Whether with No Doubt or solo, pop’s blonde bombshell is hardly “just a girl”

Do you remember what you were doing in 1985?
I remember exactly what I was doing. I was in high school and in love with this guy named Matt. He was on the drum line. I had a bob haircut and wore black-and-white tights and little mod-style outfits, listening to Madness or the Specials. I was hard-core into ska and thrift-store shopping, and making my own shit – trying not to be like everyone else.

How would you like to be remembered?
The Greatest Hits tour we did last year? Every song we played every night was a hit. And until you have a hit, you don’t know what it feels like to play a song like “Just a Girl” or “Don’t Speak” and have a crowd of 14,000 singing it back at you. So I think we’re just proud to have been able to sustain a career and move with the times and still be on the radio. That 15 minutes of fame is real, and so to be able to have anything longer than that is totally a blessing.

Even though your solo record was so successful [Love. Angel. Music. Baby spawned four hit singles, including "Hollaback Girl"], do you still think of things in the context of No Doubt?
Completely. Because Tony [Kanal, No Doubt bassist and Stefani's ex-boyfriend] was such a huge part of that record creatively, even though I only did three songs with him. So I feel like the band hasn’t really gone away. This year went like a flash, and before I know it, I’m going to be sitting with those stinky boys trying to write a record.

Which song are you most proud of?
I wrote “Simple Kind of Life” [on 2000's Return of Saturn] completely on my own, so I was really proud of it. I wrote it on guitar, and that was a big deal for me.

What are your favorite records of the last 20 years?
I don’t have records in order like that. I’m not a collector. My older brother was the guy that would buy every version of a single, so I didn’t need to. We lived in the same house. I was the girl who got bored in the record store. I like hits. I like things that stick in my head. So for me to get into a whole album, that doesn’t happen all the time. There are a few. I listen to Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon [soundtrack] a lot. UB40’s Rat in the Kitchen. The Police.

Any regrets?
I regret not really how to play an instrument. I regret that I have to rely on other people to write songs for me. I can play guitar well enough to write a song, but not enough to be free. I guess it’s not tool late to learn, but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

But your voice is your instrument.
Definitely. If you said to me “Would you rather be able to play piano or write lyrics and melodies?” I’d say I’d rather be able to write lyrics and melodies. I’ve never considered myself a great singer. I think my voice has become so familiar that people have come just to accept it for what it is. To be honest, it’s kind of nasally and piercing, and I have no range.

What’s been your biggest thrill?
Being free – not having a job but still working all the time. That freedom of creativity, and getting paid for it, so you don’t have to worry if you want extra guacamole. You can afford it.

In 1996 Spin ran a story on No Doubt with just a photo of you on the cover [the band tension it caused inspired the video for "Don't Speak"]. Now’s your chance to talk about what you thought of that.
Having four people in a picture is hard to shoot and make look good. It really is. One person with blond hair and lipstick really stands out on the shelf. We all understand it now. But when we got the call, we didn’t think we were going to get the chance again, because we thought we were at number 15 in our 15 minutes. So we were really upset, and it pulled us apart. But we’ve been able to travel the world and take a million pictures together, so it seems kind of funny now. [Laughs] But I still feel bad about it – Marc Spitz

Ska-punk siren Gwen Stefani is about to go stellar with a debut solo album and a plum role in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. But GQ managed to tie her down… By Charlie Porter. Photographs by Marc Hom.

Gwen Stefani is sitting in a Mercedes and she’s fizzing, fast words, few pauses. “The record is ridiculous. It is RI-DI-CU-LOUS.” Ridiculous, in her native Orange County, California speak, appears to be a very good thing. We’re driving away from the photoshoot at an abandoned riverside building in deepest south London, where the basement rooms feel like dungeons and the sparse furniture includes what seems to be a miniature bondage chair, rope knotted tight across its frame. Would she sit on it for GQ? Stefani strides up and straddles it, happy to oblige.

Now on the back seat, the 35-year-old is talking about her solo album, a side-project from her on-sabbatical band No Doubt, as well as her film debut in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. The tape recorder began on the seat between us, but she’s grabbed it and holds it close to her mouth. She’s long and limby, not the Hollywood shorty you’d expect, and she turns truly Amazonian in the space-age heels she wears with the thousand-pound bits of nothing. When we talk, out it pours, salty mouthed stuff in a sweet tone.

We can try and dress it up all we want, but we’ve spent the day in Deptford. The locality is grim, but for a few hours it becomes Gwenworld, a satellite town of LA. Earlier in the week, one of Stefani’s people had told me, her tone call-centre flat, that they were going to “bang this story gangsta” – apparently a good thing. This became a GQ stock phrase, until someone discovered the slang originated from the particularly unsavoury sexual practices of West Coast hoodlums.

During the shoot Stefani bounces around the building: vest and combats when she arrives; miniskirt, bustier, barely anything when she’s been trussed up. She mucks in readily, a trait that seems to be left over from her early no-money, no-fame days in No Doubt. Following their first live performance in 1987 – second on stage on a bill of 14 ska-punk acts – they cut their teeth as a back-of-the-van band. In fact, more than half of their 17-year history has been spent playing to increasingly loyal locals in their hometown of Anaheim, California. Stefani was 26 when the single “Don’t Speak” broke through in 1996 and she suddenly found fame; an instant MTV image with her peroxide cover-girl hair and bright red lips. Even with the massive success of “Don’t Speak”, she had to maintain a get-on-with-it attitude. That song, and the rest of Tragic Kingdom, the album from which it came, was about the break-up of her seven-year relationship with No Doubt band-mate Tony Kanal. Which meant performing songs each night about the man standing on stage right next to her. Not how you’d want your public-eye career to begin.

Now she’s used to living in the celebrity realm, there’s this balance – hard worker and star. The latter sees her living a transatlantic life between her homes in Los Angeles and Primrose Hill in north London, which she shares with her husband of two years Gavin Rossdale, of British band Bush. Being a star also means she can snap; eight hours into the shoot, after she straddles a chicken coup in a thigh-slashed dress and the evening rain starts to fall. She’s polite but firm: that’s it, shutdown, let’s get in the car. And she’s still smiling.

After the drive, and after our drink, Stefani is having late-late dinner with Rossdale, and is ready in a bust-enhancing Vivienne Westwood construction, the tomboy thing of her early-career image now curving out to a more romantic feminity. But don’t think she’s demure – her “dudes” and “woahs” are all said wide-eyed, Golden State-style. Her new album is called Love Angel Music Baby (the initials spell out Lamb, the name of her clothing line) and she says it’s “a silly dance record”, something she’s made while No Doubt relax after the success of last year’s cover version of Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life”, which recently won best pop video and best band video at the MTV Video Music Awards. Yet for the silly record, her co-writers and producers are among the most important musicians in America today: Andre 3000, Pharrell Williams and Dr Dre. The motive: to create a dud-free album, full of what Stefani calls “ABC songs” – easy-to-understand dance hits that are immediate, addictive, crazy. The result is one of the most ultra-hyped and ultra-anticipated.

It’s pure coincidence that The Aviator is released at the same time, ending her years of searching for a suitable film role. Before she was cast in The Aviator, she went through relentless auditioning. “Something I really tried out for was Fight Club “When I got the script I thought, ‘I can’t do that, it’s too nasty.’ But when you meet the director David Fincher, he makes you think it’s the most incredible women’s role ever. And then you’re suddenly like, ‘Ohmygod, I fucking want this part.’”

She didn’t get the part – it went to Helena Bonham Carter. For all subsequent attempts, the script hasn’t been right, she hasn’t been right, or her attention and schedule has been focused on music. But in January 2003 Martin Scorsese spotted a bus stop poster for US magazine Teen Vogue with Stefani on the cover. Balls were set rolling for her to try out for the part of Jean Harlow in The Aviator, Scorsese’s biopic of Howard Hughes. “They sent me the script and I was 15 minutes looking for the part.” She acts out flicking pages backward and forward. “I called and said, ‘I don’t see Jean Harlow in here.’ It was on one page.”

Actually, it was one line. Undeterred, she went to try out for Scorsese, where she was back down the ladder of fame. “It was so humiliating because you get used to being a star, and there are all these other girls at the same hotel. They are trying out for other parts, and they all know who you are. It’s really awkward.” But Stefani persevered and got the role, which involves attending a premiere on the arm of Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. “It was really familiar, because my scene is walking on the red carpet,” she says. There was another reason why the fact-based role wasn’t too tricky to perfect – Stefani’s brief part of the script was taken from real-life film of Harlow. “Let’s face it, dude, I had footage of her actually saying it.”

In the movies, there are hundreds of people who can influence the outcome of the final cut. With the music, Stefani is fully in control, and when we meet she is still pushing herself to the limit. Even though she’s already got more than enough tracks, she’s hot from the plane after a last-minute recording session with Pharrell in New York, where they wrote and recorded three songs from scratch, (“I said, ‘Dude, why the fuck isn’t Pharrell on the record? He’s going to be so bummed when it comes out and he’s not in it’”) and has only just got her head around the Dre track (the revelation came to her on a treadmill). She still sounds battered from going head-to-head with Andre 3000. “It’s so hard to work with another artist that you’re a fan of when you don’t even know them,” she says. You have to walk in cold, and he’s coming up with all this shit, and my ego was all bruised up, rolled up in the corner.” She blows a raspberry to show just how bruised up she was. And just to make it clear, the shit Andre was coming up with was good shit, not bad shit.

American pop in the 21st century is full of guest appearances, so Stefani’s hook-ups are no great surprise. But the calibre and power of her collaborations belie her status – hot as a member of a four-piece band; potentially unbeatable as a solo artist. Some are repeat performances – Pharrell and his Neptunes partner Chad Hugo co-wrote No Doubt’s 2002 single “Hella Good”, while Stefani appeared with Eve on the Dr Dre-produced track “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” in 2001. Meanwhile, some are fresh meetings: the first single from the album, “What You Waiting For”, is a collaboration with Linda Perry, formerly of Nineties band 4 Non Blondes, more recently the woman behind the credible rise of Christina Aguilera and Pink.

