Platinum pop star Gwen Stefani talks about her hit addiction, yodeling fantasies, and how she kicked her Madonna habit. Now she prepares to conquer the world, with baby in tow. By Joseph Hooper.

You know the story: Blonde Italian-American pop diva, music video eminence, and all-round material girl marries a Brit artiste and moves to England. The relationship hits some bumps along the way, but a baby boy ensues and celebrity life keeps rolling. “It is weird that we have all these similarities,” Gwen Stefani allows as she nestles on a couch in one of the many rooms her entourage has taken in London’s Landmark hotel in mid-November. With a voice that hovers somewhere between sultry and Kewpie doll, the singer has a knack for sounding about seven years old: “Madonna’s had us over to dinner and stuff, and she’s always been very nice to me.”

Undeniably, there is a scale to Madge’s assault on the Old Country, everything from the horsey rural estate to the creeping mid-Atlantic accent. Stefani, by contrast, will lose her flat, half-swallowed Californian vowels when hell freezes over, and anyway, she hasn’t even truly relocated to England; she and Brit rocker husband Gavin Rossdale have for the past 10 years split their time between the house in London’s tony Primrose Hill (neighbors on either side are Jude Law and his ex, Sadie Frost) and a manse in LA. But if Madonna does it bigger, it is no longer heresy to suggest that musically, Stefani does it every bit as well. After 17 years of fronting the redoubtable rock/ska/reggae band No Doubt (she should make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the strength of one immortal break-up tune alone, “Don’t Speak”), Stefani took the solo plunge. Her 2004 giddy confession of dance tunes Love. Angel. Music. Baby went triple platinum. (“I remember telling Madonna I was going to do an ’80s dance record,” Stefani says, “and she rolled her eyes, because I think when you’ve lived through it like she did, she’s like ‘Whatever.’ But a lot of my influences came from her early work, like directly, like a Xerox.”) That album spawned one monster single, “Hollaback Girl,” a saucy cheerleader chant that taught teenage girls how to spell the word bananas and simultaneously established Stefani’s urban street cred as a white suburban rapper comfortable with the “S” word and with pop-hop notables the Neptunes’ marital beats.

“Gwen was always dope,” says Pharrell Williams, producer and one half of the Neptunes. “If there was an ill black record out there, she knew what is was.”

Linda Perry, the songwriter-producer who made Pink into Pink, says she barged her way onto the Stefani solo team by physically accosting the singer at the Grammy awards in 2004. “I was pokin’ her on the head,” Perry says, “and I was like, ‘Dude, you gotta give me a call for the new record.’ ”

Just last week, Stefani put the finishing touches on her new solo album, The Sweet Escape, which, if industry buzz and early radio play can be trusted, is poised to make a major impact. Less self-consciously retro than it’s prodecessor, The Sweet Escape employs the same working method as L.A.M.B; Lock Gwen up in the studio with a blurry succession of dream-team producers all vying for that one megahit (can you spell bananas?), tape everything, toss it up in the air, and see what sticks. A likely recipe for disaster (which No Doubt purists, partial to human beings playing actual drums and bass, may well judge), but it works, mostly due to Stefani’s feckless, reckless impulse to try anything that pops into her head. Nothing is more out there than the album’s first single and video, “Wind It Up” — typically sinister Neptunes beats and Stefani, backed by a symphony orchestra, singing fragments lifted from The Sound of Music’s “The Lonely Goatherd.” (Yes, that’s right: “High on the hill was the lonely goatherd/ Lay, odl ay odl ay hee hoo.”)

“Some people are freaked out by that yodel,” Stefani confides. “Either people get it or they don’t. But I’ve always had the fantasy of putting The Sound of Music to a beat. I used to quote all the songs like a geek!” (Pharrell, a famous musical minimalist, was less than convinced, but he tells me later, “I just rolled with her. I wanted her to be happy.”) Stefani’s term of art for a tune like “Wind It Up” is a “mash-up,” but, if you wanted to go all High Culture on Gwen, Dada would do as well. Marcel Duchamp has nothing on Stefani, whose brain is as adhesive as flypaper, a trap for pop-culture fragments that almost randomly catch and reassemble.

