheim to play my first show by myself, I cried all the way, because I was like, ‘This is surreal. Why does my first show have to be in Anaheim?’ ”

Gwen Stefani’s parents – Dad is marketing exec and Mom quit her job as a dental assistant to stay at home with the kids – still live in the same house in Anaheim where she grew up with her older brother, Eric, younger sister, Jill, and younger brother, Todd. “My mum and dad met at Anaheim High School,” she says. “After they got married, all they wanted to do was have four children, and they did.” When the kids were still small, their parents would take them to bluegrass and folk festivals; one of the first shows Gwen remembers seeing was Emmylou Harris. “She had just had a baby,” she says, “and she took a break in the middle of the show to go feed the baby. I couldn’t believe it.”

The Stefani kids all live relatively close to home, and though Gwen says she’s very close with Jill – the two call each other simply “sister” – it was Eric whom she idolized as a teenager. No Doubt was his band before he recruited Gwen to share singing duties with the late John Sinclair, who committed suicide in 1987. Eric quit the group before Tragic Kingdom came out and now works full-time as a cartoonist. “Everything Eric was into, I got into,” she says. “He’s super creative, and he was this high school cartoonist and he was in the marching band, and he had all these wild artist friends. I don’t know if he really was cool or not, but he seemed cool to me.”

By comparison, Stefani says she was “pretty lazy” and “passive.” She had trouble with her grades at Loara High School and didn’t even know if she was going to be able to graduate. By the time she got to Cypress College in 1987, she discovered that, even though she couldn’t spell to save her life, she was pretty good at writing song lyrics. “After Tony broke up with me, I realized I had something to say,” she says. “When I started writing songs, it was like ‘I’m a real human in this world, and I can do something.’ ”

Love, Angel, Music, Baby, though, proved a major challenge to Stefani’s confidence as a songwriter. her original idea was to make an old-school dance album “with Tony in his bedroom and the two of us singing in a microphone,” she says. Jimmy Iovine wanted something bigger and pushed Stefani to shoot for the moon, pairing her with producers such as Dallas Austin and Linda Perry in hopes of striking chart gold. “She was nervous about it,” says Iovine. “It was her first time doing something without her band, and it was a big step. I said, ‘Let’s just experiment and see what happens.’ ”

But when it came time to start work on the album in earnest, her insecurities kicked into high gear. “I cried before I went in the studio,” Stefani says. “I was just terrified.” Writing songs with her band of seventeen years seemed like a piece of cake compared with trying to be creative on cue, alongside Pharrell Williams or André 3000 or Dr. Dre. “It was very threatening to let these people into my world,” she says. “Because that’s what I define myself as – a songwriter. The hardest part was letting someone even suggest an idea and then my ego being able to take it if it was good.”

She got together with Perry, and on the first day they wrote a song called “Fine by You” that didn’t make it onto the album.”It was all about ‘I don’t want to be inspired. I don’t want to call anyone. I just want to sleep and wear the name you gave me. And everything is fine by you and you don’t judge me and you love me,’ ” Stefani says. “It was a stupid love song, but really good. I went home and felt good, like, ‘I did it. I wrote a song today.’ I was still really scared to go back, and when I got there the next day, Linda had been up writing all night. That whole jealousy thing happened, like, ‘You did that?’ ” The song Perry had written was “What You Waiting For?”; it was her way of telling Stefani to get off her ass and stop complaining. “It was a dare, and I don’t even remember writing the words after that,” Stefani says. “I just barfed them out.”

Once Stefani felt comfortable with the direction of the album, her quirky creative impulses took over. She became fixated on the idea of dedicating a song to the wildly dressed Japanese women she had admired ever since her first visit to the Harajuku section of Tokyo in 1996. “Everybody had this crazy personal style,” she says. “The last couple of times I was there, it had evolved into all these different things like the Gothic Lolitas and these girls with blond hair and dark tans and high-heel shoes, like they were from Hollywood. I was working with Linda, and I did a shout out to them: ‘Harajuku girls, you got the wicked style.’ That’s when the dream started.”

The dream, that is, of having four Harajuku girls follow her everywhere she went to promote her album. The four girls, whom Stefani named “Love,” “Angel,” “Music” and “Baby” are actually professional dancers whose main job – other than performing on stage with Stefani – is to stand behind her and look cute. But the idea also evolved into a running theme on the album: Not only did she write a song dedicated to them (“Harajuku Girls”), but two other songs on Love, Angel, Music, Baby reference the Japanese fashionistas. “I was thinking about calling the album Stolen Goods,” she jokes. “Or It Was Yours and Now It’s Mine.”

Maybe one day, she says, maybe after she’s started her family, maybe she will make a “real” solo album. “I would really love to learn to play something so I Don’t have to rely on someone to collaborate with,” she admits. “Like, I’ve written songs on guitar, but I don’t play guitar good enough to be free. If I could play every chord? I feel like I could write a million songs if I had that.”

But how will she know when it’s time to stop fighting the ticking in her head and start the family she’s always wanted? For a moment she seems at a loss for words. “I’ve been making a conscious effort not to think about the future,” she finally says. “I feel lucky to not have a real job, to be able to express myself, be creative and be relevant. I don’t know what I’ll be doing in ten years. How old will I be? Forty-five. I don’t want to think about it, to be honest, because it’s a waste of time. Tomorrow night I’ll be in bed with my husband again and it will be great. It’s all about right now.”

Blender joins the No Doubt singer’s court to find out about her solo album, movie career and love life. “Everything you could probably think up is true,” she says.

Gwen Stefani is dancing barefoot in her kitchen. One of the tracks she’s just finished for her first solo album is playing on her laptop, and she spinning around saying “I love this song!” while a small posse of assembled staff looks on: her publicist, her graphic designer and her British manservant Pete, who is juicing a lemon and preparing Stefani her light, fragrant lunch.

All around Stefani, in her Mediterranean-style Los Angeles mansion, are the lavish accumulations of the truly successful: a driveway crowded with Mercedes; huge vases of tall, perfect lilies on every table; two silent cleaning women fluffing every cushion and dusting every shiny surface; a parade of Herb Ritts photographs of Stefani with her shirtless husband, Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale; and drawings by couturier John Galliano of the dress he made for her wedding, framed with a card from the designer that reads: “Dearest Gwen, Thank you for the most amazing evening.” Stefani arrived here from London just last night, but Rossdale had to stay behind. “We’re trying to get his dog out here,” she explains, “but it’s hard to get a private plane to fly a person with a dog.”

Stefani sings along to her song “Harajuku Girls” in the kind of mock pop-star voice one might use to croon “Like a Virgin” into a hairbrush. “I’m your biggest fan!” she squeals in perfect unison with her recorded self. And if Blender didn’t know that the woman bouncing and twirling about was the queen of this castle, that she and Madonna have actually “hung out several times,” that the voice coming from the computer has sold 26 million records worldwide with her band No Doubt, we might think she was exactly what she just said: a fan, a starry-eyed hopeful bopping along to the beat.

Blender’s Woman of the Year still has the giddy enthusiasm of a person who is surprised by her luck, even after 17 years in music, three Grammys and the launch of her own fashion label L.A.M.B, which Gwen-ishly stands for “Love Angel Music Baby,” also the name of her new album. Love Angel Music Baby will not only bring her another car or manservant, it’s sure to brighten the celebrity spotlight, as happened to Justin Timberlake when he stepped out of ‘N Sync.

But going solo is still a risk, a move away from a proven formula and out into the unknown. Just ask Mick Jagger. Or david Lee Roth. Or Al Gore. Stepping out – at age 34, no less – of the protective cocoon of a band that she has been in half her life requires remarkable ambition, power, balls. Gwen Stefani doesn’t see it that way.

“Everyone keeps calling it a solo record and I keep calling it a dance record,” she says. “‘Cause if I was doing a solo record, that would be like, finally, me… finally this is the real Gwen Stefani. It’s not that. This album is actually less of me than ever before.”

Growing up, Gwen Stefani never fantasized about being a rock star. Never pictured living the brilliant transatlantic life of pop royalty. The Gwen Stefani story according to Gwen Stefani, goes like this: All her life, things just happened to her. She is an accidental rock star – or at least she likes to think so, maybe because it’s true or maybe because lusting after fame and fortune seems unladylike to her.

And to be sure, Stefani has been lucky in one crucial regard: The men in her life have buffeted her from many of the uphill struggles in her life.

Her brother Eric founded the band No Doubt when Gwen was still in high school in Anaheim, California, and herded her into the band. “Eric’s the one who brought the first Madness record home and got us all into ska,” she says. “I’d wake up because he’d be banging on the piano. He would always be trying to get me to sing, because he couldn’t sing very much himself, and I could sing along to the Annie soundtrack or Evita.”

Gwen’s first real boyfriend, Tony Kanal, was, and is, No Doubt’s bassist and co-songwriter. Kanal has always handled all the wheeling and dealing and planning that are crucial, tedious busy work of any successful band.

“Tony took care of everyone and he was on top of all business,” Stefani says. “Nothing went wrong – no stone unturned, every corner cleaned. The opposite of me. I’m a mess!” (She means literally as well as figuratively: Stefani says that of all her indulgences, the one she’s most hate to lose is her cleaning women. “I get home, I drop.” She mimes throughing things in every direction.)

Stefani entered the band that made her a star when she was 17 years old. “I was a very passive girl,” she says. Stefani is perched on an immaculate, overstuffed white sofa, her white hair pinned up in a glamorous puff.”I was completely satisfied with just being in love with my boyfriend and dreaming about getting married.” Stefani didn’t consider herself talented. “I always considered myself as really lazy because I was bad at school…. Not that I was a bad girl,” she says quickly. “just that it was hard for me to learn. I couldn’t even pay attention, I spent the whole fuckin’ time drawing pictures. The bell would ring and I would be like, ‘Gosh the period’s over?’ I would have just written my boyfriend’s name in really sketched out, really nice letters.”

Part of the fun of being a No Doubt fan has always been tracking Stefani’s crushes and heartaches through her unusually transparent, occasionally, artless lyrics. Listening to a No Doubt song can feel like peeking into high-school journal: finding out on 1995’s “Sunday Morning” how excruciating it was for her when Kanal ended their romance; hearing, on Rock Steady’s “Underneath It All,” about how happy she’s become with Rossdale (“You give me the most gorgeous sleep/ That I’ve ever had”); or how badly she wants a baby on “Simple Kind of Life” (“I always thought I’d be a mom/ Sometimes I wish for a mistake”).

Gwen Stefani wrote that song in 1999, a couple of years after No Doubt and Bush were pushed together on a tour by their label, Interscope Records. Initially, everyone in the band was dead-set against the pairing. “The label was always talking about Gavin and Bush,” she says in the whine of a kid talking about history and math. “We were just like, ‘Whatever. We are not going on tour with those guys; that’s not who we are.’ And then we went and it was love. It was magic.”

Well, maybe for her. The rest of No Doubt were furious.

“Everybody was against it,” Stefani says. “It was a very crazy time. There was already my breakup with Tony, and we were enjoying success for the first time and having outside things come in to to our little band, our little family. And then I met Gavin. It was really lonely, because I felt like nobody wanted me to go out with him. My ex-boyfriend and all of my, like, brothers in the band were saying ‘You are not gonna go out with that guy!’ ”

Why not? “Because I had never been out with anyone else! And other reasons. Everything you could probably think up in your brain is probably true.”