According to her definition, it’s not a solo album. “If I was doing a solo record it would a be, this-is-the-real-me, and I’d be on the guitar playing my heart out to everybody.” No disrespect to Stefani, but the fewer this-is-the-real-me records inflicted on the world, the better. So why does she see it as silly? “When we were growing up, Tony and I were into Prince, Club Nouveau, Wendy and Lisa, the Family, the Time, and there was this one song by Debbie Deb called ‘Lookout Weekend’ that was a huge part of my life,” she remembers “So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be good to do a stupid Eighties dance record like that?’ The idea just snowballed.”

I try to make her see the discrepancy – that she calls these records a huge part of her life, then describes the genre as stupid – but the point doesn’t stick. Maybe that is the point – their beauty is in their stupidity. “I’m a singles girl, MTV, I don’t even listen to albums,” she admits. “My husband is the opposite, the guy never listened to the radio in his life. And I’ll be like, ‘Can I please put on Radio 1 for, like, five minutes, and listen to what crap is on there?’” However much pop music is enjoyed and venerated after its release, it is because it is seen as throwaway at its inception that it is without hubris. It’s a continuation of humility that has run through her whole weird career.

The story of No Doubt is a tragi-comedy. “We never made records, because we couldn’t afford to make records,” she says. We’re now sitting in Home House, the London club where she and Rossdale held the UK leg of their wedding ceremony in September 2002. A fortnight later, Stefani wore her Galliano gown again for a reception at the LA home of her record label boss, Jimmy lovine. Now, she’s reminiscing about more spendthrift times. “We couldn’t afford to make a demo. We used to rent the mic at two bucks an hour, then get to Taco Bell afterwards to make some cents. When we got signed to Interscope in 1991, we had to learn how to make records. The first record we made was shit because we didn’t know how. I thought you jumped around like you did on stage.” This first album, No Doubt, provoked little interest when it was released in 1992 – jumping around on stage was still clearly their forte.

Two of the founding members are no longer part of No Doubt. Singer John Spence committed suicide in December 1987, seemingly because of depression, after which the band called it quits, then quickly reformed. Gwen’s brother Eric left in 1994 to become an animator on The Simpsons. Over those years, the four-piece which now makes up No Doubt formed solid bonds as they became a cult in the local community. “Even when I was 17 I would go into Tower Records in Anaheim and people would go, ‘Look who’s over there.’ But it started to get crazy. I’d be going to college, and the day before we’d played there, and they’d banned us because so many people showed up, and we weren’t even on the radio. I remember in class the next day, people going, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ I’d be all, um, ‘I’m trying to learn.’ ”

This knowing amateurism has its benefits. We’re talking about how the skittish, stuttering rhythm of the Andre 3000 track on her album, ‘Bubble Pop Electric”, resembles the goofy ska sound of nascent No Doubt. She thinks it’s true of a track she did with Pharrell – “You started It”. “The chord changes are really weird,” she says. “And with No Doubt we used to always write them like that, not on purpose, jut because we didn’t know what we were doing. Those kind of songs are so powerful because the changes are so weird, but once you get used to them, they’re addictive.”

Indeed, although her band was often on the same bill as punk bands, her home life was more than a bit nerdy. “My parents were strict,” he says. “I’m the girl who when I went to Tony’s prom, I had to be home by midnight. If I was walking to college, they’d drive by and say, ‘You’re not going to school like that.’ ”

Three years before Tragic Kingdom, the first record to get them serious attention, and cushioned by obscurity in the world outside Anaheim, Stefani wrote a raw song about her break-up from Kanal. “Don’t Speak” wasn’t the first single off the album – it was preceded by Just A Girl” – but it was the track that blew the band way beyond their previous level. The aIbum eventually sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, introducing the band to the masses at a painful time for them, but a juicy time for the public. “A lot of things happened to us as friends and as a band, like writing an album about your boyfriend you never thought anyone would hear,” she says. “Suddenly he’s being beat up by everybody, them saying to him, ‘You blew it, dude.’ And in interviews all four of us would sit there, and they’d ask, ‘So tell me, why did you break up with him?’ for freaking years. And me, I was like, ‘Woooh, I can’t believe I got this new life, and all this confidence, and all this change.’”

Does she regret the break-up now? “No, nooooo way.” Her second “no” is very long. “I don’t regret Tony breaking up with me. That was what made me who I am, that gave me the power to have passion and drive.”

The band seem to have survived because of their hard-fought past. Indeed, their history meant that although the subsequent two-and-a-half-year tour was the first time most fans had seen them live, the band were no beginners, adding to the buzz. “We’d been playing nine years, so we were pretty good at it,” she remembers. “We’d go on stage, look at the audience and think, ‘You’re not going to fucking stand there and look at me, and not get off right now.’ So when we went on stage, it was like, ‘Fuck you, you’re going to fucking like this.’ We would kill it every time, and people liked it, because they like to be beat up a little bit.”

Post-Tragic Kingdom and the ensuing years on the road, Stefani went back to California, finally moved out of her parents’ house and bought her own place in LA. There followed another album in 2000, Return Of Saturn, but it was 2oo1’s Rock Steady that consolidated their position worldwide with the hits “Hey Baby” and “Hella Good”. Follow this with last year’s greatest hits album The Singles 1992-2003, with that Talk Talk cover, and you’ve got a pretty satisfying, if loopy, career so far. Which brings us to the solo album. Oh, and to films.

She wants to do more movies, but it’s hard to see how it’ll fit into her work pile-up. Any major album like her solo project needs a year set aside for promotion. Then there’s No Doubt, a band ruled by egalitarian meetings. Soon they will get together again to talk about their next step. Then there’s her marriage: she says she plans to have babies. Then there’s that women’s clothing line, but since this is a men’s magazine, I’ll spare you the details.

“We’re so lucky the way it’s unfolded,” she says. “Although, fuck, I wish I had a couple more years to do things, because it’s starting to get crazy now.” But this seems to be the pattern of her life: no breaks, just keep going. “We’ve been eating our cake for ages,” she says, “going, ‘Fuck, I can’t believe we’re still eating.’”

Love Angel Music Baby is released on 22 November. The Aviator is released on 26 December.

With Madonna lost in Kabbalah-land, Gwen Stefani, who is releasing her dance-pop solo debut, Love Angel Music Baby, looks set to take over as Top Blonde. Here, the No Doubt frontwoman and fashion icon talks marriage, movies, motherhood, and the future of her band.

She used to be just a girl. Now she’s just “Gwen.” Thanks to megahits with Eve and Moby, a hot clothing line (L.A.M.B), a fantasy wedding to longtime boyfriend Gavin Rossdale, and her film debut (as ’30s movie star Jean Harlow, opposite Leo DiCaprio, in Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator), the No Doubt singer has transformed into a one-name pop icon and multimedia brand – the kind you read about in supermarket tabloids, fashion bibles and rock magazines alike. With every door in the music industry open to her as she plotted her solo debut, Love Angel Music Baby, Stefani went shopping for producer (Dr. Dre, Andre 3000, and Linda Perry among them) and emerged with a truly eclectic homage to the ’80s pop disco of her adolescence. With a potential motherhood and a film career ahead, this may be the last time the 35-year-old will be able to stay in the groove for very long, and she’’s determined to dance for inspiration.

How are you Gwen?
I’m fucking great. I’m really, really, really great. I finished my album yesterday. Like, literally finished it. Like, it’s a wrap, you know? It’s so exciting. I feel like I’ve been running this marathon and I’m still breathing really hard, but I know I won.

Why did you decide to release a solo album? No Doubt are as big, if not bigger, than they were in 1996.
People don’t do the same thing their whole life, do they? I mean, I’ve been doing this since I was 17. You get to a certain point in your life when you’re like, “Oh my gosh. I wanna do something else, ’cause I’m gonna die.” Your life starts to go really quick.

Did you always want to make a dance record?
Yeah, I first got the idea while on tour in 2002. I’d heard that old Debbie Deb song [1983's club classic "When I Hear Music"] on the radio: [sings] “When I hear music/ It makes me dance.” And then Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. Those songs were the backdrop of my life. They were what [No Doubt bassist] Tony [Kanal] was super into when we met; he was 16 and I was 17. [Drummer] Adrian [Young] was like, punk-rock bad boy, and [guitarist] Tom [Dumont] was heavy-metal guy, so they didn’t really like that music. But I said to Tony, “I want to do a record like this. A dance record.”

Recently a pattern has emerged of artists making emotional, singer/songwriter statements in their 20s. Then, in their 30s, they’re like, “Let’s Dance!”
Right. For me, this was coming from my heart. I don’t know if people are gonna like my record, but it’s exactly what I wanted to make. It has such a theme to it – a concept that was never really intended, but it just kind of happened.

Can you explain the concept?
I can’t really. But it definitely has more substance to it than I wanted. I wanted it to be like Madonna’s “Into the Groove.” I didn’t think it was gonna be so hard. I thought I’d work with a couple of talented people, and it would be a side project. But it snowballed and took over my life. It was a whole year of hell.

You collaborated with loads of people on the album. Was it hard not to have your bandmates around to weigh in on what worked and what didn’t?
Yeah. It was a really big deal for No Doubt. It was always, “We write the songs. That’s the point of the band.” But after all those years, it’s fun to go in with super-talented people and do something fresh. All you have to lose is time, and if you write a shitty song, who cares? Going into this record, I had a very specific sound I wanted to make, so I made a wish list of people I thought could get me there.

Anyone you wanted but couldn’t get?
I didn’t get Robert Smith, who said he wanted to, but he was making his own record. Same with Prince, because he was on tour. Missy Elliot and I didn’t hook up either. We did at the very beginning and she was like, “Gwen, you gotta write some songs first and then I’ll know what you wanna do!” I was like, “Okay,” and then it just never happened. [Pause] And one of the people who was not on the list – she’s gonna kill me, but… Linda Perry.