In her own mind, Gwen Stefani is the Cinderella of pop music. At any moment, it seems, the Landmark could turn into a pumpkin. “The hotel maid walked by today,” she says, “and she’s really pretty and she probably comes from Poland. And here I am about to spend a lot of money on room service and I was thinking, I could have been a maid.” Actually, Stefani grew up solidly middle-class in Anaheim, the second of four kids in a tight-knit family headed by folk-music-loving parents (dad Dennis was a Yamaha marketing executive; Patti was an accountant before becoming a full time mom.) Teenage Gwen was mad for clothes and jumped-up Jamaican-rooted ska music, then enjoying one of it’s periodic rivals. In 1987, her older brother, Eric, formed No Doubt and persuaded his bopping little sister to sing in the band and that, aside from a little college on the fly, would be her life; near-constant touring and a steady romance with the band’s bassist, Tony Kanal. The Cinderella theme kicked in big time with No Doubt’s hit third album, 1995’s Tragic Kingdom (Anaheim being home to Disney’s Magic Kingdom, after all), which transformed the Southern California party band into a pop/rock juggernaut. By then, Tony and Gwen had broken up (providing the raw material for “Don’t Speak) and Eric had decamped to become and animator with The Simpsons. But the band chugged on through 2001’s Rock Steady, by which all four No Doubt members were desperate for a break. (Kanal has since emerged as one of Stefani’s trusted solo collaborators.) As as to whether the success of solo Gwen means the end of No Doubt, Stefani says she hopes not: “I’m looking forward to going back to my little musical family and trying to write a song,” she says. But for the tween girls who are the core of her solo fan base, No Doubt, much beloved by young men, would fall squarely into the “No Clue” department.

With hubby Rossdale in LA recording with Pharrell, Stefani has turned over the London Primrose Hill house to her parents, visiting from Anaheim and eager, like the rest of the inner circle, to get some quality time with their six-month old grandson, Kingston. (“He’s pretty rad,” Kingston’s mom says.) For nine days, Stefani has moved in the Landmark with a small army of publicists and managers, transforming one of the city’s swankiest hotels into a field headquarters for the campaign of a global publicity push behind The Sweet Escape.

“I’m so exhausted,” Stefani announces as she walks into her personal assistant’s hotel room. But just because Cinderella is in a mood doesn’t mean she’s a diva. (“The ghastly thing about her is that she is a really decent human being,” says her pal Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson.) Fame and talent aside, Stefani is the mall girl next door, one who’s very in touch with her emotions. When she’s up, she’s up, when she’s down, she cries easily, and she’s particularly sensitive in matters of personal appearance. Trailed from city to city by a retinue of hair and skin and clothes handlers who have become her intimate friends. (“They are as obsessive as I am and complete mad hatters,” Stefani says), she is still the last word on her high-glam platinum persona that evolved over a decade and a half’s worth of music videos. Today, and all-day photo shoot for another project has let her down. “I started with my hard look – my bangs – but the lighting was like Kmart – ‘Attention shoppers!’- so I had to revise.”

Post-photo-shoot debacle, Stefani has changed into a soothingly rich green tracksuit with the logo of her clothing line, L.A.M.B, running down one side in fancy gold script letters, (She has also launched a teen-friendly line, Harajuku Lovers, her homage to the style-conscious Tokyo girls who hang out in the Harajuku shopping district.) “People always say the same things,” she tells me. “That I’m smaller than they expected and that I look better in real like. Which is kind of a back-handed compliment.”

True enough. The early No Doubt Gwen, the adorable ska kid with a little baby fat, has been updated into a striking 37-year-old woman with angular features and a trim, honed physique. And then there’s the hair, which serves as a kind of Stefani mood ring, never more dramatically than in 2000 when she broke up with Rossdale (temporarily) and opted for the startling pink do that graced the cover of No Doubt’s Return of Saturn. She’s since gone back to Jean Harlow platinum, and over-the-top shade that can be seen to good effect in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, Stefani’s chance to play her Hollywood avatar for about three minutes of screen time, hanging off the arm of Leo DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes, (The movie experiences seems to have slacked her once-ardent film ambitions, but she says, “If Martin Scorsese called me again…”)

Hair color notwithstanding, the past four years have been anything but a cakewalk. After her 2002 marriage to her English rocker, she learned that Rossdale had fathered an illegitimate child, now a teenager, Stefani’s lyrics tend to read like blog entries from her own tumultuous Planet Relationship, so fans interpreted “Danger Zone,” off her first album, as a stinging retort: “Are your secrets where you’ve left them?/ Cause now your ghosts are mine as well.” (In this instance, the fans were wrong; the song was written before the revelation, but Stefani would be shocked by it’s prophetic resonance.)