Gwen Stefani started thinking about making a solo album when No Doubt was on tour in 2002 to promote Rock Steady. This was just a few weeks after she married Rossdale in London, went on a quickie honeymoon to Capri, then had a second ceremony in Los Angeles at the home of Jimmy Iovine, her boss at Interscope records. (“That dress,” she says of her custom-designed Galliano with a giggle, “was the whole reason I had another wedding.”) All four members of No Doubt were planning to take a break after the triple platinum Rock Steady “because we hadn’t had one in so long and everyone was burned out,” Stefani says, “Me, first and foremost.”

But the girl who had always worried about being lazy wasn’t planning on taking it easy. “I had so many things I wanted to do: the baby, the movie, the whole list, and the clock was so loud in my head!” Stefani says making her solo album was actually a low priority, but that once she put it in motion, it was impossible to halt. An all-star group of musicians and producers from very different genres came forward to collaborate with her: André 3000, Dr. Dre, Linda Perry, Dallas Austin, the Neptunes and Nellee Hooper, to name a few. And once she told the label she was interested in doing her own “side-project,” you can imagine their reaction. Gwen Stefani, the billboard-ready blonde with the crazy voice and the mad style is finally going solo? Ka-ching!

“As soon as I told Jimmy Iovine that I wanted to do this record, it’s been, like, his record,” she says. “When someone believed in you more than you believe in yourself, you almost want to do it to please them.”

“I would literally back her on anything,” Iovine says from his L.A. office. “Her vision is that strong, I use her a lot in Interscope’s business, the way I would use Dr. Dre: ‘What do you think of this? What do you think of that?’ ”

But when Stefani first started working on Love Angel Music Baby, she found herself – or cast herself – in a familiar role, as the subordinate: dealing with other people’s time lines, striving to meet other people’s goals.

“This is how crazy it was,” she says, tapping her feet frantically as if still buzzing with the pressure and the adrenaline of the whole thing. “The record company called me and was like, ‘You’ve got to go work with Linda Perry. Now. She has only five days out of the whole year to work with you.’ And I’d just got off tour! I was tired, I was burned out, I’d just got married. I hadn’t even seen my husband! But then I thought, OK, if I don’t do this now…. I want to do great things, and I know that I’m super-lucky?” she says in perfect so-cal upspeak.

“So I should just take all the opportunities. It’s one to have ‘Just a Girl’ on the radio, but to have years of cake and ice cream?” She grins and makes eating noises. “It’s gonna end soon! So basically, I cried in my bed, like, for real.”

“When Stefani talks, she actually does sound very much like that teenager who sings into hairbrushes and spends 6th period tracing her boyfriends name in curlicues. But it’s confusing, hearing this animated, teenybopper voice come out of the crimson mouthed woman who is so outrageously glamorous. She doesn’t wear clothes so much as she does costumes. Even sitting around the house, she has gold high-heeled Mary Janes and a plaid Vivienne Westwood top with a cape-like piece that she throws dramatically over her shoulder every 20 minutes or so.

Her assistant brings out an exquisite china coffee service and she takes hers with honey and milk, raising a tiny teacup to her lips with a perfectly manicured hand. “I feel so ‘lady’ now!” she says, beaming. She is not unlike the cliché of the platinum-haired silent-movie star who opens her mouth and spoils the illusion of frosty allure with her Betty Boop voice.

Only in Gwen Stefani’s case, the tears and the eating noises and the “rads” that pepper her conversations are a large part of her Valley-girl-next-door appeal. You can’t be too fancy when you begin your career with a bindi glued to your forehead or decorate your backyard with two intersecting green street signs that read “Gwen Drive” and “Gavin Way.”

“I’m gaudy and cheesy and I always want to push it,” she admits. “Adrian [Young] was always the yang of the band if I was the yin. If I’m the cheese, he’s the cool. That’s what makes No Doubt.” She thinks about it for a minute. “We would be like the most not-best-friends.”

The down side of all this guileless, youthful charm is that Stefani sometimes seems on the verge of drowning in her own adolescent securities. “I think Gwen is over-critical of herself,” say Linda Perry, who was the first producer to work with Stefani on her solo tracks. (Perry was the lead singer of 4 Non Blondes and then went on to write and produce Pink hits like “Get The Party Started” and Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful”) “There was one day where she had a little insecurity breakdown. But I found it very endearing: I loved seeing her that insecure. You meet a lot of people who have half her talent and the they think they’re God’s creative monster.”

Somehow, when Stefani tells it, she is, again the person who things are happening to, not the person in control. “At the Grammys, Linda Perry came up to me like a fucking bull dozer and basically put me in a headlock and was like, ‘We need to write some songs together,’ ” says Stefani. Gwen was accustomed to taking her time – sometimes years – to write songs with No Doubt. “It was always a long, hard process. So I was like, ‘I can’t sit next to you and pour my heart out. I don’t even know you!’ There was times I was just like, ‘Fuck you, dude, you’re totally stepping on my territory.’ Other times we were really inspired by each other. Linda and I had a meant-to-be thing that was magical. I get emotional about it,” Stefani says, and starts to cry a little.

It will probably come as no surprise that Stefani is big on emotion. She is also big on magic. With Pharrell Williams, she “wrote three songs in three days and they were all magic.” The Rock Steady tour was “so magic.” Shooting her cameo appearance as Jean Harlow in martin Scorsese’s upcoming biopic on Howard Hughes, her film debut, was “super-magical.” She had a “magical night” with Adrian Young at the MTV Video Music Awards in Miani. And recording with Andre 3000 was, you guessed it, “total magic!”

Despite all her breathless enthusiasm for the new pool of talent she’s been soaking in, Stefani claims she has no plans to stay solo. “No Doubt is definitely not broken up,” she says firmly. “I don’t even have plans to tour at this point; I don’t see myself putting out a bunch of Gwen Stefani records. Who knows? I might have a baby and just want to stare at it all day and quit everything.” She assesses her time with No Doubt thus far like so: “To be able to put that many years into one project? It was magic.”

Back in her capacious, green tiled kitchen Stefani plays a few more of her new tracks for Blender, and one in particular stands out: a heart-melting ’80s-ish pop song called “Cool” that she wrote with Dallas Austin. She sings “After all the obstacles/ It’s good to see you now with someone else/ It’s such a miracle that you and me are still good friends/ After all that we’ve been through/ I know we’re cool.”

Sounds personal. Is it about anyone in particular? Any bassist in particular?
“It reminds me of the ending of something… that place we are with the band. Like, how every thing’s cool no matter what and we all know it,” she says and looks at her feet. “And other things you can probably pick up on.”

Blender wonders if all this isn’t a little weird for her husband: having a super famous wife who’s till intensely enmeshed with an ex boyfriend, an ex she’s written whole records about, an ex who’s produced several tracks on her solo album, an ex on whom she still depends (“Doing this on my own there’s this whole pile of things where you go, ‘Frick! Where’s Tony?’ “).

Stefani won’t get specific about it. But she does admit that working out without No Doubt on this record has made it possible for Rossdale to contribute more to her music.

“It’s one thing to be in a band with all these guys, and obviously Gavin’s not gonna offer much of an opinion.” she says. “But when I’m on my own, we can talk even more, he can have more of an opinion. It’s been really… romantic.”

For the first time, Rossdale wrote some lyrics for one of Stefani’s songs, a track called “The Real Thing.” It’s so clear the lines that he wrote because they’re so visual and mine are always so obvious,” she says. “Like, just how you would talk it.”

Their second wedding anniversary, on September 14, just passed. “We haven’t done anything yet because he’s in London, but when he gets here I’m sure we’ll make out or something.”

For all her insecurities, Stefani is refreshingly proud of this album. She fully expects 7th graders to be slow dancing to “Cool” and requesting it – begging for it – at make-out parties.

“That,” she says, “would be so perfect! The thing about my record is you can try not to like it. You can try. But you know what? It’s gonna be your guilty pleasure. I just know it!”

All about my year: Gwen Stefani

No band mates were consulted in the answering of this questionnaire!

Best song I heard in 2004
OutKast’s “Hey Ya!”

Trend I’m most sick of
Reality television.

Sex symbol of 2004
Beyoncé

Most expensive purchase of 2004
A Vivienne Westwood shopping spree.

Most rock-star moment of 2004
Every day felt like a rock-star day.

Where I’ll spend New Year’s Eve
At my house in L.A. with 300 people dancing to my record.

Glamorous Gwen Stefani has become the ultimate music icon with that rare thing – a good reputation. Now, as Jonathon Van Meter discovers, she’s setting her sights on Hollywood. Photographed by Steven Meisel

Gwen Stefani’s house in Los Feliz has a vaguely spooky quality to it. The unease I feel when I pull up in front may simply be the result of my having watched Sunset Boulevard one too many times. Or perhaps the damp January chill has something to do with it. In any case, when the high gates swing open, I walk up the curving, rain-slicked driveway. I am greeted at the heavy wooden door by Stefani’s assistant, Pete, an affable young English fellow who is a childhood friend of Stefani’s husband, Gavin Rossdale.

The house was built in the twenties, and Stefani is only its fourth occupant, which is one reason many of its original details remain unaltered. The rotunda-like entry, for example, is dominated by a dramatic spiral staircase (worthy of Norma Desmond herself) with a complicated wrought-iron railing featuring a replica of a Spanish galleon. On the domed ceiling above, there’s a large fresco of once-famous conquistadors. Pete leads me through a dining room lined with dark paintings and bloodred walls, a medieval chandelier hanging over a long wooden table, and deposits me in an enormous kitchen that has been remodeled to look as if it were designed in the twenties—a sea of black and green ceramic tile bathed in warm, low light. There are candles flickering and religious iconography here and there. It’s as if Stefani’s entire home is a kind of Gothy take on old Hollywood.

While I wait for the lady of the house, I look at framed family photographs in one corner. There is a picture of Stefani as Jean Harlow, taken on the set of The Aviator, Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming Howard Hughes biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Though she utters only a few lines in a movie-premiere scene, a cameo in a Scorsese film on Leo’s arm is certainly not the worst way to announce that she is ready for her close-up.

When Stefani appears in the kitchen moments later, her sunny presence throws the Dark Shadows aspect of her house into high relief. As she opens a bottle of Chardonnay, I ask about the photograph. At first she says that it’s the actual Jean Harlow, and even though a moment before I had thought it was Stefani, I fall for it because she does not look the least bit like the rock star we’ve come to know and love. “I’m kidding,” she says. “It’s me!” She seems pleased that I was willing to believe it might be Harlow. “That’s the key, right?” she says. As I lean in to look at the photograph again, she complains about her makeup. “I would have done it a little differently,” she says. “I’m always in control of my hair and makeup. I was like, ‘Are you sure you want the lips to be that thin? Jean Harlow’s were bigger than that. It’s not like I didn’t read two biographies and watch eighteen of her movies before I got here.’ But what are you going to do? They were in control. I couldn’t say anything. It was hard.”