How did you end up with her?
When I got off tour, the record company said, “Linda Perry wants to work with you!” They were all excited. I was sceptical because I didn’t think I was gonna get my dance record out of Linda Perry. [Laughs] But I didn’t want to miss an opportunity, either. So I went to her studio and we wrote this song together the first day. It was a sweet little song that was ni my dance hit. The next day I came back, kind of dreading it, and she had been up all night [finishing the song]. I was like, “You did not just do this!”" It was really inspiring. But by the last day of our session, I was really dried out. I had no ideas, and everytime I’d leave the room, she’d be writing shit and I’d be like “You gotta slow down. You’re writing my record!” I was getting pissed off. She’s writing these lyrics, and that’s when it really crossed the line. It was my insecurities, but I couldn’t take it. I was like, “Call the manager! I need to go home! I need to write on my own.” I told Linda, “It’s nothing against you.” And she was like, “You are fucking crazy.”

Isn’t it a risk working with strong, creative artists like that because they can’t help but influence you? The song you did with Andre 3000, “Bubble Pop Electric,” is unmistakably OutKast-like.
Well, I always felt like if I were a boy, I’d definitely be Andre. He really did bring a lot to the table, and I was trying to keep above water with how talented that guy is. But by the ens, it felt like a collaboration. The good part about working with all these people is that I’m not fully responsible. And I can brag about them and be like, “It’s fucking good. I don’t care if you hate me and think it’s gonna be shit. I will definitely be your guilty pleasure.”

Tony plays on the record, too. How did it feel to work with him on material outside of the band?
It was really cool. After the Linda thing, Tony called me and I was like, “Dude, I suck.” And he was like, “Dude, come over.” So I went to his house and a bunch of our friends were playing these tracks that Tony was doing that were, like, stupid. I was like, “You did not do these.” And he’s like, “Yep, you wanna hear your tracks?” And I was like, “Nuh uh, you did not.” So he pulls out this one and I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s my song.” In the next couple of days, we wrote “Crash.” I basically went from “I hate myself” to “I just wrote a song!” And the songs were exactly what we wanted to do in the first place: Lisa Lisa meets Salt-N-Pepa meets Bell Biv DeVoe!

Will you return to the band if you sell 50 million records?
[Laughs] That would be fantastic, and I hope I do. I think the guys would probably hope I do too. You know, when I called Tony and Adrian and Tom to say I was doing this record, we’d already decided we were gonna take time off. You gotta understand that these are our lives and, like, lives are short. We put everything into each other for years. Now Adrian has a baby and I got married and Tom got engaged. Our priorities have changed. We’ve had our cake for a long time now. We’re fulfilled like we never thought we’d be.

You’ve reached a new level of fame in your own right. You’re not just a girl in the band anymore.
But everything that I’ve done has been a really natural progression. Like high fashion was always something that I’d been passionate about, but was shy to talk about because I thought it was cheesy. The music comes first, but fashion was my guilty pleasure.

You’ve always had a lot of style, but it’s definitely got more elaborate.
That’s ’cause I got richer.

But what about the 16-year-old girl who works at the ice cream parlor who can’t afford to look like you anymore? Do you worry about losing that fan base?
Well no, because I’m not gonna go backward. I wore Doc. Martens for 12 years and my feet were ruined from those shoes! [Laughs] I can wear high heels now. I’m a woman. So, no. I don’t wanna go backward, but I don’t really wanna go forward, either. I mean, I’m really vain and I don’t wanna get old. But at the same time, I don’t want to be that stupid person who tries to hang on. It’s hard. It definitely sucks getting older, but you always feel like the best version of yourself because you’re more experienced and confident. I hope maybe my children will save me from my vanity.

Are you and Gavin planning a family?
We talked about it, and I’ve wanted a baby ever since I was a baby. [Laughs] It’s weird, though. I go in and out of wanting to and then being scared. My life is so spectacular, I don’t want it to change. I don’t want to miss any opportunities. But I think after doing this album, I kind of got it out of my system. So it’s gonna happen when it’s supposed to happen. I mena, my life is nothing like I thought it was gonna be. It’s so much better! Wooo!

And your film career is finally beginning. What was it like to make your first movie with Martin Scorsese?
I only have a couple of lines, but, like, there’s really no small part in a Scorsese movie. To be able to play someone like Jean Harlow is just… come on, dude. I don’t care if I’m walking around looking like her – it’s still a pretty big deal. Scorsese is so warm and welcoming and smart and passionate, and Leo was so helpful. He’s incredible. It was a really good experience. I got my feet wet [in movies] and I want to go swimming. I’d love to do the breaststroke for a while on that one, but I don’t know. It’s also very tedious.

How so?
It’s nothing that’s ever gonna compare to being on stage and playing for 20,000 people. You don’t get that immediate response to a performance. It’s more like, “Okay, now do it again 14 more times.” And it’s very competitive. I’ve tried out for loads of movie that I didn’t get, like Fight Club and Girl, interrupted, but I never thought any of the parts were really my part. You get caught up in it because it’s like a race. And it’s really humiliating because people know who you are. Like, even trying out for the Scorsese movie, I had to go to the Hotel BelAir and there were all these other girls there. It’s a casting call! Which, for me, was weird because I’m like -

An icon.
Yeah! [Laughs] I’m an icon!

Gwen Stefani and No Doubt are back. But maybe not for very long. She talks to Caroline Sullivan

The dressing rooms at Top of the Pops are uniformly tiny cubby holes with barely enough space for a dispirited pile of weathered ham sandwiches, let alone people. Jennifer Lopez supposedly commandeered 15 of these rooms last time she was here. No Doubt have two and, despite being the band’s sole woman, Gwen Stefani has democratically crammed in with bassist Tony Kanal, while guitarist Tom Dumont and drummer Adrian Young are sharing a cupboard down the corridor. There’s not even room for their entourage of two – their manager and her assistant – who find themselves relegated to an anteroom wistfully known as the Star Bar.

On seeing the 10ft x 6ft space where she’ll be spending the next three hours waiting to perform No Doubt’s new single, Hey Baby, Stefani flops into a chair and laconically asks: “Can we turn down the lights?” It’s not a slur on the decor, even if the dressing room has apparently been furnished with cast-offs from a Warsaw office block. She was up late last night, celebrating her first London gig in three years, which went particularly well. The light is dimmed and Stefani cautiously removes her sunglasses. At 32, she still has the peachy skin of a 20-year-old, and her tiredness is hardly visible. “Better,” she says, sliding into a roughly horizontal position.

“As comebacks go, up there with Elvis,” panted last week’s NME, which is over-egging it, but it does convey the unexpected enthusiasm generated by No Doubt’s return. Until recently, they seemed destined for pop-footnotery, remembered only for the leaky 1997 hit Don’t Speak, and the accompanying 12m selling album, Tragic Kingdom. Subsequent singles and an album in 2000, Return of Saturn, underperformed, as the euphemism goes. Few would have bet on their making one of the splashiest returns of recent times, charting at number two with Hey Baby, and unveiling a new album, Rock Steady, to highly favourable reviews.

Much of the new-found interest is down to Stefani herself. Fifteen years after joining the band formed by her brother in Anaheim, California (home of Disneyland, hence the sardonic play on Magic Kingdom), she has suddenly been deemed of-the-moment. Chiming with the current taste for unconventional female stars such as Chloe Sevigny and Sarah Jessica Parker, her camp, goofball blondeness and tremulous vibrato are now hip, causing her to be reassessed by many who had never taken her or the group seriously.

“Any perception of you is weird. You have your own life and reality, and anything people might think of you is their own perception,” she says, uncomfortable with personal celebrity in a way that pop’s other Italian Catholic princess, Madonna, would find inexplicable. She shoves her sunglasses back on. “It’s like when you don’t see someone for a while, and they say, ‘Your hair’s grown’, or, ‘You’re so skinny’, and you don’t realise it about yourself.”

Stefani’s activities are now routinely reported in gossip magazines, which run shots of her undulating through awards ceremonies and restaurants. Her chum Marilyn Manson boasted of deliberately peeing on her toilet seat, presumably a form of Hollywood greeting. She even bagged a front-row seat at Vivienne Westwood’s fashion show, a sure sign of someone who gets her calls returned. Often, she’s pictured with her rock star fiance, Gavin “Big in America” Rossdale, but where photographers once aimed to get the best shot of Rossdale, it’s now Stefani they focus on.

One reason, perhaps, is that she undersells herself. She belittlingly claims to be an “ordinary, suburban” girl from “a goody two-shoes” family who lived at home till she was nearly 30 (not all that unusual in Italian-American households). “I didn’t travel at all till Tragic Kingdom. I’d been to Italy, like, 15 years before. One of the best parts of the band is meeting people.”

One reason she was attracted to Rossdale, she has said, is that he wants a wife and children. She’s protective of her London-born boyfriend, whose derivative grunge band Bush sell by the million in America but are less successful at home. He’s only her second boyfriend, and their five-year relationship has been bumpy. He was often “linked” with women such as Andrea Corr and Natalie Appleton, and he and Stefani broke up several times. During one separation, she wrote a bitter song called Ex-Girlfriend, which brooded: “I always knew I’d end up your ex-girlfriend.”

According to Bush biographer Karen Shook: “I got the impression Gwen does that female thing of thinking that she’s so normal and he’s so deep.” On cue, Stefani muses: “My boyfriend told me to read The Bell Jar, and I got totally into Sylvia Plath’s saga and journals and Ted Hughes. She died across the street from our house in Primrose Hill. The purple house.”

The couple’s paparazzi appeal is obvious. Stefani is the sunshiny yin to his studiedly dark yang. She thinks their relationship was predestined and talks of seeing him on TV before they met and knowing they would be together. “I didn’t have a choice; I met him [while supporting Bush on an American tour] and fell for him. We got engaged on New Year’s Day. We had a night out on London and woke up at three in the afternoon and he asked me. I’m so happy.”

Her only other relationship, with bassist Tony Kanal, ended with his leaving her after seven years, a crushing experience that inspired Don’t Speak. “I’d never envisaged moving on after breaking up with Tony.” She glances at Kanal, next to her, and fondly pats his knee. “I’m grateful to have him as a friend.”