As for the new album’s gorgeously bleak ballad “Early Winter” (“I can’t fix what you broke”), it turns out Tim Rice-Oxley from the band Keane wrote most of the lyrics and, by all accounts, Stefani and Rossdale are in a positive phase of the moon, thank you very much.) “But [that song] felt weird,” she says. “It felt like I could have lived it and I have lived it. I mean, of course me and Gavin have problems, sometimes. Everyone does. We’ve been together for over 10 years. This is, like, the real deal.” (For more on loving your man in spite of it all, consult “The Real Thing” off L.A.M.B)

In any event, she adds, it’s not like she’s going into the studio these days expressly for emotional catharsis. “I’ll never be as pure as I was when I wrote Tragic Kingdom,” she says. “Once you’ve had a hit, there’s no going back, because it’s so addictive. It’s a drug. I felt I was going back and getting more Pharrell, ‘Hollaback Girl Number 2.’” She giggles. “As you would! It’s not like being ambitious is a bad thing. And I wanted [this album] to be now, to be modern. I want it to be in the clubs. No Doubt was never in the clubs. I want to go out and hear that song pumping in the car next to me. I want bass! I want bump!”

Room service knocks and our tea arrives. “This is perfection,” Stefani says. She may be getting the hang of the England thing after all.

The next day I follow Stefani to the KISS radio station to watch her make nice over the English airwaves. It’s an entourage production, but in addition to the usual handlers we get an appearance by the beguiling Kingston Rossdale, who holds court in the waiting lounge under the watchful eyes of his grandparents. “Kingston is so chill,” Stefani says. “He goes with me everywhere, ’cause I’m still nursing. He’s been to every studio in LA, New York, London. He lives up to his name – total Rasta boy. He gives me real balance. You can go 100 miles an hour, but you still have to stop to hang out with him.” According to Manson, Stefani functions bafflingly well at top speed. “Sometimes you hang out with her and she says ‘Oh God, I had two hours of sleep last night. I was in the studio until 4 A.M. and then up with the baby at 6. Then she throws a big party at night.”

If motherhood is sweet, the pregnancy proved to be an unexpected bitch. “I thought I was going to be one of those Mother Nature girls. I figured, I’ll just squeeze it out,” she says, ” ’cause I’m really strong and I work out and stuff.” Instead, shortness of breath and a host of other physical ills made the latter part of her L.A.M.B tour a nightmare. “I would be seriously crying before I went on stage. I didn’t know how I was going to get through the tour, putting on nice costume changes on a stage in front of 12,000 people every night. And I didn’t want people to know [I was pregnant]. I didn’t want it to become the Gwen Freak Circus Show – ‘Watch it grow on stage.’ ”

Tonight, gearing up for her Sweet Escape tour, Stefani is looking the furthest thing from maternal, in a skintight sweater and clunky neck chain that I assume is a garden-variety hip-hop bling until she sets me straight. It’s a key, she says, formed by two back-to-back G’s, her “Wind It Up” key that’s featured prominently in the video with yodeling and the lonely goatherd and an allusively related Houdini subplot with a struggling Stefani shackled to a chain fence as if underwater. “In the video,” she says, “you can see the key coming out of my mouth. When Houdini used to do his tricks, his wife used to pass the key from her mouth to his mouth. It’s the sweet escape. And I was thinking, The key is the music. It all kind of ties up together.”

Whatever (as Stefani would say), it makes for a cool video. Her new fans are happy to follow her into the woolliest recesses of her imagination, entranced by the fabulous artifice, by the playful tug-of-war between her Jean Harlow and abs-of-steal personas, and by the evident fact that you can be a mega-pop star without the standard issue T & A pander (especially about a zillion preteen girls who take their uncomplaining dads to her concerts.) Something about Gwen Stefani seems to reconcile opposites – humble celebrity, femme jock, surrealist material girl – and has ever since the early No Doubt days when she was the girl in the guys’ band touring the rock dives of America in a van. “I would ‘go off’ in the mosh pit,” she says, “but I was always very glamorous before I dove in.”

Gwen Stefani’s new single, “Wind It Up,” celebrates her lifelong obsession with Maria from ‘The Sound of Music.’ Yet the singer says her latest stylistic muse is Michelle Pfeiffer’s drug-addled bombshell from ‘Scarface.’ As she prepares to release her second solo CD, the new mom talks about the unlikely people, places, and events that have shaped her career, her wardrobe – and her yodeling. By Clark Collis. Photographs by James Dimmock.