The makeup artist must have been a nervous wreck. Is there anyone in popular culture today who is as identified with her makeup as Gwen Stefani? The powdered, pale skin, the scarlet lips, those high, arched brows. She has a very particular, almost dated relationship to “putting on her face.” She even wrote a song about it a few years back (“If the magic’s in the makeup/Then who am I?”). It’s so rare to see her out of makeup that when she appeared in a recent video jumping on a bed with a naked face, looking just pretty, she was almost unrecognizable. The image appears to be an homage to those famous shots of a natural Marilyn Monroe, another icon who always had her face on in public and on whom Stefani has been fixated since she was a teenager. “My whole room was Marilyn Monroe posters,” she says.

Today Stefani’s wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with wide red, green, and yellow stripes, and a pair of complicated new Levi’s jeans, worn low and long. Lacy underthings peek out from the top of her jeans. On her feet: sweat socks and Adidas flip-flops. Around her neck is a diamond choker that spells out WIFE in Gothic, diamond-encrusted lettering—a gift from Rossdale. Her white-white hair is a marvel of structural engineering, pulled back tight on the sides and piled high up on her head in a kind of squared-off, simulated Mohawk. Like so much of Stefani’s style, the do manages to simultaneously evoke forties Hollywood and early-eighties SoCal punk. It’s quite a trick.

Stefani has just gotten home from an audition for Brian De Palma, the director who’s partly responsible for making it seem as if something creepy lurks behind every gate in Hollywood. His latest project will do nothing to dispel that notion. He is casting The Black Dahlia, a film based on the James Ellroy novel, which is itself based on the true story of a young Hollywood starlet’s gruesome murder in 1947 (her body was found cut in half and disemboweled). Josh Hartnett and Mark Wahlberg have already been cast in the film as two detectives. Stefani tells me that this afternoon she had to read with “some young guy named Josh,” not seeming to know who he is. She can sometimes verge on ditzy, but, to be fair, this could just be a sign that she’s still sort of a stranger to the film world. “It was really humiliating and nerve-racking, but I feel like I did pretty well,” she says. “But I don’t know whether I would ever even do it if they offered it to me because it’s a kind of a racy part.” She amends her last thought slightly: “I know I’m not going to get it, because I think the character is so the opposite of me. She’s really dark and naughty and slutty. And she has black hair.” This is the first glimpse I get of Stefani’s self-image, which, despite her tough-girl stage persona, is surprisingly wholesome, if not prim.

Stefani claims she had never considered acting until she became famous as the lead singer of No Doubt and agents started calling. After she came off of touring for the band’s breakthrough album, Tragic Kingdom, in 1997, she settled on David Schiff from United Talent Agency. “All I ever do is go to parties with him,” she says. “I never do movies.” Spoken like a true Hollywood starlet.

At least he’s getting her through the right doors. The last film she auditioned for was Mr. & Mrs. Smith. “It was between me and Angelina Jolie, and I’m like, ‘Oh, great. I got a shot here.’ ” But then, she says, “the whole acting thing really feels like something I could do. Whenever I’ve done it, whenever I had moments where it works, it’s just like performing. You hit a moment. And that’s what movies are: a series of moments.”

Now we are sitting in her living room, whose artifacts speak to the curious mix of interests in her life, from haute couture to Hollywood history, from reggae to rock ‘n’ roll. The room is dominated by two plain white sofas and a dark-wood baby grand piano. Above the mantel is a huge black-and-white framed photograph of Bob Marley. Next to it is a red neon heart inside a Plexiglas box, a gift from Gwen to Gavin. Nearby are John Galliano’s framed sketches of her wedding gown. And there, in the corner, are Stefani’s two Grammys, to which she can now add a third, which she won in February for “Underneath It All,” a sweetly demanding little song she wrote about Rossdale before they were married. Lying on the coffee table are stacks of art books, including Icons & Idols, Great Hollywood Movies, and a book of Marilyn Monroe photographs.

At the moment, Stefani is curled up on one of her white sofas sipping a glass of wine. Right behind her head is a series of very glamorous Herb Ritts photographs of her and her husband, propped up in frames and lined up in a row on the piano. The images are, in fact, so glamorous that it’s tempting to want to place Stefani in the pantheon with Monroe and Harlow. “Isn’t it weird how there are icons like that?” she says. “Like Jean Harlow. They screened her movie Hell’s Angels for us. She was really bad in it, really awkward. But she’s so magical. She comes on the screen and you’re like, ‘When is she coming back?’ She’s just like this lightbulb. And it’s so obvious that she’s huge.”

Stefani could just as well be describing herself. Sophie Muller, who has directed seven of No Doubt’s videos, says she has “no idea” whether the singer’s prodigious screen presence in music videos will translate to film. “The difference between actors and singers who are great at videos,” she says, “is that they’re great at being themselves, but an even better, prettier, larger-than-life version of themselves. Actors are often people who don’t really know who they are and really love becoming somebody else.” Muller and Stefani first met nine years ago as they prepared to shoot the now classic “Don’t Speak” video. “She came to my hotel room and I just remember that she was all sparkly,” says Muller. “She had diamonds under her eyes and she looked incredibly glamorous. I just knew that she was a big star. You could see that right away.”

At 34, Gwen Stefani can sometimes seem much younger. She still talks in the patois of a teenager, beginning sentences with “Dude!” more often than not. Eight years ago, I briefly interviewed a 26-year-old Stefani over the phone. I had been writing a story about women in rock, and just as I was finishing a draft, I saw a video on MTV by a band I’d never heard of. The song was “Just a Girl.” Aside from the fact that the lyrics spoke directly to my point, I was thunderstruck by this new? person. She was clearly a post-Madonna, ironic blonde; she spent a lot of time in the video pouting and batting her eyelashes but had rock-hard abs, was dressed half like a boy and half like a cheerleader, and stomped around like a bad-ass rocker chick. I thought: I have to talk to her.

Despite the song’s defiant lyrics – “I’ve had it up to here” is the last line, though it’s sung in a cutesy, Betty Boop voice – Stefani claimed at the time to have no idea that it would resonate with feminists and tough grrrls.”The scene that I grew up in,” she said, “with female artists like Bikini Kill and Hole and all these more punk-rock girls, I always had the pressure of ‘You’ve got to be a feminist and you’ve got to hate guys. And you’ve got to cuss and be tough.’ And I was never like that. I grew up, like, a Catholic good girl. Total Brady Bunch family. That always kind of scared me, the pressure of having to be so cool or like, fuck you to the world. But I kind of got over that and realized that, yes, I love to dress up and I love to wear makeup and be myself. I like being a girl; I like having a door opened for me; I like all that traditional stuff and I won’t deny it.”

Nothing has changed since then. As Andrea Lieberman, a stylist who has been working with Stefani for the last couple of years, says, “Gwen is the girliest girl I know. She’s like a giant heart wrapped in a diamond-studded bow.” Stefani’s girlishness seems to be the direct result of the fact that she has lived in the protective bubble first of her family, then of her band.

Stefani was born on October 3, 1969, to high-school sweethearts. Her father, Dennis, who is Italian, worked in research and marketing for Yamaha motorcycles, and her mother, Patti, who is of Irish and Scottish extraction, was a homemaker. Stefani has an older brother and a younger sister and brother who all live in Los Angeles and remain very close. “I was very spoiled compared with a lot of people,” she says. “We weren’t rich, but we definitely had whatever we wanted.” The Stefani household was also very musical. “My parents were into Bob Dylan and were huge lovers of folk music.” Stefani distinctly remembers being taken out of Girl Scouts to go see Emmylou Harris perform at a local theater. Her parents took her to see movies and musicals, including The Sound of Music, which, as she likes to say, “changed my life.” Then there were the inevitable cast albums for Evita and Annie, which she would sing along to. “I don’t have a singer-singer’s voice,” she says. “I know what my voice is. But I knew that, physically, it felt really good.”

As it happened, her father may have been the first to really recognize that her loopy, unpredictable voice was actually rather surprising. “I remember giving my dad a demo tape of a song I wrote called ‘End It on This,’” she says, “and he would listen to it on the way to work and he played it for people. I remember two things he said to me. One was ‘Everybody’s saying that your songwriting is really good and you should just keep going.’ And the other was ‘Don’t ever take lessons, because your voice is really unique. There’s just something about it.’”

Even No Doubt was a family affair. Founded by Stefani’s brother Eric and his friend John Spence in 1986 as a ska band, No Doubt had very humble beginnings. Gwen was invited by her brother to be the co-lead singer; shortly thereafter the bass player, Tony Kanal, joined the band and they began playing small local venues. A year later, Spence committed suicide, and Gwen stepped into the spotlight. She also became the girlfriend of Kanal, a relationship that lasted seven years and whose breakup she has painstakingly detailed in several songs (most famously in “Don’t Speak”). “I was very passive,” she says. “My brother did everything. I was like, ‘I’m just the sister.’ And then after that I was ‘Tony’s girlfriend.’ And that was good enough for me! I never really had any ambitions or goals or dreams.”

When Stefani’s grandmother died, everyone in the band but Gwen and Kanal moved into her house, and it became known as the Band House, cementing the notion that No Doubt was a family. “I look back on the band, our little family, and how we made it into one. We had a lot of rules that we made up. The band was always number one.”

The group slowly and steadily gathered a sizable and very loyal following in Southern California—but there was no game plan. “We never thought we were going anywhere, really; we just wanted to see the next show. It was just a really homemade little fun thing we did literally in our garage.” Their big break came in 1990, when No Doubt got signed by Jimmy Iovine to his then-fledgling Interscope Records. “Jimmy took me aside and said, ‘Gwen, you are going to be a huge star in six years.’ I was like, ‘First of all, who the hell are you?’ And second of all, ‘I’m not going to be in this band six years from now. I’m going to be having fourteen children and be married.’ Then, practically to the day, ‘Don’t Speak’ was number one around the world. It’s pretty spooky. We always laugh about that.”

In 1995, No Doubt went on tour in support of their second album, Tragic Kingdom. Stefani dropped out of school for a semester thinking she’d be gone for only two months. But two months turned into two and half years, and Tragic Kingdom sold 16 million copies. When the tour finally ended, Gwen came home to her childhood bedroom in her parents’ house in Anaheim, older and wiser and rock-star famous. She had outgrown her own life.

Three weeks before I visit her in LA, I meet up with Stefani in London at Home House, a swanky members-only club where she and Rossdale held their wedding reception in September 2002. It is late in the afternoon on a weekday and we are sitting in a quiet, shabby-chic room with a few fussy little sofas and tables scattered about. There are a couple of middle-aged men pretending not to listen, but I can see them peering over their newspapers. Stefani’s wearing a pair of wide-leg pin-striped Gucci pants and a short little tan thrift-store jacket over a very tight Vivienne Westwood camisole and a pair of Sergio Rossi red silk stilettos. Perhaps it has something to do with her getup, or maybe it’s this old-world setting, but the first thing that strikes me about Stefani is that she is surprisingly ladylike.

While Stefani grows tired of being likened to Madonna, the comparison is irresistible. Madonna filtered her Hollywood-starlet persona through the prism of pop; Stefani has done something very similar through rock’n'roll. Like Madonna, Stefani has begun to drift away from a street-punk aesthetic and into the front rows of couture shows. And then, of course, there is the English husband and dual citizenship. In fact, Gavin and Gwen were recently invited over to Madonna and Guy’s house for dinner, just the four of them. “We do have a lot in common,” concedes Stefani.