Her new-found coolness could turn out to be fleeting, but there is a sense of having permanently crossed a line. On one side, the zany frontwoman of an achingly naff Los Angeles ska band (ska was mysteriously popular in southern California when No Doubt formed in 1987) – on the other, the confidently stylish leader of a quartet that’s suddenly had its lease on the charts renewed.

Jostled along by Jamaican dancehall rhythms, Hey Baby is good enough to almost erase the drippy memory of Don’t Speak, which was number one for three long weeks in 1997. Its parent album, Rock Steady (the title is another nod to Jamaica, where it was partially recorded, accounting for its joyous pop-reggae slant) is by some way the best of their five LPs, including Tragic Kingdom.

Like most women who front male bands, Stefani innocently professes surprise that she gets the lion’s share of the attention. Echoing Debbie Harry (who wore badges proclaiming “Blondie is a group!”), she refuses to be interviewed alone, and was outraged when American music mag Spin computer-erased the other three from a cover photo.

Kanal, though, is resigned to it. He tells a story about Prince flying the band to Paisley Park to play on one of his songs. When they arrived, it was Stefani alone who was ushered into the studio, while Kanal, Dumont and Young ended up twiddling their thumbs outside. “We expected to work with him, but it didn’t work out that way,” he shrugs. But Prince did make up for it by producing the Rock Steady song Waiting Room.

“But this record is all about having fun!” Stefani quickly interjects, pushing her outsized wool beret off her forehead in a conciliatory gesture. Kanal waves his hand in a what-the-hell way and props his feet on a low table. Born in London of Asian parents who emigrated to California when he was a child (“In LA, people think I’m Mexican, black, Hispanic – never Indian”), he has a phlegmatic British attitude to his place in the No Doubt scheme of things. Just as well – fashion magazines approach Stefani to model, and other musicians seek her out for the tomboyish sass she imparts to a track. She has worked with golden boy Moby as well as Prince, but it was her guest vocal on rapper Eve’s hit Let Me Blow Ya Mind (rarely off the radio last summer) that zapped her to iconic coolness.

I tell her about hearing Alan McGee raving to friends in a restaurant that the song was the best thing he’d heard all year. She leans forward, pleased. “Dr Dre called and I went down and sang. The band were like, ‘Go for it!’” She casts a sidelong glance at Kanal, who grins encouragingly. “It was fascinating to go into Eve’s world, so different from anything I’ve done before. When I left I was like, ‘Whoa, I’ve just worked with Dre!’”

It provided an entree to an audience that had probably never bought a No Doubt album. As Danny Eccleston of Q magazine puts it: “She’s taken on board that bling bling R&B lustre, which gave her a sense of being culturally aware of that world. She looks very modern now. She’s always been colourful, with those cropped tops and crazy shoes, but now R&B is like that, and she fits in.” Her biggest problem these days seems to be accepting that she’s first among equals in No Doubt, but a couple of years ago she was depressed and shellshocked by two years of touring the blockbusting Tragic Kingdom, then facing the poor performance of Return of Saturn.

“I had a very hard time making Return of Saturn. Tragic was all about [Stefani and Kanal's] relationship, and then I went on tour for two years. I felt like I was fine when I got home, but then I went into a depression, which has never happened before. Compared to most people, I wasn’t really depressed, but I was figuring myself out. Saturn was my coming-of-age album.”

She makes light of it now, but in an interview with the journalist Emma Forrest at the time of Saturn’s release, she confessed to feeling “insecure and jealous and paranoid”. Asked about it now, she frowns. “I never said insecure or paranoid. I’m not that way at all. I never said that.” (Forrest maintains: “She definitely said it. I felt great empathy for her. She seemed so sad.”)

Cheerful again, she says something very Stefani: “I’ve blossomed so much with this album, but I remember something I said in Jamaica. I was sitting on a raft and talking about how we’ll make one more album and then I’ll get pregnant.” At this moment, she’s every inch suburban Gwen, even getting misty as she says: “I mean I’m 32 and I think about babies a lot. “

No Doubt’s Drummer dusts off his ska roots, teases the Mohawk, and proceeds to party on with the release of Rock Steady

It’s a Psycho-suburban dream come true: Adrian Young was a striving young drummer living in suburbia, playing golf, drumming at home, and playing in a local band called No Doubt. Fifteen years and seventeen million records later Young is a striving young drummer living in suburbia, drumming at home, playing golf and playing in a famous band called No Doubt.

On the eve of their latest release, Rock Steady, No Doubt was days away from ‘warm-up gigs’ with U2. Drum! magazine caught Young at his very large house on a country club golf course. He graciously offered a tour (because the reporter was staring at the pad). The house was tastefully decorated by Young and his beautiful wife Nina in a dark wood, Southeast Asian opulence. Many of the furnishings were picked out by Young while on tour with No Doubt and shipped home. “We went to Malasia, Thailand, places that were new to us. Those are great. I loved going over there” Young pointed a casual finger into bedroom after bedroom, saying, “We party here a lot and people like to stay over.” The bar is large and well stocked and a grinning Young says. “We’ve had a lot of good parties here!

There’s a game room, complete with arcade video machines. The game room ceiling is papered with album covers, mostly ‘70s acts, some ‘80s: Fleetwood Mac, Steve Miller, Madness, The Police. “A lot of those are my wife’s, but my parents were sort of hippie types, they had a little rock band so I grew up on all that stuff, too. I lived in the Santa Barbara/Pismo Beach area until I was ten. That probably affected me more, musically, than growing up in Orange County did. When we moved I stopped listening to as much ‘70s rock and started listening tening to more new-wave, punk, and ska.”

There’s a room that used to be the office – you can tell by the wall full of gold and platinum records — but it’s being redone as a nursery. “I’m the only married one in the band, and the first with a baby.”

As Young walks around the house, he looks more like an athlete than a musician, If it weren’t for the Mohawk, he could easily pass for a young pro ball player instead of a rock star. “When I was growing up I was all about sports. Basketball in high school, and golf. I didn’t start playing drums until I was 18, a senior. It was sports. Now I’m on a basketball team, and a softball thing. My main thing is golf. I probably spend more time golfing than I do drumming.”

All the members from No Doubt claim roots in neighboring Orange County. Anaheim, in particular, serves as a metaphor for things plastic and “Tragic” in the Orange County “Kingdom.” But now some of them live in L.A., and Young is in a suburb known more for Aviation executives than celebrities. “We’re all from Orange County. I live here because I love [this area]. My parents are still in [a town about ten miles away], I like to be close to them still. LA’s too much. Too much partying, too much everything.”

Young waves off the last couple of rooms, offices, guest bathrooms, blah, blah, blah, he seems uninterested. But he gets a spring in his step when he takes us back downstairs to a room near the bar. He slides a large sofa aside to reveal a trap door. “My drum room is down here,” he says, “Watch your head.” We descend the short steps into a basement that has been padded with acoustic treatments. There’s a kit wedged into the corner, a stereo system, piles of CD’s. In the room directly above us, a tape recorder and some other studio gear is wired to capture evenings of inspiration in the drum room. It’s everything a drummer needs — especially privacy. Last night I was playing in here until about 12:30. It’s great. I don’t have a standard practice routine. During the off time I just keep my chops up, trying to stay fluid. I play to Steely Dan records a lot. I’ve been playing to Jeff Buckley’s stuff. I don’t know the drummer’s name, but he’s good. Some Erika Bahdu for groove. I’ve got a Rush CD down here still [laughs]. Last night I was playing to some 311 stuff.”

Young warns us to mind our head again as we come out of the little studio and go to a front room where we camp with some food and drink and get the low-down on his working life. Through the front window the golf course is busy with players. Behind us is the huge backyard and the stone-rimmed swimming pool.

“On Thursday we’ll start three weeks with U2 as a warm up before the record comes out. So awesome. U2 is totally bitchin’. We’ll do our tour next year. This is the beginning of a long cycle for this record. We’ll do a lot of national and international promo for the record first. Do some live dates. Wherever the record’s doing good next year, wherever we could do good tours, that’s where we’ll go. It all depends on how the record does. For us a lot of things are decided close to the dates. We won’t do the states until next spring or summer. By February we’ll know.”

The promotional tour is comprised of a barrage of radio station visits, press interviews, television appearances, and anything else that might shout from the rooftops, “THE NEW NO DOUBT RECORD, ROCK STEADY, IS IN STORES NOW!”

“It’s not ike a regular tour. We don’t take quite as much stuff. I take my kit, I don’t do rental stuff, It’s a little bit broken down. It’s more of a pain in the ass because you’re doing interviews every day, multiple interviews every day. And different timezones. It’s just work.”

“We didn’t want to wait until next year [to release the CD]. The record company’s behind it, they think it’s going to fly. If we have their confidence then we’re pretty much willing to do anything. Because if the record company’s behind it, your foot’s already in the door for your record to do well, because the dollars are going to be behind it. That’s half the battle.”

With Rock Steady the band has turned into a dance hall groove machine. “During the last tour we put on dance parties after the shows. We were listening to a lot of dance hall music and a lot of ‘80s stuff, too. This is the fastest record we’ve ever done. It usually takes us two to three years to make a record. This one’s a total funk-party record. We weren’t trying to prove anything. Just trying to have fun. There was lots of pressure on us for the last of record. This one we were like, whatever.”

The fact that the airwaves are saturated with beat-box rhythms was likely not far from their minds, either. By the time this interview hits the newsstands, most Americans will have heard “Hey Baby,” No Doubt’s first single from Rock Steady.

“Even though I don’t write any of the songs, I still get to have a pretty free opinion about direction [of the songs]. That’s what’s made it cool over the years. I’ve taken a little more of a back seat on this record, though, as far as involvement goes. The songs, pre-recording, are always a struggle and a challenge, and it’s very rewarding. Any band will tell you that. This time I didn’t have it in me to the fight, you know, and I was more comfortable taking the lesser role. And I’m glad I did. It’s been more fun.”