These are a few of Gwen Stefani’s favorite things: ‘The Sound of Music,’ ‘The Sound of Music,’ and, oh yes, ‘The Sound of Music.’ “I’m like a Trekkie, but for ‘The Sound of Music,’ ” says the No Doubt frontwoman and solo superstar. “The first time I ever went on stage, at a high school talent show, the dress that I wore was the dress that Maria wears when she sings ‘I Have Confidence.’ The drop-waist tweed dress. I had that dress. I made it.”

More than two decades on, the 37-year-old’s enthusiasm for the classic Julie Andrews musical remains undimmed. This morning, perched on a bench in the basement of the Cuckoo nightclub in London, where her ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY cover shoot is to take place, Stefani is thrilled to sing a few lines from “I Have Confidence” should anyone request it (or even if they don’t). Further proof of her fanaticism: Stefani’s new single, “Wind It Up,” finds the singer mimicking Andrew’s yodel from the film’s “The Lonely Goatherd” – albeit over a rhythm track provided by Pharrell Williams’ production team, the Neptunes.

“I was threatening for a while to put The Sound of Music to a beat,” Stefani says. “When I heard ["Wind It Up"] for the first time, I was in tears. I was, like, That is the craziest s— I’ve ever heard! It’s bizarre how the movie has followed my life.” Indeed, the plots are similar: Naive and chatty but well-meaning young Catholic girl – who makes her own clothes! – goes out into the big wide world, where she survives assorted adventures and meets the man of her dreams. Of course, in Stefani’s case, the “assorted adventures” didn’t involve escaping from the Nazis but selling 26 million albums worldwide with a globe-trotting ska-pop band, then 7 million more with her 2004 solo debut, Love.Angel.Music.Baby. And the “man of her dreams” is a British rocker (Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, 39, whom Stefani married in September 2002), not an Austrian naval captain. But both stories do have a happy ending, as is eveidenced in Stefani’s case by the 6-month-old bundle of joy named Kingston James McGregor Rossdale, right now nestled in a Bugaboo across the room from his mommy.

All of which raises the question: Why does the cover of her new CD, The Sweet Escape, find her dressed not as the heroine von Trapp, but in the style of Michelle Pfeiffer’s drugged-out gangster’s moll, Elvira, from Brian De Palma’s blood-drenched 1983 classic, Scarface?

The answer to this conundrum is connected to the clean-living, gym-frequenting, new-mommying Stefani’s obvious delight in being ever-so-slightly naughty. (She repeatedly uses the phrase “coke whore” to describe her newfound fashion muse – and does so with a mischievous smirk.) But, more specifically, the idea came to the singer early last year while shooting the video for her single “Cool” in Lake Como, Italy. Also on hand: Tony Kanal, 36 – No Doubt’s bassist and, many moons previously, a teenage Gwen Renee Stefani’s first boyfriend – and Kanal’s current steady, Erin Lokitch. “She had on this long, peach, polyester dress,” Stefani recalls. “I was looking at her silhouette going, ‘You look so hot.’ It was probably a late-’70s dress, and I started thinking about Michelle Pfeiffer and how amazingly styled she was [in Scarface].”

Needless to say, it is something of a leap from the hills being alive with the sound of music to the restroom stalls being filled with the sound of people hoovering up Bolivian marching powder. “Yeah, I know!” Stefani says, laughing. “I’ve never even done coke, so it’s hilarious. Do you know how many times I’ve said ‘Let’s look like a coke whore’ in the last two months?”

We’re guessing it’s a lot. With The Sweet Escape due for release on Dec. 5, Stefani – who, with Rossdale, has two houses in London and Los Angeles – is in the midst of a feverish, Atlantic-crisscrossing publicity tour. But album promotion is hardly the only thing that has been occupying chunks of Stefani’s diary. She oversees two fashion lines, L.A.M.B, and Harajuku Lovers (which a L.A.M.B source says are on track this year to post a combined $90 million in retail sales), and is preparing for an upcoming world tour, set to start this April. In addition, there’s the much-wanted Kingston to coo over and the much-unwanted 40-odd pounds of baby weight to remove from Stefani’s frame. Judging by her appearance today, the latter mission seems to have been accomplished already.