But while Madonna’s efforts to grow up and act like a lady have always felt a bit forced, Stefani seems innately poised and well mannered. As rough-and-tumble as she gets on stage, Stefani leaves that attitude behind when the concert’s over. There are no Courtney Love histrionics, no Janet Jackson-style wardrobe malfunctions, no J.Lo diva routines. She’s a rare rock star who has it both ways.

Once again, her family seems to have protected her from the worst excesses of her chosen profession, as well as instilled in her a strong set of values. “My mom was really conservative growing up; everything was plain and simple and tasteful, and I couldn’t wait to rip my shirts and cut things up.” To Stefani, the cover of Vogue represents the pinnacle – more important than even Rolling Stone. “When I told my mother I was going to be on Vogue, she started crying.”

Mama Stefani is also beside herself with joy about the fact that her daughter is finally putting out her own collection, L.A.M.B, which debuted in February. “She was looking through the designs in my book, and she got really emotional.” Here, she imitates her mother crying: “It’s in your blood! This is for Great-Grandma!” Turns out Gwen comes from a long line of seamstresses. “My great-grandma used to start on New Year’s day, which was her birthday, and she would sew every person in her family a quilt and, like, flannel pajamas and then the next Christmas you’d get it. Her daughter, my mom’s mom, made every single thing my mother wore, to the point where she didn’t get to choose her own clothes until she was, like, engaged. And then my mom made our clothes. I used to be kind of bummed. Like, ‘Can’t I go to the mall?’”

One of the reasons Stefani’s look has been so distinct from the very beginning is that she has made most of the things she wears on stage herself. When she became successful and began to tour constantly, she felt she lost her way. Then she met the stylist Andrea Lieberman. “I never really knew anything about fashion,” says Stefani. “Andrea made me a lot sleeker and calmed me down. Before I would just wear everything. She matured my style.”

Lieberman had been admiring Stefani from afar. “I remember when I saw her wearing Viktor & Rolf pants in a video and I was like, ‘She is so fly!’ She always had that mad fantastic style, but I felt like nobody had opened her up to the world of couture and designers. But she’s like a kid in a candy store. Her eyes are wide-open. She loves to throw it all on and I’ll come in and be like, ‘There’s something to be said for restraint at times.’ Part of the joy of working with her is that she has this innate understanding, this cool factor. The It-girl thing.”

Their “inspirational tennis match,” as Lieberman puts it, led to Stefani’s designing and launching L.A.M.B. And while the line is pretty much youthful Gwen-style, is there anything more ladylike and feminine than picking up needle and thread?

It’s as if Stefani is trying on the role of womanhood. As she and Rossdale have been seen ringside at the shows in Paris, you get the sense that she enjoys being the soignée bride of an English gentleman. “Being married does make you feel like a woman,” says Stefani. “Other people treat you differently too. They have a respect for you as a duo. It’s kind of cool.”

It’s hard not to wonder if the wedding and her subsequent married life have met Stefani’s very high (and conventional) expectations, which, two albums ago, she addressed head-on. One song was titled, simply, “Marry Me” (“? I wouldn’t mind if my name changed to Mrs. …”), and in another she yearned for a “… simple kind of life/all I needed was a simple man/so I could be a wife.” When I ask her about this, she says, “It’s weird because when I was a little girl I was always looking at bridal magazines and drawing what my wedding dress was going to be like. But it was nothing like that. I was on tour and I came home and Gavin had literally planned the entire thing. And John Galliano made my wedding gown, chose the color, everything. It’s weird because you think you’re going to do all that. I can remember being on tour, crying, ‘I’m missing out on my life!’ But then I got home two weeks before and got adjusted. And it was very romantic because it just felt like Gavin did it all for me.”

One hopes that the 36-year-old Rossdale has a healthy ego because while Stefani’s star has been ever-ascendant, his has cooled off considerably over the last few years. When I ask her what he’s like, she says, “He’s one of those multi-taskers – good at everything. He’s an incredible cook. I totally scored. I’m a big, huge pig and I love eating, and I married a guy who loves to cook.” Rossdale was a serious tennis player when he was young but gave it up when his coach died. “We were in LA at a dinner party, and this guy was like, ‘You should come over to my house and play tennis.’ And that was it. Now he’s playing in celebrity tournaments. He’s a maniac. He plays like three hours a day.”

It is an intriguing role reversal: While Stefani tours the world and seemingly launches one new career after another, Rossdale plans weddings, cooks, plays tennis, and buys art for their two homes. In a funny way, he’s living the life that she’s always dreamed of. And even though they’ve been together for eight years, it seems they’re still getting to know each other. “We never lived together and we never lived in the same country,” says Stefani. “So, all told, we’ve only been together for, like, two years.” She laughs. “We toured so much separately. The most time we would ever spend together before we were married was like four weeks. But this whole past year, we’ve been together almost every day. Which has just been, like, amazing.” She exaggeratedly wipes the back of her hand across her forehead and says, “Phew!” Big laugh. “We like each other!”

Between quietly taking on Hollywood, getting married, and finally designing her own line of clothes, Gwen Stefani is clearly coming into her own. Nowhere is this more evident than in her music. No Doubt’s 2002 album, Rock Steady, was a huge success, both creatively and commercially, spawning four hit singles. After nearly fifteen years of being a freakishly successful ska band, No Doubt finally collaborated with other songwriters and producers. The result was a glittering collection of brilliant high-end pop that jumped all over the musical map. In the meantime, Stefani also cannily laid the groundwork for her solo career in 2001 when she collaborated with Moby on the ghetto-fabulous send-up “South Side” and, again, with Eve, on her single “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.” Suddenly Stefani became a kind of genre-jumping girl wonder, just as at ease in hip-hop, R&B, and dance music as she has been in the rock world for so long. The surprise for Moby, he says, was that “her voice has this very unique timbre and a very distinctive quality. But after spending a day with her in the studio I also realized that she’s incredibly technically proficient and just a really remarkable singer. And she worked really hard.”

As if to prove there’s nothing she can’t do, Stefani is currently putting together her first solo album, which she’s calling “a dance record.” To that end, she’s collaborating with a stellar lineup of producers and songwriters, including André 3000 from OutKast, Dallas Austin, and her ex-boyfriend Tony Kanal. “I really thought this record was going to be easy and fun and short. I’ll do a couple covers, I’ll work with some really talented people, I don’t have to do all the writing. It’s a dance record, so it can’t really be emotional. Well, I’ve written about seventeen songs, and only two of them are good enough.”

Iovine, chairman of Universal’s Interscope division (whom David Geffen recently called “the foremost record executive in the world today”), believes that Stefani’s future has never looked brighter. “It can be as big as she wants it to be. She’s a driven person, and she’s tough on her music. She’s got just enough insecurity to get herself where she is. There’s no arrogance.”

One of things that everyone who works with her seems to agree on is that Stefani is utterly guileless. “There’s no front to her,” says Muller. “It all just kind of pours out. And she’s always kind of in awe of her life. To have done as much as she has and still be grateful and amazed is fantastic.” Or, as Iovine puts it, “She doesn’t exploit herself. She’s not overselling it.”

I ask Iovine if he thinks there are any other female rock stars who are as big as Stefani. “No,” he says. “What Gwen’s got is that she moves the culture. You are truly great when you can move that culture meter—when you can make the needle jump—and I think she’s going to move it a lot in the next five years. She just will. She’s that kind of artist. I’d bet the store on her.”

Let’s face it: A big part of Stefani’s allure is the killer body. She works out religiously, preferring old-school running and weight lifting to yoga or pilates. Not surprisingly, she has been working out extra-hard lately, denying herself the food she loves so much, for her Vogue photo shoot. But after a glass of wine on an empty stomach in her LA living room, she has decided we must go out and get something to eat. “I feel like if I don’t eat, I might lose one more pound.” She pauses. “But I’m starving.” She invites me to join her upstairs while she gets ready and on our way up says, “When I’m home, I work out five days a week. It’s a battle, I have to say. I have to stop myself from eating. Ask anyone around me: I have to struggle to have this hot body!” She laughs. At the top of the stairs, there’s the master bedroom with a giant, dark wooden canopy bed. Over there, in the corner, is her vanity, a minimalist little moderne shrine to makeup and brushes and potions. There’s an office, a guest room, and then, finally, the vast, roaring closet. It’s a converted bedroom, actually, with plush white carpeting and racks and racks of clothes. “Look at how lucky I am,” she says.

This is the biggest closet I’ve ever seen, I say.

“Hello. Haven’t you seen Paula Abdul’s on TV? She has those circular racks, like they have in stores. I was so jealous.” She picks out a pair of boots (brand-new John Galliano pointy neo-Victorian) and sits on the floor to lace them up. Then she goes to the racks and pulls out a ratty yet elegant vintage cardigan with stains on the elbows. And then she throws on a sort of peacoat, and off we go.

We climb into an insanely luxurious Range Rover with a computerized dashboard. “This is Gavin’s,” she says. “I don’t have a car right now.” She pops in a CD and turns it way up. It’s a demo of one of her new songs, called “Crash,” reminiscent of Kelis’s song “Milkshake” and just as infectious. “Japanese or Italian?” she shouts over herself. We settle on Italian, and she points the car to a neighborhood joint where she’s a regular. “It’s nothing fancy-pants,” she says. When we arrive at the restaurant, it’s packed, and we are forced to wait outside on the street. I can see that this makes her a little nervous and maybe a touch annoyed. In London she admits, with refreshing honesty, that “there are certain things about being famous that I love, like being taken care of when I go to a restaurant. I love the attention. It’s fun.”

If Stefani’s career is tied to her physical beauty (it’s hard to imagine her maturing into a chanteuse), then there’s little doubt that she’s in her prime. Once we’re seated, I ask her if she worries about there being a time limit on a female rock star’s career. “When you get past a certain age, you start thinking about life and how much time ’till you die and you start panicking. I want to have a family, and I haven’t even done that yet. I’m worried that I only have a few more years to do this solo record because I don’t think I’ll care about this record when I’m 45. I don’t know. You can’t predict how you’re going to feel.” Then she tells me about a lyric she wrote years ago and has been trying to get in a song ever since: “Born to blossom, bloom to perish.”

But for now, Stefani’s immense appeal shows no signs of waning. A few tables away, there are two young girls who look as if they’re about to burst because of her presence. Stefani notices them and waves. We return to our dinner, and when the plates are cleared, a waitress approaches with a note. “The little girls in the back wanted me to give this to you. They are so terrified.”

“Will you just tell them that they can come say hi to me?” says Stefani. She unfolds the note and says. “Omigod. Oh. My. God.” Turns out one of the girls, Jana, went to school with Gwen’s niece, Madeline. A moment later, the girls appear at our table with their mother. “Jana, you are so cute,” says Stefani. “How old are you?” “Eight,” says her mother. “I can’t believe you know Madeline,” says Stefani. “It’s so weird because she called me last week and she said I’m her favorite singer. For the first time!”

“Has she not said that every day?” says the mom.

“No!” says Stefani. “Because, hello. Have you heard of Hillary Duff? I finally made it onto her radar. I’m taking her to the Grammys, so watch TV. I’m making her a really cute outfit.” (Sure enough, there was Stefani’s niece in the front row of the Grammys in some crazy getup.)