Young told us about the birthing of the infectious dance-hall groove on “Hey Baby.” “My wife and I have a friend with a Victorian house in San Francisco, a one bedroom place. It came vacant, and he said, ‘Do you want to stay in it for a while?’ This was during some down time for the band and me and Nina wanted to get away, so we got a U-Haul and took one rooms worth of furniture, just grabbed the sofa nearest the door and whatever else we needed and went and lived there. But while we were up there, trying to get away, Tom and Tony came up to work on ideas. Work was following me [laughs]! So we went to this recording studio to work out some ideas.

“Tony had this bass line, this dance hall bass line, and I came up with a beat. There was a million ideas, but this one idea became ‘Hey Baby.’ The drums were just recorded stereo, it wasn’t supposed to be a real recording. We got to Jamaica [later, to record tunes for the record with Sly & Robbie] and tried to re-record it. But we couldn’t get it happening. So we just flew [the stereo drum track] into Pro Tools, and it became the first single.”

We asked if the band jammed on it a lot, or did a lot of takes. “Not really. Pro Tools does that. You can stop stuff or cut it up. Versus the last record, when I was hardheaded about the whole thing. My approach then was, ‘I don’t want to cut anything, I don’t want to do any of that crap.’ Sort of an unnecessary, macho way looking at it. But, I feared that if I started doing that, then people would say, ‘That guy’s not really doing that; he’s getting all cut up on tape or Pro Tools. I didn’t want to become one of those guys. But after using Pro Tools] on two records I realized it’s a creative tool. It’s not a way for lousy players to sound good … well, maybe it is, but I don’t think that applies to me.

“The whole thing was done on Pro Tools. So was the last one, actually. A lot of the songs were done at Tom’s condo. He’s got a Pro Tools setup there. So, a lot of the parts recorded in the demoing sessions in his apartment were kept. That environment creates more of a drum machine, drum loop thing, versus four fight people just getting together and jamming. At least for the starting ideas, before I get to play on it. I did all my parts after the fact. It was different, kind of going backwards, drumwise.”

Was that better? “It’s not really better for me, it’s just different.” Did it increase the fun factor for the band? “I think so, yeah. There’s only like two rock tracks on this CD. Those are the two Ric Ocasek did. It’s a pretty eclectic record, which I guess all of our records are. It’s one of our happiest records. We’ve always had that ‘80s thing going on, there’s no shortage of that on this record.

“There were various individuals we wanted to work with, and this was a good way to hit a lot of ‘em. The record was co-produced by the band plus the producers: Nellee Hooper, Ric Ocasek, Sly & Robbie, Steely & Cleavie, William Orbit, and Prince.”

Once the record is out and the promotional tour is done, it’ll be time to pack up the OCDP kit and hit the road. Young, for the most part, looks forward to it. “Touring was one of the best things for me. We toured Tragic Kingdom for two-and-a-half years. After that I felt really, really strong. Definitely helps, getting out on that road and working on your thing. That repetition is a good thing. I love playing live.” And sometimes friends need a favor and Young is happy to oblige. “Sitting in with other bands is a bigger thrill than playing our own show sometimes. I was in Vegas — my wife was working for Stone Temple Pilots at the time — and Eric [Kretz] asked me to play on ‘Plush.’ That was cool. But I don’t know if I can keep touring as much, now that I have a family on the way.” The enthusiasm in his manner as he talks about playing live seems a bit stronger than his cautious words about fatherhood. And he’s enthusiastic about his new drum set, too.

For this tour Young will be pounding on a brand-new kit from Orange County Drum and Percussion, made from a jellybean jar selection of acrylic shells. Young was excited to get to New York for the U2 shows, because, “I haven’t played this kit yet. This will be the first time I use it.

“There’s a lot more sampling and sequencing on this record, too. So, live, I have a lot more samples to play. Some of the tracks I’ll be playing to clicks. We’re using Tascam 2424 Recording machines, and the tech will be running that. I’m going to give him the look— ‘push the button.’ I’m wearing headphones, and I tried to get the biggest, most obnoxious ones I could find. I’m going to make them even bigger, put stuff on ‘em.”

Some drummers, in the off-season between tours and records, like to hook up some outside gigs, some sessions, some clinics. Was sitting in with Stone Temple Pilots an omen of things to come? “I don’t really have time to play with other bands. No Doubt is full-time. I’ll do little things when I’m out, sitting in with other bands, I love doing that stuff. I’d love to play on other people’s records in the future. I could never picture myself doing clinics. I can’t really solo, and my reading is not very proficient. I’ve taken some basic reading classes, but I haven’t really utilized it much.”

We give a hearty “yeah, but.” Enough of the modesty. How does it feel to sell seventeen million records and tour the world? “It’s pretty awesome. Definitely one of the best things about this is the drum recognition from young people. And from people that are older, too, actually. I’ve even heard people cop licks [from No Doubt recordings]. I’m not going to name bands, but I’m flattered by it, I love it. I do it, too. I still do it; I hear my peers, I can’t help it. My friend Josh Freese lives around the corner. I subbed for him a couple times in the Vandals a while back. I copped some of his stuff on this record.”

We asked Young what he would recommend to young drummers shedding for their future. “I would suggest playing to a lot of different CDs. Mixing it up. Keep those horizons expanded. As teenagers musical tastes are usually skewed into tunnel vision. So, expand. Work on groove stuff. If a kid wants to go to school and be taught properly, that’s great, that can only be a good thing. But some kids that come up learning only like that play so stiff it’s amazing. I’ve seen players with lots of drum corps chops but — so stiff. It’s too one-sided, I think.”

Young cast a glance across the way to the fairway. Would he golf today? “I don’t play rounds every day, but as far as playing or practicing goes I probably get in five days a week.” And would he ever consider switching from drums to golf? “Go pro? No. Too hard. I’m not good enough. Right now I’m a 5.3 handicap. That would be rad, though. I work on my game enough.”

Is there a similarity between golfing and drumming? “Oh, yeah. You’ve got to stay relaxed. [laughs] Stay relaxed or everything goes to hell.”

With thanks to Mike McKeaney of ND Universe

By Mar Yvette

It’s not often that a band can withstand its founding member departing, increasing creative uncertainty, weak record sales, mounting industry pressure and loads of internal (and extremely personal) tension. But that’s exactly what O.C. darlings-turned-world-famous wünderkinds No Doubt have done – and they’ve got their very own episode of VH1’s Behind The Music to prove it. Together now for almost 15 years, chances are many of you Mean Street readers got to experience the group’s kinetic live shows back in the day when Anaheim was known simply as Disneyland’s epicenter and Gwen wasn’t touted as a diva in fashion magazines; a term the gregarious lyricist laughs about. “I think of Aretha Franklin when I hear that word. I don’t wake up in the morning and go, ‘you diva!’ “

But now that frontwoman Gwen Stefani, guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal and drummer Adrian Young have sold a gazillion albums (okay, maybe only multi-millions), have toured the world over and are international superstars, circumstances have changed tremendously; the band, however, remains much the same.

“As far as all the fame and celebrity stuff, that really is a strange part. But it doesn’t really soak in. It doesn’t enter the real world of four best friends who make music together and get to have this extended childhood and go around dancing onstage for people,” reveals Stefani. “We feel very, very blessed to be doing this still. Everything after Tragic Kingdom has just been borrowed time. None of us expected that we’d still be doing this, you know?”

When I finally get the chance to begin the interview, a PR associate warns that Stefani is feeling a bit under the weather and must be very careful about saving her voice for the show. This lowered my expectations slightly as I envisioned a truncated discourse where Stefani might not be too enthusiastic about yet another scribe badgering her for details about everything from musical inspiration to favorite lipsticks (she loves The Sound of Music and the staining power of Anna Sui lipstick, by the way). But once she starts talking, one would never guess that the fashion-forward singer is battling a cold with only “two bites of salad” in that oft-bared tummy of hers. Perky and genuinely friendly, Stefani’s manner is warm and welcoming while her unaffected speech is marked by a plethora of “you know?” and the occasional “dude.” In essence, she is a real slice of Orange County. Likewise, when guitarist Tom Dumont speaks, he is sincere, gracious, given to laughter and shares in Stefani’s sentiments about No Doubt’s success.

“When Tragic Kingdom came out in ‘95, we had been together for eight years not because we were extremely successful, but because we had a really strong friendship.

“The cool thing about all the fame and stuff after Tragic Kingdom is that we’re still here and we still have the same friendships and still enjoy being together,” he reveals. “It’s cool that we’ve made it without hating each other or becoming drug addicts or anything bad, you know what I mean? The analogy I use is that we’re like brothers and sister. There are moments when we drive each other crazy, but at the same time we’re really tight and have this deep connection. No matter what I do to piss off Tony today, tomorrow we’re gonna be hanging out drinking and playing tennis.”

It’s been little more than a year since No Doubt released a new album, and just in time for the holidays comes Rock Steady – a danceable collage of ska, reggae, dancehall and new wave synthesizers bobbing within a sweet pop bubble. Rerouting themselves from the slightly dark departure they took on Return Of Saturn, No Doubt is feeling fine and ready to share the love.

“We were in a really good mood while making this record and it was probably one of the most magical times in the group,” gushes Stefani, waiting for sound check at the Staples Center before she and the group open for U2 on their current Elevation Tour. “The last record was like our growing pains record. We came off of Tragic Kingdom and we made a record that we took very seriously. Everybody took it on like a huge responsibility to prove to themselves that they could become better songwriters and all that stuff, so it was definitely a darker phase for us. And after completing that goal and going on tour with that record, we felt that we really did it. We love that record. It just set us up for this really great space to be in. Our friendship and chemistry is, I don’t know…” she pauses for a moment, “just better than ever! Which is just so mind blowing after all these years.”

From the smooth, tropical “Rock Steady” and the new-wavy “Making Out” to the Elastica-meets-Garbage vibe of “Platinum Blonde” and the perfectly percolating reggae-synth of “In My Head,” No Doubt has audibly delved into a new multi-layered, somewhat experimental sound that is as sonically diverse – everything from laser gun noises to Jamaican dancehall beats – as it is unifyingly upbeat.