Or not. “I still have a little bit of, you know, skin or whatever,” says Stefani, lifting up her L.A.M.B sweatsuit top to reveal a stomach that would be regarded, as close-to-flat in any but these most size-0-obsessed times. “If I wasn’t having the record come out there’s no way I would have lost the weight. A year would have gone by [before] I’d be, like, ‘Well, s—, maybe I should start trying to get the weight off now!’ ”

Stefani has come a long way from her baby-fat days as a self-described “lazy” teen in Anaheim, Calif., who was fanatical about Sting and Madness singer Suggs. “At high school I would think, All I want to do is eat and sleep. It wasn’t until I discovered that I could write songs… Because when, I discover things that I’m good at, then I get really passionate and fiery and you can’t slow me down.”

Early last fall, Stefani learned that she was finally going to have her first child – and not even that could get her to ease up. The pregnancy was good news for someone, who like a true Sound of Music fan, has frequently expressed her desire for children. The bad news was that she was about to start her first solo American tour.

“I’d be crying before I was going on,” she recalls. “I couldn’t breathe, because when you’re pregnanct, you get short of breath. So I’m trying to breathe with a corset and high hells and the nine costume changes. I was in pain. I won’t go into detail, but I had really bad stomachaches. What saved me was God put these young girls in the front row; you could tell it was their first concert and that they were looking at me as if I was Cinderella. They just though I was great.”

To hear Stefani tell it, she hadn’t planned on releasing an official solo album – never mind spending the first half of her pregnancy traveling around the country on a tour that, as far as she was concerned, couldn’t end soon enough. Following the last No Doubt tour in 2004, she thought about making a low-key dance album, possibly to be released under the name “GS.” Her boss, chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M Records Jimmy Iovine, talked her out of it.

“I saw the potential for what she could accomplish,” Iovine says. “You have to remember, she’s one of the last rock stars. This isn’t a girl that was put together in a dance studio. She’s toured clubs for 10 years, no different from the Clash. I thought she could make a mark on the culture.”

The mark was the Alpine-mountain-size smash “Hollback Girl.” A late addition to Love.Angel.Music.Baby, it was recorded after Stefani decided the CD lacked a “Don’t f— with me” song. The result was a perfect, pounding meld of the Neptunes’ production wizardry and her feisty ska-rock chick persona, the first single to sell one million difital downloads in the U.S. and the inspiration for a number of, let’s say, “homages” by other artists (think Fergie’s “London Bridge”). In addition to making marching bands hipm Stefani’s song “connected with the clubs and the urban centers,” Iovine says. “It was not unlike Debbie Harry with ‘Rapture.’ With Gwen, the whole fashion thing comes through, so you actually move that cultural needle of how young kids react, feel, dance.”

But not everyone warmed to Stefani’s “whole fashion thing” – in particular, the showcasing of her admiration for Tokyo trendsetters via an entourage of four Japanese women that she called the Harajuku Girls. The Girls silently accompanied her on photo shoots and to public appearances, and subsequently appeared on her tour. Stefani regarded the Girls, all of whom looked as if they had come straight off the streets of the capital city’s hip Harajuku district, as a figment of her imagination brought to life in a culturally positive manner. But last year, Korean-American comedian Margaret Cho publicly decried them as “a minstrel show”.

“She didn’t so her research!” spits Stefani, who says she’s been a fan of Japan and its mix-and-match fashion sense since first visiting the country with No Doubt in the mid-’90s. “The truth is that I basically was saying how great that culture is. It pisses me off that [Cho] would not do the research and then talk out like that. It’s just so embaressing for her. The Harajuku Girls is an art project. It’s fun!” (Cho told EW via e-mail, “I absolutely agree! I didn’t do any research! I realize the Harajuku Girls rule!!! How embaressing for me!!! I was just jealous that I didn’t get to be one… I dance really good!!!”)

Stefani continues: “I was surprised how racist everybody was about them. Especially when I came over here and they’d make all these jokes, like Jonathon Ross.” Ross, a British TV host, asked Stefani whether an “Imaginary hand job” from one of her “imaginary” dancers would count as cheating on his wife. Stefani responds, “Everybody’s making jokes about Japanese girls and the stereotypes. I had no idea [I'd be] walking into that.”

The Harajuku Girls make an encore appearance in the “Wind It Up” video (as von Trapp children of course). Also returning to Stefani’s side for the Sweet Escape project are the Neptunes and Kanal, who helped Stefani pen her favourite song on the record, “Four in the Morning.”