As we drive back to her house, Stefani tells me that there’s a videotape she wants to show me. It’s edited footage of the early days, when Gwen was still the kid sister in her brother’s rock band. Once we arrive, she takes me into a dark, cave-like TV room and pops it into the VCR. Suddenly, a girl appears on the screen. She has long brown hair, a round face, and schlumpy clothes. The only reason I know that it is Gwen Stefani is the voice. The eighteen-year-old girl on the TV looks nothing like the glamorous creature before me. “I don’t even recognize myself,” she says. She fast-forwards through the tape. “I want to show you where my hair goes blonde so you can go, ‘Whoa!’ OK, here it is. See. The blonde hair changed everything. We’re playing at Disneyland. We wanted to do it just to say we did it. That’s the dress I wore on the cover of Tragic Kingdom that I bought for $14 at Contempo Casuals.”

Wow, I say, I can’t believe how different you look.

“Dude, that was a long time ago,” she says. “Let’s face it. I’m way cooler now.”

Gwen Stefani blows our minds once again. By Peter Davis, Photographs by Richard Phibbs.

It’s Gwen Stefani’s 33rd birthday, and the scene in No Doubt’s dressing room at an auditorium in downtown Los Angeles is cluttered and chaotic. Stefani’s operatic voice booms from the sound check as she belts out the song “Bathwater.” Five large pizza boxes and cases of Coca Cola, Diet Coke and bottled water are stacked near an enormous bouquet of birthday flowers. Drummer Adrian Young’s wife, Nina, strolls by cuddling their toddler son, who has been dressed in a black jumpsuit with skull-and-crossbones buttons. Techies race back and forth, fueled by venti lattes from Starbucks.

“I’m burnt, dude,” says Stefani, who wed Bush lead singer Gavin Rossdale in September, as a blue-haired assistant hands her a cappuccinos. Her sweet voice has a Southern California sufer-girl twang. “I had 10 days to plan my wedding, and now I’m going on tour,” she says. “I have so much stuff going on. In January I’m taking the month off. Gavin and I, we don’t know what we’re gonna do-just hang out and not talk to anybody.”

Sporting a rehearsal outfit of Ron Herman and a blue-and-white mesh tank top, with her long, white-blond hair framing her face, Stefani is just as beautiful as she looked in the photographs of her in her pale-pink couture John Galliano wedding dress. Stefani and Rossdale actually tied the knot twice. The first ceremony, performed by the Church of England, was held on September 14 in London, where the “I dos” were said in front of 130 people-family members and friends like Stefani’s ex, 32-year-old No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal. After a honeymoon on the Italian island of Capri, the pair flew back to Los Angeles, where they repeated their vows privately for a Catholic priest and the couple’s parents. Finally, on September 28, Jimmy Iovine, chairman of No Doubt’s label Interscope, gave the newlyweds the ultimate present: a lavish, enormous wedding celebration at his Beverly Hills home, with guests like Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. “I didn’t know what level it was going to be at,” Stefani gushes, widening her brown eyes. “It was beyond! It was the most spectacular event I’ve ever been to. Everyone’s mouth was on the floor. I didn’t think I”d be emotional the second time around, but I was.”

Stefani’s blonde, bottle-rocket looks have landed her in magazines as different as Vogue and Vibe-proof that the singer transcends all age and racial boundaries. Her ability to transform and reinvent her public persona are sure to give her a career trajectory like another blond pop dynamo, Madonna. Part of her enduring appeal is her daring fashion sense. Raised in a conservative Catholic household in Anaheim, California (home of Disneyland), she has a look that is part cartoon, part Latina home girl. From bindis to braces to Jean Harlow hairdos, Stefani’s changing looks have kept the Gwen-abes busy trying to re-create her style. With help from her mother and friends, she has always designer her own clothes and stage costumes, so it’s only natural that one day she would start her own clothing company. With her business partner, Andrea Lieberman, Stefani is launching Lamb, an edgy fashion line that will hit stores in Fall 2003. The line’s name comes from her moniker for her dog. “‘Lamb’ is anything cute singer explains. “It’s basically the clothes I wear. I want it to be my style, so I can wear them. I don’t know what it will evolve into. I don’t know if people will like it nor not. I don’t know anything about fashion, I’m still learning. It’s just another creative outlet for me to do, and it’s exciting.”

Armies of Gwen clones crowd every No Doubt concert, but Stefani says she is still surprised that she is a role model. “I never thought I would have an impact,” she claims. “I was a really passive person growing up. I had a really creative, talented, hyperactive older brother. I’d do whatever he said; I liked what he liked. Anything he did, I did.” This brother, Eric, started No Doubt in 1986 with singer John Spence, and 17-year-old Gwen provided back-up vocals. Then Spence killed himself with a gun in a public park in 1987. With Gwen stepping in as lead singer, the band (which at the time included Kanal on bass, Tom Dumont on guitar and Adrian Young on drums) recorded Tragic Kingdom in 1995. The record sold 14 million copies (Eric Stefani, who dropped out of the group seven years ago, is now an artist and a contributor to The Simpsons.) Gwen became an instant MTV superstar. “After living at home with my parents and going to college and making this record that I thought no one would ever hear, it was like, ‘Who am I? What the hell in happening?’”

As a teen, Stefani didn’t find many women to look up to in rock music. “I remember in high school, I couldn’t like Madonna,” she admits with deadpan seriousness. “It was high school. There were rules. I was into ska and rockabilly- bands like Fishbone and Madness. It wasn’t until later that I discovered Debbie Harry, who was everything I loved. She was glamorous,and she got up on stage and she rocked. Now, of course, as you get older, you see someone like Madonna, who has a career that lasts and keeps people interested so long, and I have a lot of respect for her.” Stefani complains that when she first started there was little room for women in the mail-dominated world of bands. “Girls were like, ‘What does she think she’s doing up there?’-that kind of attitude. Then it started to turn around to, ‘She’s me. She’s representing me.’ I think it’s amazing to be in a band as a girl. Girls come to the concerts, and they feel like they can relate to you-to the lyrics, or maybe they just like the way I do my hair. It’s really cool that I can do that for them. I love it.”

These days, all anyone wants to talk about is her love life, which has been followed by fans of No Doubt’s pop-ska music for years. Her breakup with Kanal in 1994 inspired the hit ‘Ex Girlfriend.” She says the ballad “A Simple Kind of Life” (from No Doubt’s sophomore album, 1999’s Return of Saturn) – with lyrics like, “And all I needed was a simple man/ So I could be a wife”-has “a lot to do with Gavin.” Today, on her birthday, Stefani reports that she is more mature and ready to start a family. “I want to be a grandma,” she confesses, smiling. “I love my 30s so far. Of course, I’m really vain, like we all are, and I’m probably more vain because I’m being looked at all the time and judged. I”m sure in a couple of days I’ll look in the mirror and go, ‘Oh, my God! Look at that and that and that.’ But turning 30 has been so cool. I just want to live life.”

During the making of Return of Saturn, Stefani was in a deep-blue funk. “I was lost,” she recalls, staring off into space. “The making of that record was a growing phase. You can hear it in the songs. I didn’t know how to write songs when I did Tragic Kingdom. I kind of figured it out. I really wanted to be a good songwriter. I wrote in my journal and cried. Ugggh! It was such a serious mood. You can see it in my style. I had pink hair, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I was turning 30 and going through a weird phase.”

Stefani’s current ebullient state of mind is evident on the band’s latest disc, the up-beat Rock Steady. “There’s a real freshness to [the album], because nothing was planned,” she says. “It was like, be fun – write a song about, whatever, how cute your boyfriend is.” Much of Rock Steady was recorded in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and boasts co-producers and co-writers like Sly and Robbie, Prince, William Orbit, the Neptunes, Rick Ocasek, Nellee Hooper and Dave Stewart. “We had all these different energies,” she says. “When you do a record with all different people, you have to bring it together phonetically. We had no game plan, but everything fell into place.”

The list of artists Stefani has collaborated with is also impressive. She’s scored hit with Eve on “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” and Moby on “South Side.” “Working with Gwen was wonderful,” Moby recalls. “When she came into the studio, I expected her to be a lager-than-life rock star, but she was so sweet and down-to-earth. It was the same when we worked on the “South Side” video. She has this very focused work ethic that is impressive, and she’s a lot of fun to be around.”

Stefani returns the love. “I’m so lucky people ask me,” she says. “The song with Eve had the most impact on me. I’d never worked with a rapper. Doing the video, it was like stepping into a whole other world. I love the idea of different worlds coming together. It was what ska was all about in the first place. And I got exposed to a whole other audience. Even just walking around New York, people who I didn’t think would know who I am were like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’”

On the top of Stefani’s with list for future collaborators is Dr. Dre. “He’s on my label, so I told them, if he ever calls or wants me for anything, I’ll be there!” Although Stefani and Rossdale listen and critique each other’s work, they have yet to cut a track together. “We’ve never been creative as a team like that. I would love to, but I feel shy about it somehow. It’s the one thing we haven’t done together.”

After No Doubt’s tour ends in November, Stefani and the band are going to lay low. “We don’t really have any plans. We’ll do whatever feels right at the time. Right no, I don’t think anyone feels inspired to write a record.” The main thing on Stefani’s mind at the moment is finishing up today’s sound check so she can hightail it home to hubby Rossdale, who is cooking a special birthday dinner. No Doubt will soon be on the road, playing big stadiums with bands like Garbage and even opening a few dates for the Rolling Stones.

Stefani finishes her cappuccino and sighs. “Being a performer and being on tour is really repetitive,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It’s not very creative. I really enjoy writing a record more than touring. Performing is fun, but it’s like, hey, so is eating ice cream. You don’t want to do it every minute of your life. It’s like, okay, something else now, please.”

Transcribed by Tabitha for No Doubt Scrapbook. What a star!

It’s Gwen’s world – we just live in it. How everything this rock rebel touches turns platinum. By Lisa Johnson.

After performing live in the Super Bowl in front of an estimated 100 million screaming fans, Gwen Stefani is no longer “just a girl in the world.” The hard-bodied, platinum blonde has combined grunge and glamour to fashion herself into a trendsetting pop icon of “Madonna” proportions. On the verge of launching her own fashion line, the award-winning singer/songwriter is responsible for three platinum albums and sold-out concert tours the world over. But will the savagely cut Amazon who begins her concerts with perfectly posed push-ups and stalks the stage in boxing boots ever be comfortable in her own flawless skin? Many of the hit songs she writes and sings are full of the same insecurities, longing, jealousy, and pain, that the rest of us mere mortals experience. Perhaps her group’s name, No Doubt, is more of a queston than a declaration.

Gwen certainly started life like the rest of us, except she had a rollercoaster in her backyard. Born on October 3, 1969 in Orange County’s Anaheim, home of the original Disneyland in Southern California, Gwen had two brothers, Eric and Tony, one sister, Jill, and competed on her high school swim team, then attended classes at Fullerton College.

“I Was Never a Leader”

When her keyboard-playing brother Eric invited her to join his newly formed ska-punk band, she obliged, not because she wanted to be a rock star or thought she was a great singer. Gwen joined the band because she was used to following her big brother. “I did whatever he told me to do. I was never a leader,” she says.