“It’s been a record where we just sat down and said, ‘well, if we’re gonna make a record, we’ve gotta clear the slate and be really free; be able to do whatever we want.’ So it was a real experimental record in a lot of ways,” remarks Stefani.

And like mad musical scientists, the group spent the last year honing their experiment at home in Southern Cali, in Jamaica and in London. As Stefani recalls, “We found this music called dancehall, which is a Jamaican [type of] music that’s basically the evolved, modern version of ska [and] reggae. And that’s what we’ve always loved. I mean, we started our band as a ska band. So when we started making this record we said, ‘let’s make a record that we can dance to ‘cause we wanna be in a club and hear our song come on.’ So we just sat down and started writing and ended up recording in Jamaica with legendary Sly and Robbie, Steely and Clevie and just these hard-core dancehall producers. We had a real magical time there and it just set up the whole vibe for the record.”

Adds Dumont, “Some of the stuff was inspired by contemporary Jamaican dancehall music. But accurately, there is this huge cultural difference between what dancehall music in Jamaica is doing right now and what we’re doing.” Which is? “Well, we’ve got a white girl singing, not a Jamaican singer doing more of a rap thing,” he laughs.

Another fresh element of Rock Steady is the inclusion of more electronically inclined components in the songs. As Tom explains, “As far as the electronic thing, it didn’t happen on the whole record, but it did on a lot of the record. It’s kind of me and Tony, deciding out of our own tastes, to lay down our instruments to experiment with keyboards. We just got a bunch of synthesizers and started messing around with making songs that way. So like on ‘Hey Baby’ Tony played half the bass line on the keyboard, and all these weird Star Wars sounds and laser noises that you hear were just us having fun with it. Right now, for me, using all these new elements to push music forward is really exciting.”

Moreover, with the ProTools program, the technologically savvy Dumont was able to transform his Mac computer into a full-blown recording studio.

“ProTools is really expensive, but once you have it, it’s so amazingly powerful. Like on a lot of the songs all the vocals and keyboards were recorded in my living room,” he enthusiastically recalls. “It opened us up creatively in this amazing way because it was just us being creative all day long with a microphone. So when we had about six or seven songs we were like, let’s go to Jamaica and record these things. Then we came back and recorded more at my house again and when we had about 15 songs that we really loved, we went to England to record them and we were done. That’s how this album came about: writing and recording in bits and pieces with things that were exciting and inspiring to us.”

Rock Steady signifies another first for No Doubt: outside collaboration. In addition to Jamaican producers Sly and Robbie and Steely and Clevie, the group enlisted the help of other celebrated artists like Rick Ocasek (The Cars), Orbital, Dave Stewart (The Eurythmics) and Prince. As Stefani readily offers, “We decided to open ourselves up to other people that we respect, because for the 14 years we’ve been a band we always made records with just us four and nobody else. Our success has afforded us to work with some incredible people, and we did that because we had the opportunity to. Can you imagine if we just said, ‘nah, we’re not gonna let anyone inside our world.’ This record was all about letting people into the No Doubt world and I think it reflects it. We don’t get sick of it or jaded by it. I mean, we’re on tour with U2 and it’s intense!” she declares with amazement. “It doesn’t get old.”

Dumont agrees. “It’s kind of like going to music school ‘cause we’re sitting with people like Prince and watching how they work and learning from them. Or working with Dave Stewart on “Underneath It All” was literally just us and a guitar for a half an hour and [coming] up with this really pretty, sweet song with a reggae vibe. When you collaborate, you’re filtering your creativity through someone else’s sensibility, so you come up with a different result than you would if you were just working by yourself.”

Stefani can’t help but express her enthusiasm for the new album and all that went into making it.

“I’ve been in the band since I was seventeen, and just to get to this point where we can make a record that we’re all in love with and work with all these people is amazing. This record was done so quickly, it was almost a miracle for us to get it done in a year. If you would’ve told me a year ago that I would be sitting here talking about this record coming out I would have said no way!”

But despite all the opportunities afforded by fame and success, life in the public spotlight is often just as much about adulation and respect as it is severe scrutiny and judgment. Stefani candidly reveals. “I wrote a record called Tragic Kingdom and it was all about Tony and me and our split up. I certainly didn’t think that that record would come out and I certainly didn’t think that 16 million people would hear it. And then I didn’t think that I would go on tour for two-and-a-half years and every day having people pick at my wounds. That was definitely challenging for me and for Tony, but we’re very open about it. I don’t really have that much to hide. I’m really a regular, normal person. I have the same problems that everybody else does and for some reason, the way I put it down with the melody people can relate to. That makes me feel great and even more normal.”

Perhaps an anomaly in the world of entertainment where artists go to great lengths to ensure privacy, Stefani doesn’t attempt to shield her deepest thoughts and feelings. “I don’t censor myself at all when I’m writing, even now that I know people are going to hear it. I don’t really consider anyone else when I’m writing, just my own thoughts. The only other person I usually consider is the person I’m writing about. I can see how with Tony a song might hurt, and I never want to hurt anyone. Or when writing about Gavin, I know that people are gonna read into it. So there’s been a couple of songs I may have changed some of the words here and there, but only because I don’t want to hurt my boyfriend or anyone [else].”

So what about a song like “In My Head” that carries the verse, “Let’s talk about the future/ Let’s talk about the wedding”? Is that truly what’s in Ms. Stefani’s head at the moment? She laughingly replies, “Dude, that’s been on my mind since eighth grade! It’s like, uh … when am I having the kids, when am I gonna get married? I mean, every girl thinks of those things all the time. That’s the thing: It’s only 12 songs at two minutes each and if everyone thinks they know everything about me from that they’re crazy, you know? It’s only a snapshot of one night or one idea, so I feel like I am sharing a lot, but yet I’m not.” She pauses, “I just think that I’ve been really blessed. Me and Gavin are totally in love and anything that we don’t have control over – like all the stuff that’s written about me or the band or our music – is something that I can’t really think about. My job is to try to write great songs and try to put on a great show.”

Signaled that it’s time for sound check, Gwen Stefani and Tom Dumont are off to do just that.

With thanks to Mike McKeaney of ND Universe

Gwen Stefani: “I love this headline so much, I’m going to kiss it.”

So says Gwen Stefani, and who is Blender to argue? But what else does this ska-singing, rock star-dating, Eve-supporting California mega-blond find sexy? And what does she think of our list of the 50 sexist artist of all time? Blender turned up on the doorstep of her Los Angeles home to find out…

DON’T GET HER WRONG — Gwen Stefani is flattered to be named one of the 50 Sexiest Artists of All Time by Blender. It’s just that she thinks someone else should be on the cover. A certain short, reclusive genius from Minneapolis. ‘Prince,” she nods firmly. He makes the sexiest music. Total make-out music.”

Mightily carnal as Prince’s catalog is, though, the blond lead singer of No Doubt is being far too modest: Valley girl—cute, aerobics-instructor fit and movie-queen glamorous, Stefani is mamongmusic’s sexiest and most like-able stars. “She’s like a homegirl,” attests rapper Eve, who recruited Stefani to sing in the chorus of her Top 10 hit “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.” “You’d want to hang out with her.” Stefani’s other recent Top 10 partner, Moby, concurs. “I expected osomereally self-involved rock star, but he’s lovely and down to earth. She’s the reason hip-hopo for ‘South Side’ got played so much.”

While No Doubt’s 2000 album, Return of Saturn, posted only modest ales, Stefani has given her career a hiphop-style jump-start via turns in other people’s videos. It’s been a deft move, as the 31-year-old has catapulted herself back onto pop’s A list in time for the lease of No Doubt’s new album, scheduled for November and tentatively tied Rock Steady. “I’ve been in a good mood,” she affirms, “so there’s a lot of happier songs.”

Grabbing a lime Popsicle from the freezer, she scoots across the kitchen or to give Blender a tour of her Hollywood digs. All archways and pressed tin, it’s a tasteful Spanish-style abode with manicured courtyards, a tiled pool and a trickling waterfall. Amid all this pop-star elegance sits a large silver pagoda on a hill overlooking the pool. It’s a prop from No Doubt’s “Simple Kind of Life” video, she explains, leading Blender to the shade of a large umbrella.

For the past three months, Stefani’s been sharing her home in the Hollywood Hills with her longtime beau, chisel-cheeked Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale; his band has been recording its new album in Los Angeles. Stefani and Rossdale hooked up five years ago when No Doubt’s breakout single, “Just a Girl,” was climbing the charts and the band was touring as Bush’s opening act.

Despite living eight time zones apart, they’ve been a couple ever since. It’s quite an achievement. Mind you, No Doubt’s last disc resembled a concept album about dreamy grunge boys who can’t seem to commit. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Stefani has rediscovered upbeat pop just as Rossdale has shown a newfound willingness to cohabit.

The tousled Englishman, though, is absent today; he’s out working on his tennis game. But Tony Kanal, No Doubt’s bassist (and Stefani’s ex), has dropped by, looking relaxed and handsome in a vintage Live Aid T-shirt. But all is not quite right — something’s amiss with the top of his head. A tufted blond stripe runs skunklike down the middle of his otherwise dark hair. It’s a rather unorthodox “look.” Understandably, Kanal is a little anxious.

“It looks great,” Stefani offers.
“You mean it?” Kanal replies, “I had a mohawk that didn’t work out. We had to fix it.”
“No, it’s excellent,” Stefani assures him.
Kanal grins broadly. Male ego suitably soothed, the agreeable bassist lopes off for a dip in Stefani’s pool. Stefani and Blender are alone at last. The blond chanteuse shifts her chair into the shade, settles herself and sticks out her tongue. It has turned bright green. Blender takes this as a signal that our gracious hostess is ready to begin. So, in the immortal words of Salt-N-Pepa, let’s talk about sex…

Ready to face the world?
Yeah, it’s fun. I love talking about myself. And it’s yummy right now in the heat.

Extremely. Is that a bruise on your wrist?
No, that’s a steam burn from the tea kettle. It doesn’t look like a burn, huh?