After Kingston’s May 26 birth, Stefani sought out new collaborators, including rapper Akon, producer Sean Garrett (Beyoncé’s B’Day), and Tim Oxley-Smith of the British band Keane. The latter co-wrote a tortured and not un-Keane-like lament called “Early Winter.” “She likes to write from the heart,” Oxley-Smith says. “She’s obviously quite an emotional person. Within 10 minutes of us sitting down, she was crying. I played her a little bit of a thing that I’d been working on just before she came in and she welled up about it.”

Though Stefani made her solo-career mark with the upbeat “Hollback Girl,” it was the melancholic 1996 ballad “Don’t Speak” that took No Doubt from a little ska band to serious platinum recording act and made Stefani a celebrity. Their first No.1 single, “Don’t Speak,” dealt directly with Stefani’s tortured, drawn-out breakup with Kanal. Stefani also got personal on the 2000 No Doubt single “Ex-Girlfriend,” in which she references a brief separation from Rossdale: “I kinda always knew I’d end up your ex-girlfriend.” Given all that, it seems reasonable to ask how much fans should read into the heart-wrenching lyrics to “Early Winter,” the chorus of which finds Stefani singing, “And I always was, always was, one for crying/ Always was one for tears/ No, I never was, never was one for lying/ You lied to me all these years.”

“The lyrics on this album are probably more autobiographical than the last,” she concedes. “A song like ‘Wind It Up’ isn’t about anything. But there are definitely a few relationship songs on there.”

But does Rossdale ever say, Look, if you put this on the album people are going to be thinking, What’s going on here?

“No, of course he doesn’t,” she replies before continuing, hesitantly. “I mean… I think it’s like… It’s vague enough that it’s… And… To be honest, everyone has the same problems. We all have the same problems. And there’s nothing to hide about that. I could have a problem with Gavin at some point in our marriage. I’ve been with him for over 10 years. I’m not ashamed of it. It’s just, like, working through it. And good songs are so good at helping you get through things. I think it’s a really good way to put things behind you and document it and move forward. I’m not ever scared to share my situations with people.”

Back at the Cuckoo Club in London, around 20 people have arrived to help with, or observe, the photo shoot. The star of the show, however is sound asleep. We refer, of course, not to Gwen Stefani but to baby Kingston, whose beatific, slumbering, Gavin-favoring face is being inspected with utter devotion by Stefani, her UK-visiting parents, and assorted Rossdale in-laws. (Gavin himself is recording in Los Angeles.)

Stefani admits she too could do with a doze, having wrapped The Sweet Escape just a week before. (In fact, following the shoot, she goes straight to bed and gets under the covers with Kingston.) “I was literally doing vocals and mastering and mixing all at one time” in a race to make the release date, she says. She swears that her fellow No Doubt members were happy about her decision to record a second solo CD, despite the fact that the band hasn’t released an album of new material since 2001. At least they were happy when the plan was for her CD to come out in 2005 – and before she decided to embark on a full world tour in 2007.

“I’m sure they were, like, bummed that I was going on tour,” she says. “But everybody’s busy. It’s not like they’re sitting around going, ‘Where’s Gwen?’ They all have their projects. I need to do the tour to complete my life journey of this whole thing. I felt like I got ripped off on the last tour because I was pregnant. Although I can’t believe I’m going to do it, especially with Kingston.”

Speaking of whom, has Stefani thought about the possibility of a little brother or sister for the nipper? After all, as every good Sound of Music fan knows, there were no fewer that seven von Trapp children. “I really want to have more,” she says with a big smile. “One solo record, two solo records. One baby, two babies. I always want more of everything!”

Becoming Gwen Stefani

So what made her the global megastar she is today apart from The Sound of Music? British ska, the land of the rising sun, and Uncle Walt, of course.

Vivienne Westwood
“The only time I ever spend money on clothes is when I f—in’ spend it on Vivienne Westwood. But I get a discount.”

Disneyland
“Totally an influence. My brother was a huge animation fan, so I had a very cartoon-driven upbringing.”

Madness
“I wouldn’t be sitting here without them. My brother started playing this Madness record ‘Our House,’ and it never came off. That got us into ska. And that’s why we started the band.”

Japan
“I first went there with No Doubt. I love the naive recycling of cultures, the way they suck everything in and make it their own.”

Sting
“The guy is so talented and he’s cute! He was probably the first famous person I ever met. He was really rude to me. Years later I told him the story. He was, like, ‘I was such an a–hole.’ “