It was during the early years of the band’s existence that clouds first began to obscure the sunshine of Gwen’s young life. Her brother left the group to pursue other interests, and the group’s original lead singer, John Spence, took his own life. Gwen also began a tumultuous romantic relationship with the group’s bassist, Tony Kanal. No Doubt was eight years and two albums old before they got their first hit, Spider Webs, on their soon-to-be smash album, “Tragic Kingdom,” a dark play on Disney’s “Magic Kingdom” in Gwen’s old neighborhood, where she was still living at home with her parents. Gwen has come a long way sice moving out and going on her first concert tour. At least, it would seem that way on the outside. She lives in a gated villa in the Griffith Park section of the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, and, as of September 14, she’s happily married to her six-year love, Bush front-man Gavin Rossdale, whom she met in Southern California in the Spring of 1996, when the two bands were on tour together. They now split whatever time they have together when their bands are not on tour, between Gavin’s London flat and Stefani’s Hollywood home.

Their weddings (there were two, actually, one in London, one in Los Angeles) were the stuff of fairy tales. Gwen’s friend, Chanel’s John Galliano, designed a stunning, traditional pink-tinged, cream-colored dress especially for her. The first ceremony, held mostly for Gavin’s people, took place in St. Paul’s Church in London’s posh Covent Garden. Gavin wore a tuxedo and his trademark designer shades through the entire ceremony. His Scottish mother wore a traditional British morning suit, and even the couple’s Hungarian sheepdog Winston was decked with pink and purple flowers on his collar.

After a quickie honeymoon in France, the couple went thrugh the nuptial routine again in California on September 28. That ceremony was attended by the princess-like bride’s celebrity friends, including Ben Stiller and Courteney Cox Arquette.

Gwen’s Fabric Kingdom

Gwen’s belly-baring, bindi-wearing style has been voraciously copied by “Gwenabes” the world over, who now will be able to go legit. Gwen is landing her own fahion line. The apparel line won’t fully debut until spring of 2004, but she’s teaming with LeSportsac for a series of bags and accessories due in stores September 1.

The line has been dubbed L.A.M.B., an acronym of her favorite words – love, angel, music, baby – which will be printed in white letters on the bags. Items to be released this fall inclue wristlets, CD and iPod cases, cosmetic clutches, handbags, wallets, totes, even a tour bag duffel, most made of rip-stop nylon with grosgrain accents, antiqued metal hardware and woven guitar strap handles. They’ll be priced from $20 to $158.

The winner of the best Rock Style at the 2001 VH1/Vogue Fashion awards owes much of her look to friend and stylist Andrea Leiberman, but the two work together to come up with Gwen’s unique look. And there have been more than a few “misses.” Her baggy, low-slung plaid pants in addition to heavy leather, chains, and bathing suit tops, have landed her on more than one “fashion don’t” list.

“You get dressed up and share it with people,” Gwen says, without much ado. “I’ve always thought about being a fashion designer. But I never did anything about it.”

Even with a life most of us would consider beyond perfect, Gwen still has doubts. “I think I’ve been able to fool a lot of people because I know I’m a dork,” she says. “I’m a geek.” Most people would have no doubt the opposite is true. To many, Gwen Stefani has become the Queen of Cool.

Ms. Stefani is already a rock rebel, a girl-power icon, and a style star. Now, Lauren Waterman finds, she’s going for blissed-out bride, fashion designer, and silver-screen queen, too. By Lauren Waterman

Back when Gwen Stefani was just a girl, she never imagined for herself the kind of life she has now. Even though she loved Julie Andrews and Emmylou Harris and was, as she says with a perfectly straight face, “very affected by The Muppet Movie,” she never thought she’d be a performer. “I didn’t think I’d have an impact on anyone,” she says.

Gwen and I are sitting together at the end of a huge conference table in a back office of Orlando’s Hard Rock Hotel – she’s between stops on a seven-week tour with her band, No Doubt – and as she finishes her sentence, the door behind her swings open, right on cue. It’s the room service guy, bearing cups of English breakfast tea, and as if to underscore Gwen’s point, he immediately accosts her. “Gwen Stefani!” he yells, grinning from ear to ear. “Hiya!” He sets down the tray and, with little finesse, asks for four tickets to that night’s show. I’m rolling my eyes at this point, but Gwen graciously agrees. Finally her bodyguard rises from his seat on the other side of the room and subtly intercedes, taking the fan’s name for the guest list even as he ushers him out the door.

“See, I know everyone,” Gwen says with a little smile, delicately acknowledging her discomfort and at the same time brushing it aside. Whether or not she ever imagined herself in this kind of situation, here, for better or for worse, she is. It’s been like this ever since No Doubt’s ska-punk sound first penetrated MTV eight years ago. Back then, the cobwebs of grunge – the angst, the flannel – still clung, so a girl like Gwen, with her retro rolled bangs (inspired by her grandma), her bindi (borrowed from band mate and ex-boyfriend Tony Kanal’s mom), her punker pants, and her California-girl cropped tops might have attracted outside attention even if her songs hadn’t been up to par.

But, of course, they were – thanks to Gwen’s timely discovery of her inner pop star. “I was a very passive person groing up,” she explains. When Eric, the big brother she idolized, encouraged her to join his band, she did, not because she thought she could sing (she didn’t) but because “I did whatever he told me to do. I was never a leader,” she muses. “I didn’t need to be.” It was only after Tony and Gwen broke up and Eric left the band that she really started to find herself as a songwriter. “All of a sudden, it was like, ‘Where did this come from?’” she remembers with a laugh.

No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom went platinum in 1996, thanks in large part to the power of Gwen’s voice and her go-girl personality. And each subsequent album – Return of Saturn and Rock Steady – has only increased the band’s critical cred and popularity. “It’s cool to be respected for things I’m passionate about,” says Gwen. At the same time, she can get overwhelmed by the attention, which she thinks peaked around the time of her wedding to Bush’s Gavin Rossdale.

It’s hard to blame people for being so interested in Gwen and Gavin. After all, they’re talented, successful, fantastic-looking, and – it’s clear – very much in love. When they were introduced in 1996, Gwen liked Gavin immediately. “He looked so familiar to me,” she says. “There was something about him. The first thing I said to him was, ‘You’ve got gorgeous eyes.’” By the end of the night, Gavin had told Gwen that she was gorgeous, too.

After he asked her to marry him on New Year’s Day 2002, Gwen enlisted a friend, Christian Dior designer John Galliano, to make her gown. “Gwen is an old-fashioned romantic at heart,” explains Galliano. “We share a deep respect for tradition, yet also a love of breaking with convention. We wanted the effect to be dreamy, with a contemporary twist.” The pink and ivory dress he created – as well as Gwen’s wedding ring, a wide platinum (of course!) band paved with diamonds and top with a heart-shaped stone set inside interlocking Gs – is dazzling, totally romantic, and extremely cool, just like Gwen herself.

Even the fact that she hasn’t seen Gavin much since their second wedding – they had twin ceremonies in London and LA, with a honeymoon in between – can’t rattle Gwen’s newlywed bliss. “When we got married,” she says, “we promised we would be there for each other. So it’s cool if we’re apart now; we’re going to be together forever. I’m totally with him in my heart.” Still, Gwen does look forward to being with Gavin – and not just in her heart – when No Doubt finishes their tour. As for what else she’ll do, she’s happy to keep he options wide open. “One of the benefits of the band’s success is that we don’t have to think too far ahead,” she says. “I get to enjoy what I’m doing right now.”

In the fall, Gwen is launching a clothing line she’s designing with her friend and stylist Andrea Lieberman. They’re been collaborating on Gwen’s look for a few years – “She totally streamlined me,” says Gwen, “because to me, there’s no such thing as too much” – and suddenly it just felt like the right time to strike out on their own. “We were already making lots of my clothes,” she says,” and we have so much fun working together, so why not?” They’ve named the line L.A.M.B, which was what Gwen called her dearly departed little Lhasa apso (in “Platinum Blonde Life,” she sings, “Where did my lamb go? I feel as empty as a widow”). It’s also an endearment she reserves for her best friends and an acronym that “has different meanings, none of which I’m ready to reveal.”

When I ask if she’s planning a J.Lo-style in-store assault – logo sweatsuits, rhinestone-studded denim, signature perfume – Gwen says no. “This is truly my look,” she says. “It’s going to be based on everything I’ve ever worn, from my first punker pants to the present.” It will be a collection of pieces that, when put together just so, will subtly convey the Stefani sensibility. Considering Gwen’s fashion history, the line looks set to be a success. After all, she’s inspired flocks of so-called “Gwennabes” since her bindi days, and she always manages to make the most out-there ideas – blue hair, braces, bikini tops as eveningwear – look totally in. But it’s charmingly, utterly Gwen that what excites her most about L.A.M.B is the prospect of presenting the finished pieces to her friends. “To hand them a pair of pants and say, ‘They’re mine; I made them!’” she enthuses.

Gwen’s also looking forward to jump-starting another longtime dream of hers: She tells me she “very badly” wants to be an actress. “I’ve auditioned for lots of things, but always when the band was about to make a record or go out on tour. I think that to do something like acting, which is so difficult, really well, I have to put all my passion into it. I’m ready to focus on it now.” Since one of the “things” she missed out on was Mya’s part as one of the murderous yet glamorous Cell Block Girls in Chicago, expect to see Gwen taking a small role in a prestigious picture like Moulin Rouge, not starring in a big shiny vanity vehicle like Crossroads or Glitter. “I think acting is an art,” she explains,” and auditioning can be terrifying or humiliating, especially since people know who I am… It’s the challenge that drives me to want to do it.”

But don’t worry that all this fashion and film and true romance is going to keep Gwen away from music. It’s her first love, and even though she has no specific plans to make a new album with her band, she knows she’ll always come back to it. “We didn’t plan to make the last one either,” she notes. Plus, she’s very interested in doing more high-profile collaborations like the hits she made recently with Moby and Eve. “Dre told me he’s ready any time I am,” she says happily.

“Sometimes,” Gwen tells me, “it seems like good things just happen all around me.” She might be selling her own powers a little short – even her friend Galliano insists that Gwen is “very much in control of her destiny” – but it’s easy to understand her point. Because she didn’t expect to be living what she calls a “platinum blonde life,” the scenery can be, at times, a little baffling. But her excitement and energy are truly infectious. “It’s crazy,” she says, shaking her head. “Sometimes I have to remember to keep walking forward, because it all blows my mind.”

Hella Great

With a new baby, an impending wedding and a breakthrough hit single – “Hella Good” – it’s no wonder the members of No Doubt are feeling fine in the summertime. By: Cara Lynn Shultz

The members of No Doubt are screaming for their lives. They’ve been electrocuted, blasted with fire, and now they’re plummeting off the side of a 10-story building. At the last minute they’re whisked to safety by… Spider-Man? That’s right. Singer Gwen Stefani, 32, bassist Tony Kanal, 31, and guitarist Tom Dumont, 34, are spending a rare free afternoon at Universal’s Islands of Adventure in Orlando, cramming eight rides – including the virtual reality Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man – into a 90-minute field trip. (Drummer Adrian Young, 32, is off playing golf.) After going on one stomach-churning roller coaster twice, Tom asks the operator, “Don’t you have any Snow White rides?” Everyone laughs, but he’s got a point – they could use a break.