Does Gavin have you drinking tea now?
No, but you have to remember that Tony and I went out for eight years, and he’s English. He moved here when he was 11 so I always used to drink tea at their house. I can drink tea all day, but Gavin has one cup right when he wakes up, and that’s it.As an expert witness, what makes musicians sexy?
I don’t like the word sexy. I get embarrassed. It was only recently that I felt comfortable wearing high heels. But I’m more of a woman now. I’m not so girly. It’s hard to talk about what’s sexy, because it’s all about someone’s particular point of view.

Right.
I guess you’re asking me what my point of view is, huh?

Yes. From your point of view, why are musicians sex symbols?
Music is sexy, that’s why. If I’m listening to a Prince song and I hear “Is the water warm enough? Yes, Lisa” [a famous snippet from Purple Rain’s “Computer Blue”], I just think of making out. In a song like “Simple Kind of Life,” for instance, when I say, “You seem like you’d be a good dad”: That’s intimate. It brings out emotions, so it’s sexy.

Who’s the sexiest performer out there? Aside from Gavin, naturally.
My all-time favorites are Suggs from Madness and Angelo Moore from Fishbone. Those two guys have melted my entire life.

What makes Suggs and Moore so luscious? Their dorkiness, their silliness and their energy. [Pauses to think] And obviously, Chris Cornell looks hot as hell, but what really makes him sexy is his voice and his talent. It’s like when Gavin played me his record. I was like, “Wow, honey. You’re hot.” ‘Cause it was good.

Who’s sexier: Elvis Presley or Jim Morrison?
Elvis. I love that whole ‘50’s look.

Kurt Cobain or Robert Plant?
Kurt Cobain.

What can a regular guy like me do to be more rock-star sexy?
Don’t shave, don’t shower, don’t care. Be really stinky and wear the same clothes every day. I think what makes a man sexy is not being self-aware. That’s what’s really cute to me.

As a self-aware girl, what have you learned over the years about how to be sexy when you need to be?
Everybody wants the perfect body, even though there’s no such thing. You just have to be happy with what you’ve got. When I look at the video for “Don’t Speak,” all I see is my stomach rippling like a jelly doughnut in slow motion during the live performance. I asked my girlfriend who directed it, “Can you cut that part out?” And she said, “No. That’s all the guys in my office are talking about.”

So is my jelly-roll stomach sexy?
I don’t know. But they thought so.

Well, your stomach is flat as a pancake. Have any “gentlemen’s magazines” ever approached you?
One time, a guy said he worked for Hugh Hefner and gave me a card. I thought it was funny. But sometimes you walk down the street and there are catcalls and guys yelling at you and you’re just like, pfffft. And the next morning, you walk down the street and no one whistles and it’s like, “No one thinks I’m hot today” [pouts]. When the band started, I was in this all-guy band in Orange County, and there weren’t a lot of girls in bands. So my goal was to get up onstage and to not have guys say, “Show me your tits.”

What about the “Lady Marmalade” girls in lingerie? Some think the hottie thing’s gone too far.
There’s room for everything, but when you start so young where do you on from there? When I was that age, I was in a band, but I had my dad saying, “You’re not wearing that.” As soon as I was on tour, I was showing my belly button, because he couldn’t tell me not to. You flaunt what you think is your best quality to try to get attention. Maybe I’ve lived too long, but some of these younger girls seem like too much too soon, even lyrically. I watch my niece going, “Oops, I did it…” and gyrating, and I’m like, “You’re only 5 Stop it.” But then again, I go around in a bathing-suit top. I don’t have a boob job, so I can get away with it. My niece and I look pretty much the same in a bathing-suit top [laughs].

Is there an outfit you wear to feel sexy?
If I wear high heels, I suddenly feel like I’m that girl. . . ‘cause it makes you walk like that [attempts to wiggle seductively in her chair].

Have you ever listened to your own music while you’re making out with someone?
I don’t think so.

How about Gavin’s?
[Quickly] I think we made out to his music one time. But you know what we used to make out to? The Goo Goo Dolls, because they were the opening act when we were on tour together.

I saw the two of you sneak off to Gavin’s tour bus together — you were ridiculously cute. Five years later, have you and Gavin merged books and records?
We still don’t really live together. He lives in London, and I live in Los Angeles. While he’s been here making a record it’s been perfect, because we get to really spend time together for the first time in five and a half years. He’s leaving next week, and it’s going to suck.

Is marriage in the future for you and Gavin?
I hope so, yeah. The funny thing is we talk about it, and that ruins it all for us. Some guy in England, not even in an interview, said to Gavin, “Are you guys going to get married?” And Gavin said, “Of course I’m going to marry her.” And I swear to God, I was getting calls from Germany, France, everywhere around the world, going, “Oh, my God, congratulations!” My mom called me. It kind of spoils it if Gavin’s planning a surprise.

How is life different being in your thirties?
I love my age right now. Being 28 sucked. And 29 was really hard for me, and I don’t know if that was just coming off the Tragic Kingdom tour, or if it was just that age. you get older, it’s not that you’re so smart, it’s just that you don’t have to worry about the stuff you used to worry about. And there’s so much to look forward to — I still need to get married, I still want to have a family, major things.

TOMORROW IS A big day for Gwen Stefani it’s her father’s birthday. Her family is driving up from Orange County for a celebrity barbecue, and there’s grocery shopping to be done. Pulling on her shoes, she begins to scribble out a shopping list. “I’ve volunteered to make the birthday cake,” she beams, before explaining that this is the limit of her culinary abilities. Usually, this kind of thing is very much Rossdale’s department, and sure enough, he will be handling the rest of the menu.

“We’re a perfect couple,” smiles Stefani, staring back from the house. “He cooks, and I eat.”

With thanks to Mike McKeaney of ND Universe

No Doubt’s Tony Kanal gains taste & maturity.

This summer marks 30 years since Tony Kanal was born and 15 since he took up bass. For nearly 14 of those years, Tony has played in the service of No Doubt, a band that began in Southern California’s third wave ska underground and became one of the defining groups of ’90s pop. With the 1995 Interscope album Tragic Kingdom, and its worldwide, bass-heavy hits “Just a Girl,” “Spiderwebs,” and “Don’t Speak,” No Doubt seemed to come from nowhere to international stardom. But this was no overnight success; Tony and his bandmates had struggled to make it since high school.

The first two radio hits from No Doubt’s follow up album, Return of Saturn, show a promising musical range – from the driving punk of “Ex-Girlfriend” to the sensitive rock of “Simple Kind Of Life.” But delving into Saturn reveals a lot more: a band that has moved toward more refined, creative songwriting, and a bassist whose heightened melodic sense, judicious use of space, and increasing ease with the group’s stylistic mixture of rock, reggae, and new wave reveal a self-less approach. “There are parts on the album I feel I can be proud of,” says Tony. “Not lines that show off what I can do, but parts with an intricacy and emotion I never thought I could play.”

The calm, serious expression Tony wears just barely hides the bubbling energy and excitement beneath – his speech is liberally decorated with superlatives like “amazing,” “incredible,” “awesome” and “phenomenal.” Nonetheless, he overwhelmingly communicates a sense of being grounded, the kind of personality you’d expect in a good bass player. Kanal has an ease with his emotions – from the thrill of taking his parents to India and playing a show their friends and family could see, to the disappointment on that same trip, when some Indians, still saddled with generations-long colonial mindset, treated his European-descent bandmates with a deference he was not afforded. No Doubt’s incredible success has let them see the world and experience hard work and struggle – including the suicide of an early bandmate. That range of feelings is increasingly present in Kanal’s bass lines. From the driving, energetic eighth-notes to moments of melancholy reflection to surreal new-wave fun, Tony’s lines give energy and life to Saturn’s broad emotional range.

Born in England, Tony Ashwin Kanal moved to Orange County, California, when he was ten. He credits his dad for fostering his love of music, from playing records when young Tony couldn’t sleep to encouraging him to take up saxophone in middle school. At the end of 9th grade, Tony’s jazz band teacher needed a replacement for his graduating bassist. “Dave Carpenter was a phenomenal bass player,” remembers Tony, noting that his former classmate is not the same Carpenter as the prolific sideman who’s played with Al Jarreau and Peter Erskine. “Plus he was a cool guy and all the girls liked him, so I put my hand up.” In order to catch up with his classmates, who had all been playing for a few years, Tony spent the summer in a crash course on his new instrument, guided by band teacher Mike Stouffer, and Carpenter, whom Tony still meets occasionally for lessons. “Dave was the one who taught me how to play bass. I wouldn’t play the way I play if it weren’t for him.”

After a year of playing, a friend approached Tony about joining No Doubt. In March 1987 16-year-old Tony joined the crowd watching No Doubt’s first show at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach. He auditioned for the band a week later, and in two weeks he was playing No Doubt’s second show. “I gave up saxophone soon after,” he smiles. Playing in No Doubt turned Tony into a bass nut. He finished his three years of high school jazz band, learned all of Flea’s lines on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Uplift Mofo Party Plan, and increasingly turned his attention to making music from the bottom up. “I love bass – bass-heavy recordings, bass as an instrument. I wouldn’t want to play anything else.”

We met Tony at his Los Angeles home, a nicely redone Mediterranean on a modest lot that speaks more of Tony’s contentment with his success than of stereotypical rock-star opulence. The tastefully framed No Doubt memorabilia on his walls shows Tony as a media-savvy veteran of many magazine covers shared with his bandmates – vocalist Gwen Stefani, guitarist Tom Dumont, and drummer Adrian Young. But Tony has his doubts about being on the cover of Bass Player. “I’ve never been a musician’s musician. Most of the people on the Bass Player cover have amazing music-theory knowledge, and I don’t. I think I’ve been able to grow and maybe do some cool stuff because I’ve played with the same group for so long. I’m comfortable, and I’ve been able to experiment and try everything.”

How would you describe your playing style?
I’m a definitely a rock bass player influenced by punk. I always try to stay melodic so the bass line can stand on its own but at the same time provide that foundation for the rest of the band.
We’re a rock group with a reggae/ska side and a new wave side. When we started we were part of this underground ska scene. But we all came from diverse musical backgrounds, and we knew we wouldn’t be able to contain ourselves. We had to explore and experiment. I think of us as a true American rock band that’s heavily influenced by British music.