Since forming in California’s Orange County in 1986, No Doubt has ridden a career roller coaster that challenges even Universal’s wildest ride. There’s been the slow build to the top (hitting a peak with 1995’s multiplatinum Tragic Kingdom) and the sudden drop (2000’s critically acclaimed but commercially weak Return of Saturn), but now the band has thrown everyone – including its members – for a loop with its fifth record, Rock Steady. A juggernaut of New Wave, Jamaican dance hall and rock, the disc charmed critics and courted a new legion of fans with hit singles like “Hella Good” and “Hey Baby.” On the personal front, two of the tightly knit foursome have had or will experience life-changing events: This past February, Adrian’s wife, Nina, gave birth to a son, Mason. And in September, Gwen and her longtime boyfriend, Bush singer Gavin Rossdale, are set to marry.

TEEN PEOPLE: Will your wedding be like the one you dreamed of having when you were a teen?
GWEN STEFANI: In high school you’re really detailed, but now – I have no time to think about the candy almonds on the table. We’re getting married in London, and Gavin is taking all the wedding-planner meetings without me because I haven’t been able to be with him.

TP: What have you decided on so far?
GS: We’re getting married in the Church of England by a priest who was Gavin’s religious-studies teacher. But we are going to get blessed by a Catholic priest.

TP: Where does religion fit into your life?
GS: As a teen I was a Catholic girl from a really great family. I wasn’t having sex – that wasn’t the way I was brought up. And I pray, because if you take the time out to be thankful, it calms you down. My mom tells me, “Pray and you find peace.”

TP: Do you want to be a mom?
GS: I feel very romantic about the idea because I think Gavin’s going to be the most incredible dad. I’m excited about seeing him as a husband first. But if I got pregnant tomorrow I’d be like, “Yeeaahh!”

TP: How did you learn to trust each other – especially given the careers that you both have?
GS: Yeah, all those boy fans that I just want to get with! [Laughs] It doesn’t matter who you are – if I worked in the same McDonald’s as Gavin, and he worked at the fryer, there are going to be trust issues. Is he flirting with the girl behind the French fries? But we’ve been able to trust each other. I mean, we’re going to marry each other!

By now, Gwen’s pre-Gavin romantic history is a familiar tale: Girl meets boy (Tony Kanal), girl loses boy (in 1994), girl and boy are in a rock band and become superstars. OK, maybe it’s not that common a tale, but Gwen and Tony’s whirlwind romance was the stuff that songs are made of – hence the most poignant tune from Tragic Kingdom, “Don’t Speak.” Gwen wrote the heart-wrenching ballad after Tony severed their relationship and her brother Eric, the band’s keyboardist and songwriter, left the group to pursue a career in computer animation. (Eric worked on TV’s The Simpsons for two years). “Before that, I was a really passive person,” says Gwen. “My brother – I was his puppet. He would just kick me around, like ‘Gwen! Come in here [and sing for us]!’ When he left I had to start writing songs. Then Tony breaks up with me.

“I know it sounds cheesy,” she continues, “But I found out everything about me through those songs. Suddenly I was this independent person who was happy and didn’t have to depend on my lover. Before that, I never really had anything of my own. It was like, ‘I’m Gwen. Do you know who Gwen is? Gwen loves Tony.’”

TP: What were you like as a teenager?
GS: I was rebellious in the sense that I wasn’t into popular music. It was like, “I’m into ska, nobody knows what it is. I’m cool; you’re not.” I wasn’t a cheerleader, never had a lot of girlfriends – just one best girlfriend.

TP: Mostly you hung out with the boys in No Doubt. What do you cherish about each?
GS: Adrian is the punker. If Adrian wasn’t in the band, we could go way too far into cheesy. Tom is a really lovable person. Tony cares about everyone. I am so lame at practical stuff, like frequent flier miles, so Tony made a card with all my numbers on it and stuck it in my wallet.

TP: You’re such a style icon. Were you into fashion in high school?
GS: I was chubby, so I joined the swim team because I wanted to get skinny. I’d wear things that covered up what I didn’t like about myself, like baggy pajama pants because I liked the old-men prints. And in Orange County I was surrounded by gangs like the Chola girls who wore Dickies, tank tops and tennis shoes. The gang thing is so sad, but those girls had wicked style.

TP: Word is you’re going to start your own clothing line. True?
GS: I figure that since Andrea [her stylist] and I already design my own stuff, we might as well make a line out of it. But it won’t be out for another year.

Yep, she’s got style. That along with her dramatic, Every-girl lyrics led to the boys getting left in the dust when the band first kicked down the door to fame. It’s easy to understand why: Nearly everyone who comes in contact with Gwen falls in love. “She is the sweetest person,” says Eve, who collaborated with Gwen last year on the hit “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.” “She sent me an earring that says ‘Eve’ with a heart and a gold chain with a paw print.” (Gwen also adores her fellow blonde superstar: “I had never worked with a girl before – let alone a rapper,” she says, “but Eve’s fantastic.”) Moby, who has also worked with Gwen (on his 2000 hit “South Side”) agrees: “I was expecting this larger-than-life rock star, but Gwen was so nice and down-to-earth.”

Meanwhile, No Doubt’s fans – particularly the female ones – have little trouble focusing on Tom, Tony and Adrian. At their sold-out show in Orlando, Adrian stepped onstage clad only in boxer shorts. “Take it off!” screamed a girl. He smiled, but kept his undies on. “I used to be a hard-core partyer,” says No Doubt’s resident nudist (he flashes his behind in the “Hella Good” video). “But Mason needs me. I am more cautious about everything now.”

So is Tom – particularly about the press. After one magazine article mentioned that his bandmates like to call him “the douche” when he drinks, he now faces the unfortunate stigma of being labeled some kind of booze hound. “I don’t like giving the impression that I’m a drunk,” says Tom. And he’s not: Instead of doing shooters at a bar, you’re more likely to find him surfing or hanging out with his girlfriend, Mieke, whom he met at an MTV party last year. “I know a good thing when I see it,” says Tom.

Tony’s still waiting to spot his good thing, but he’s in no rush to settle down. The most business-minded member of the band (he used to be its manager), he puts No Doubt first, his personal life second. “I think it would be very hard for someone to put up with me,” says Tony. “But when I find the right person, it’s gonna be all good.”

He may have more time to look. With half the band settling down, they hint that this could be their last extensive tour. “I’m not going to live a life where I am gone all the time from my kid and my wife,” says Adrian. “But I don’t know if I will be faced with a decision to make.” Instead, he employs the same one-day-at-a-time attitude that has always kept No Doubt going. “I don’t know if we will be together in 10 years or even next year,” says Tom. “We just take it as it comes, and that’s the best way to keep it going.”

And for now, it’s going hella great.

Anyone who says being a rock star is a boys-only deal can kiss Gwen’s butt. After wowing crowds for 14 years, No Doubt’s outrageous star answers ym readers’ burning questions. By Alyssa Vitrano

What the world needs now is more rockstars. Or, to be precise, more rock stars like Gwen Stefani.

Whether she inspires you to max out your girl-power side or just dye your hair hot pink, Gwen has a knack for pushing people to be a little more fabulous. She’s got all-out energy in performances and amazing personal style – who else could start a bindi craze or get braces just for the fun of it?

“Why do the good girls always want the baaaaaad boys?” she purrs to the audience during her performance of “Bathwater” at the My VH1 Awards show, her tight platinum curls, blazing red lips and belly-baring blue sailor suit popping out in the sea of dancers waving gold pom-poms. After the performance, she hops back to her trailer, which is nestled between Creed’s and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’. A fur-coated Macy Gray stops her after performance to say hi.

The crazy part is that in real life Gwen’s actually a 180 from her public persona. So watching her at the VH1 Awards, it’s hard to believe this was the girl who showed up to our shoot the day before in a pink hoodie and baggy pants, her hair dragged back into a casual ponytail. “I can’t believe this is my life,” she says. “How did this happen?”

Here’s how: No Doubt formed in the mid ’80s and struggled for years to get their generally happy music heard in a time when radio was whining through all the angst the grunge scene could pump out. Gwen recalls, “We didn’t care that we were kind of the nerd band for a lot of years. We had to do it.” The band didn’t have a hit until they released their third album, Tragic Kingdom, in 1995 – the one with “Just a Girl” and “Don’t Speak.”

But in addition to chart success, No Doubt’s hot lead singer inspired a wave of Gwenabes who copied her kick-ass tomboy meets gorgeous-girlie style. Even up through the release of the band’s latest record, Return of Saturn, pretty much anyone you asks still seems to agree that Gwen’s cool. “Everyone always says I’m a role model, but I don’t take it on,” she says. “I’m just trying to get through like everyone else.”

Well, “everyone else” is pretty intrigued. Right before her Fashionably Loud sound check at MTV, Gwen’s taking a breather in her New York hotel suite overlooking Central Park. She pauses over the gourmet chocolates the hotel has laid out on a table to grab a water bottle, and hands me one, too. (Later she tries to foist her chocolates on me so they won’t tempt her.) Sitting in her rock-star suite, I tell her that hundreds of ym readers posted questions for her on our website. She leans forward in her chair. “That’s crazy. What do they want to know?”

As a teenager, were you as creative and unique as you are now? – HOPE STEINMANN-IACULLO, 13, Staten Island, NY
I would have been considered the least likely one to be doing this. A lot of rock stars come from those dark places and it seems like it’s a prerequisite, but I grew up in a normal, traditional Catholic family. I feel really lucky to have had that.
In school I was always passive. I wasn’t a cheerleader or in the choir. I was really bad at school. I struggled really hard with math and spelling (and still do). I hated it in a lot of ways. I didn’t have a lot of friends; I was a one-on-one kind of person. The only thing I got into was art class, because I could draw. I was also really dependent on my boyfriend for my happiness. My personality and goals were pretty much surrounding him. After he broke up with me was when I wrote all those songs – “Just a Girl” and “Don’t Speak.” That gave me a lot of power and confidence because it was a creative thing I didn’t realise I had in me.

When you perform you exude a sense of individualism and a strong personality. Does this come naturally to you? – REBECCA WEBB, 18, Perth, Australia
When I first started performing, I didn’t know hat I was doing but I knew I really liked it. It evolved naturally. I get on stage and  it’s definitely another side of me. I don’t walk into a party and become the loud one taking up all the space in the room. On stage I can go into a whole other world and I love when that happens. It’s like I’m watching myself from the outside.
There are those horrible nights when I feel fat and ugly or like a dork. I can do everything – eat right, work out, not talk a lot, stretch – but it’s just the worst show. Or I’m on my period feeling like I can’t believe I have to do this. And then. Whack!, the audience throws me into shape and I come off in a great mood.

Who were your musical inspirations as a kid? – SARAH MYERS, 17, Iowa City IA
There were a couple of people I looked up to, Angelo Moore from Fishbone and Anthony Kiedis from Red Hot Chili Peppers -  the bands I used to go and see when I was in high school – were larger than life, in control of everyone there, including me. I can remember just being mesmerized by their energy and the way you could get suduced by them. I thought, God, if I could do that…

How did you get into music? – BRITTANY JIBBY, 14, San Jose, CA
It was just a group of friends who liked the same music and wanted to be in a band because we were so fired up by the bands we loved. My older brother, Eric, started the band. He was really talented and I lived through him, so that’s how I got into it.

Why’d you dye your hair pink? – ELIZABETH LAGNO, II, New York
I saw a poster of this ’50s girl with light-pink cotton candy hair and I was like, “Oh! I want to do that someday!” I finally did it because I was depressed – we thought our record was done, but then we had to write three more songs. Plus, I had just turned 30, and maybe me and boyfriend were fighting. It ended up way brighter and more hot pink than I was expecting. I never intended to keep it, but I really loved it and then I kept it for a year.

What hair dye did you use to get that awesome shade of pink? – KATHY BYCZKOWSKI, 16, Chicago
My friend dyed it for me and used Fudge and Manic Panic.

Where do you get your fashion ideas? – KRISTINA ROGERS, 13, San Jose, CA
Really it’s whatever fits or makes me look the hottest. All sorts of things inspire me, but often I copy everyone else. I’ll see a cool girl on the street or go to concerts and copy girls who copy me. Girls will looks o good with my old hair and I’ll be like, “I’m doing that again!” As far as stars, Deborah Harry was so ahead of her time with the whole girl-in-a-guy’s-world thing. Madonna’s amazing – I think my favorite period is the “Borderline” phase. And Björk is so creative and unique. I’ve copied her loads of times.

Are you still going out with Gavin Rossdale? – CASSIE DOLL, 16, Lawrenceville, GA
Yes. He definitely understands my passion, and we enjoy each other’s music and inspire each other to keep going. That’s cool to be able to talk about. The only hard thing is there’s not enough room for each other in our lives a lot of times. Like if he were just a normal guy he could come hang out with me in the studio. We are both so passionate about what we do, so that’s the one hard part we’re trying trying to learn how to deal with. But we’ve made it for five years, so who knows what’s gonna happen.

How do you deal with your relationship being in the spotlight? – LESLIE KETTERMAN, 16, Angleton TX
Compared to my last relationship, it’s been a lot more private because giving up everything about Tony and me was really hard. People don’t know the whole story, they know like 14 songs of it, I started to feel like if I tell everything then we’re like Barbie and Ken – it cheapens what my real relationship is.
However, there are a lot of pretty straightforward songs about Gavin on the record. I don’t try to edit myself. We give each other the freedom to write whatever we want. Certain things are like, “WHAT? You write that?” But we both understand where it comes from.
When we go out in public we have fun. We were at Universal Studios CityWalk and kids were everywhere – we like running into them because they gave us our life. We would have never met each other. It’s pretty amazing, and we feel really lucky.

Do you put your own ideas in your videos? – LEIGH ANN METZLER, 16 Ocean City, NJ
I always have an idea of what I want to be. For “Ex-Girlfriend,” I knew I wanted braids. In my high school there was this girl Mercedes that I wanted to look like in that video. She had white skin, reddish-blond hair, skinny eyebrows, and really red lipstick. She’d put powder on during the whole of class and never take off her mascara – she’d pick her eyelashes apart with safety pins because she’d just keep putting on more mascara.
The “Simple Kind of Life” bride character was based on a John Galliano fashion show with Kate Moss in these huge dresses. And in the “Bathwater” video, I wanted to be more what I was on the VH1 Awards, like Liza Minelli in Caberet, but it just kept changing.

How did you get to work with Moby on the “Southside” video? – JENNIFER RIVERA-VEGA, 14, Philadelphia
When he asked me to do it, I don’t think many people knew who he was. He was very underground. I didn’t even really know who he was but my boyfriend was into him. And out of all the girls in the world, he called me to come sing. I felt very flattered; he’s a really sweet guy. I sang a bunch of stuff on the track, and then he didn’t even use it on his album. i was heartbroken and he sent me a basket of soaps. But then he did a remix and asked if I wanted to do the video and I love doing videos. I’m usually colourful and cartoony in my own videos, but they wanted me to be the extreme of that. I was a little concerned I was going to be mocking myself. The video is kind of silly and I originally thought it would be more serious, but it came out awesome.

What is it like hanging out with guys 24/7? – JESS ROSE, 13, Oldsmar, FL
I’m always on tour with all my boys. For the My VH1 Awards, I had dance rehearsals with all the girls and we had so much fun. I miss out because I don’t do that often. But there’s definitely a difference between girls who hang out with girls and girls who hang out with guys. The guys in the band are my best friends. Once in a while I feel a little left out when they become extreme guys, trying to womanize. On our tour we had an after-party every night. I kind of didn’t fit in because it was all these girls who just wanted to be with the guys. They’d want to hang out with me, but couldn’t seduce me so they didn’t know what to say to me. It’s really awkward.

Do you face discrimination as one of the few girls in the punk music scene? – CHRISTINA NOEL JETER, 17, San Diego
Early on it was definitely weird because there weren’t a lot of other girls in bands where I lived, especially in the ska scene. The people who worked at the clubs just assumed I was a tagalong girlfriend or a groupie. I’d get up on stage and the audience was just like, “Show me your tits!” I had nothing to show anyway! But they’d be aggressive and that was a challenge. We had to really prove ourselves. Then after the show they’d be like, “You were great!” My whole goal was to get up there and not be a girl or a guy, but just get the audience off and make sure there were still guys in the pit. That made me feel really good.

What do you think of the music that’s out now? – SARA BEESLEY, 15, Marblehead, MA
These days it’s kind of depressing – I call it fast-food music. It’s so corporate and manufactured..  It’s a shame for everyone getting into music for the first time. Growing up, I was so into Fishbone and Madness – unique and homegrown bands. They wrote their songs and didn’t have a look constructed for them. It’s just different from some 40-year-old man sitting in a room calculating the right lyrics.

What inspires you to write songs? – KATI KRAKER, 14, New Berlin, WI
It’s pretty weird how it happens. When we played KROQ’s Acoustic Christmas last December a new band called At the Drive-In was very original and I thought, Oh My God, I need to go write something. It’s like I see great people and I think I gotta be greater. I’ll get together with the band – they’re really talented – and when they get excited, I get excited. Also, when I’m just playing guitar or reading books and poetry.  I’ll read a beautiful line and it’ll trigger so many things about my own life. Going through fights and breakups also inpires – but I wouldn’t say go fight with your boyfriend! I feel all the same things that other girls feel. I only know that becuase when I write my songs, girls go “Oh, I feel like that!” That’s my big comfort.
Every song is different. For “Simple Kind of Life” I sat in a room with a DAT player going and the song just poured out. But “Don’t Speak” was written over years. After Tony and I broke up I rewrote it, because the other words really were just kind of made up. “Bathwater” was written last minute, just for fun. I didn’t think it would ever make the record let alone be a single.  But it’s a fun party song.

What advice would you give to girls who want to pursue a musical career? – VICTORIA LAMAS, 13, Adelanto, CA
Being a girl shouldn’t even be an issue. The music is the most important thing, and everything else is an extension of that. So if you get all caught up in your look and the name of your band and stupid stuff, well, that’s just the whole wrong reason to be in a band. Getting a record deal shouldn’t even be the goal. Chances are you are not going to be commercially successful.
It has to be something you have a passion for, like you can’t help yourself. I would say write songs, and try to get live shows. If people show up, you’re lucky. And if you’re good enough, eventally someone’s gonna go, “Wow, that’s inspiring. Let me help you out.”
As a band, we’ve never done this for any other reason than we just loved to. We all went to school and had jobs, but every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday night we got together and played music. It wasn’t becasue we wanted to be rock stars. It wasn’t because we thought we were talented or good. We just did it.

What is it about No Doubt diva Gwen Stefani that makes her one of those “I wish she were my best friend” kind of girls? How about her amazing sense of style, killer voice and real-girl hang-ups? Yeah, she may be “just a girl,” but she’s rock’s reigning queen of real. And with her band’s new album, Return of Saturn, you’re guaranteed to get up and groove once again as Gwen goes off on everything from breakups to makeup. By Alexa Joy Sherman.

As No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani sits in her record label’s offices in LA, finishing off a plate of Chinese food, she dispels a major myth (and, no, it’s not that all girls are on a diet): You can’t take those fortune cookies seriously. “All your financial goals will be reached in 10 years,” she says, smiling as she reads from the slip of paper. The message is a little late, considering No Doubt’s last CD, Tragic Kingdom, sold, oh, about 15 million copies. And as Gwen sits there looking like a thrift-shop princess in a big, corduroy overcoat that’s almost the same color as her slightly faded pink-and-platinum ponytail, she tells us that, although she always wanted to be in a band, she hardly expected to be in one this huge. “I never had any goals that big!” she says. “I just wanted to be able to move out of my parents’ house.”

Mission accomplished. Gwen and the guys have certainly come a long way from their Orange County, CA, home, where a teenage Gwen spent a lot of time on the fringes trying to figure herself out. “I didn’t have a lot of friends in high school; it was mainly just me and my best girlfriend,” she admits. “I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life.” When she wasn’t doing laps for the swim team or struggling through maths class, Gwen was at home, making her own clothes and developing an over-the-top fashion style that her teenage fans, “Gwennabes,” later adopted. “When I hit puberty, I decided I didn’t want to look like anyone else in school,” she explains.

Even though Gwen was happy to be doing her own thing, it was her big brother, Eric, who helped her find her calling. “He was the cool older brother. He was really artistic, and I just lived through him,” she recalls. When he bought home a record by British ska band Madness, Gwen was hooked. “After I discovered music, I basically hung out with the rockabilly, ska and punk people,” she says. “We thought we were pretty cool, especially compared with the cheerleaders and jocks.” When Eric joined a band called No Doubt in 1987, Gwen tagged along to rehearsal and eventually found herself taking center stage as the lead singer. Even though Eric later left the band, Gwen and the guys – Tom, Adrian and Tony – have been a solid chart-topping unit for years now. “We’ve all become really good friends. We’d spend time together even if we didn’t work together,” says Gwen.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always been smooth sailing with the boys. Bassist Tony Kanal broke up with Gwen after they’d been together for seven years, which has fueled some songs penned by Gwen in the past. “In high school, I was so in love with Tony,” she gushes. “I used to drive across town to his school just to look at him. What an idiot! I was so weird!” But, she quickly points out, “I wasn’t a high-maintenance girlfriend. I was just intense and in love and I didn’t have any outside passions. I’ve since learned that you can’t find your happiness through someone else.” She’s also quick to add that the single “Ex-Girlfriend” is not about Tony – nor is it about her current boyfriend, Gavin Rossdale.

Gwen and Bush heartthrob Gavin have been going strong for more than four years now. Considering the spotlight they live under, they’ve kept their relationship pretty low profile. “It’s hard to be in a band and have a relationship,” she says. “I’m going to be so busy for the next few months that I’ll hardly get to see him.”

One thing that hasn’t been low profile, though, is Gwen status as a strong role model for girls and a trend-setting fashion icon. “It’s so funny that my clothes and my look have become a part of how people see the band. My clothes in the ‘Just a Girl’ video were what I wore to college that week, and I did my hair like that every day,” Gwen laughs. In fact she even admits, “A lot of my clothes are just what I wear to hide things I don’t like about my body. I wake up and think, Okay, what’s gonna make my butt look smaller today? I have the same issues as any girl.”

What about the metal mouth she sported at the VH1 Fashion Awards? “I’ve always wanted straight teeth and I finally had the money to do it,” she says. And the pink hair? “I did that when I was feeling frustrated while we were recording the album. I think I make big changes in my appearance when I’m depressed or going through something emotional.”

It’s that “I’m just like any other girl” attitude that makes Gwen seem so genuine. “Everything I do is just a personal choice,” she says. “I’ve learned that the more you are yourself and the more unique you are – to the extent that no one else is anything like you – the more powerful you are.” Spoken like the real-girl goddess we’ve always known her to be.