Do things you learned in high school jazz band – such as how to walk or how to interpret a harmony – help you in No Doubt?
Absolutely. All of that comes in to play. But when you’re in your own band and writing your own music, you don’t think about that stuff when you’re writing your bass lines. You’re not thinking – it’s just coming out.
I struggled through jazz band. I had to switch to bass clef, and I wasn’t a great sight reader. Plus I was spread kind of thin: I was on the swim team, editor of the school paper, and for the last few years doing No Doubt. After high school it was purely rock & roll: playing in No Doubt and making up my own bass parts, simple as that. Playing in jazz band was never my thing, but that’s what they have – there’s no rock band in high school. Theory never came easy for me; it still doesn’t.

That’s surprising – your bass lines sound like you have a good command of harmony.
That’s probably because I’ve been playing with No Doubt for almost 14 years. I’m comfortable with the people I play with, and that makes all the difference. If you took me out of No Doubt and put me in a studio situation, I’d have a hard time.
But I have total confidence in what I’m doing. When slapping was big in the early ’90s, playing was about proving yourself and your chops. I was really into that – I wanted to be able to do all that stuff, and I was okay at it. I slapped on our first record. It was more of an ego-driven way of playing bass. Now I understand my role: to make good bass lines for the song I’m working on at the moment. My job is to make a bass line that supports the guitar, drums, and vocals and leaves space for them, too. I feel I’ve been successful in making that transition to where playing is more about music than ego. And since I’ve made that, I feel confident in what I’m doing. This new record has been my most comfortable record making experience.

Was there a point when the light bulb came on?
I think it just comes with time and maturity, but 27 months on the road for Tragic Kingdom had a lot to do with it. When you’ve been out that long, you’ve tried every song, every way.

Who are your bass influences?
Before I was in No Doubt I listened to a lot of pop music, like Michael Jackson and especially Prince – Prince is my idol, my facourite. I still love all that stuff, but then when I was 16 and got into No Doubt, Eric Stefani, who started the band, exposed me to a whole new world of music: Madness, the Specials, the Selelecter, Bad Brains, Fishbone, Red Hot Chili Peppers, ska, punk, thrash, funk, all that stuff. I remember feeling so vibrant, like I’d finally found my thing and the whole world opened up. All those bass players made such an impression on me: Flea, Fishbone’s Norwood Fisher, Horace Painter from the Specials, Mark Bedford from Madness, Darryl from bad Brains – Flea being the foremost.

What did you get out of Flea’s playing?
At the time his slapping blew me away. The cool thing about Flea is how he continues to grow from record to record. By the time you get to Blood Sugar Sex Magik, it’s so musical. Back then, as a young man, it was all about the energy. from the slapping to the fingering to his beautiful melodic soloing, he’s phenomenal.
I don’t want to sound immodest, but I feel I’ve made that change myself. One thing that helped me was listening to The Cure. The bass work of Simon Gallup and Michael Dempsey showed me you don’t have to play crazy, complicated lines to have beautiful, melodic bass parts that say so much.

What was recording Return of Saturn like?
We got home from the Tragic Kingdom tour, took two months off, then started writing in February ‘98. We rented a house in the Hollywood Hills and we set ourselves a work schedule: Monday through Friday, from one in the afternoon until we were exhausted. It was surprisingly strict. We wrote a bunch of stuff, went in the studio that summer, and recorded seven songs. But we realized it sounded too similar to Tragic Kingdom – we hadn’t pushed our selves hard enough. We wanted to grow as songwriters, as musicians. All the bands we’ve ever admired always seemed to grow and take chances from record to record, and we didn’t feel like we had done that, so we scrapped it. We started writing again, looked for a new producer, and spent all of 1999 recording the album with Glen Ballard.
One thing the Tragic Kingdom success afforded us was the financial and creative means to make this record the way we wanted to. When we record Adrian’s live drums, I play with him for the energy – but I like to redo my bass parts sitting at the board with the producer. That way I can really concentrate on everything and make sure it’s the way I want it. Sometimes I’d spend days sitting with Glen and trying one thing after another. I’d put down bass lines, then a week later say, “Fuck it – it’s way too busy,” or, “I could improve on that.” That’s part of why it took so long. But it was great to be in a creative environment where you can try different things and then decide, Tragic Kingdom was completely different. We made that over three years while we were all going to school and working day jobs. We all wanted the backup plan; I was studying psychology at Cal State Fullerton. It was a struggle – we were pressed for time and money. Once in a while the record company would give us money to record some songs. This time we were able to take our time.

There are places on the album where you play just a few notes for a bar or two.
You hit a certain point where you realize space is just as important as notes. You hear so many amazing bass players say that all the time, but ultimately you have to realize it for yourself. It’s like being a father: You can’t go to school to learn how. It just comes with life, from watching your dad or watching other men do it, and then being there for your kid.

How do you write?
Usually I sit in a room with Gwen and play bass while she sings, or Tom will play guitar with Gwen. Once in a while it will be all three of us, and on this record Gwen wrote a few herself. It’s a very organic process, just bouncing ideas off each other. We bring them to the rest of the band and start building from there. We’ll try everything, every way – rock, new wave, reggae – staying open-minded to see which style fits the particular song.
Tom’s the one who really studied music theory in high school and college, so he’s the one I always ask, “If we’re in this key, can I do this?” I have a basic grasp of that stuff, but I always have to refresh my memory. But it’s not like somebody’s just handing us changes. In fact, when we’re writing songs, we don’t even talk about changes – we’re talking about making music and asking if it feels good. It’s more about how it makes you feel than what key it’s in.

What’s your musical relationship with Adrian?
It was a big deal when our original drummer left in ‘89. Adrian was a bundle of energy when he auditioned, a true California kid we had seen at shows. He told us he’d been playing for years, but in fact he had learned every song – every beat and every hit, part for part – from our five-song demo tape. At his audition he played them perfectly. We said, “You’re in,” but very quickly we learned he’d been playing only a few months. He tricked us.
Our first recording experience with him was in 1990. We borrowed some money from somebody and actually got Flea to produce for us. It was when Flea was on the cover of Spin: I was 19, and it was a really big deal for me. It was Adrian’s first studio experience, and it was horrendous. We recorded two songs we never released. It wasn’t Flea’s fault; we just weren’t ready – I remember Flea trying to show Adrian how to play beats. But that experience helped make Adrian the great drummer he is today. He’s versatile, he’s hard-hitting, and he can pull back.

What does the future hold for No Doubt?
We don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s the exciting thing. I think we’ll make another record. We hit this really cool songwriting place we’ll probably want to explore a bit more. But when we finally do decide to hang it up, there’s going to be a lot more in life to explore.

What advice do you have for young bassists?
If you’re enjoying yourself and passionate about what you’re doing, stick with it. It sounds so cliché, but it’s what we do.

Tony’s Tools

Tony Kanal retired the Yamaha BB1600 he played from 1987-86, but Yamahas are still his main axes – now a pair of BB3000s. For Return of Saturn Tony played Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay 5-strings on “Ex-Girlfriend,” “Simple Kind of Life,” and “Too Late.” He also has a Fender American Standard Jazz as a backup. “I change strings every day,” says Tony. “I use standard-gauge GHS Bass Boomers on my Yamahas, Ernie Balls on my Ernie Balls, and Fenders on my Fender.” On his Yamahas he never dials the tone knob all the way up to the treble position, and for a more reggae tone he rolls it off some.

On stage Tony has three Gallien-Krueger 800RB heads – one is the amp he bought in the 80s, and one is a spare. His road case also holds a two-channel Samson UHF wireless unit, a Korg DTR-1 tuner, and a Furman power conditioner. For easy live instrument switching, Tony has a Yamaha 4 and an Ernie Ball 5 each plugged into the Samson’s two channels. An A/B switch sends the signal to the tuner, and from there it’s split from a DI to the house, and then to two 800RBs, one for each bass. For the 4-string, the amp’s mids are set to the center and bass and trebled dimed; for the 5-string, the mids are also at noon, and the bass and treble are at 3:00. The head’s output goes to a custom Gallien-Krueger speaker cable A/B box, which determines which head will feed Tony’s Ampeg SVT 8×10 speaker cabinet.

In the studio, Tony used the same G-K and SVT setup for playing along with Adrian; then he would head into the control room and sit at the board with producer Ballard and engineer Alan Johannes. They tried various amps – even guitar heads to get different bass sounds, and they even made some after-the-fact amp adjustments in Pro Tools using Line 6’s Amp Farm. The only stompbox effect Tony used on the album was a ProCo Rat on the “Comforting Lie” chorus.

Tired of Ska, Bored with bindis, and suffering from writers block, No Doubt looked back to the 80’s for inspiration, conjuring a new-wave fest that would do Missing Persons proud.
Now only if a certain person would propose…

In bed with Gwen Stefani! Bliss! Rapture! Total listener-contest dream come true!

That is, if you’ve haven’t already spent two years in a tour bus with Gwen Stefani. Or a thousand hours at soundchecks with Gwen Stefani. Or 18 months in recording studios with Gwen Stefani. Or untold nights in cramped, urine-smelling, graffiti-mottled backstage dressing rooms with Gwen Stefani.

“Feel free to remove your shoes, dude,” Stefani chides one bedmate. “‘Cause I do, like, sleep here.”

Arrayed upon their singer’s huge, Sleeping Beauty-meets-Kama Sutra four-poster, the males of No Doubt nonetheless seem quite content with their current arrangement, staged for a visiting video crew. Surrounded by scented candles, their backs against the mirrored headboard, drummer Adrian Young (in spotted cheetah coif), bassist Tony Kanal (newly bleached blond), and guitarist Tom Dumont (proudly untinted) lounge like the three stinky brothers of a pink-haired fairy princess, here in her Hollywood castle.

The cameraman asks which member will greet the viewers at home. “Tom, you should do it,” says Kanal. “What should I say?” asks Dumont. “Just take your cock out and throw it down.”

Dumont, who is wearing a brown argyle sweater, looks unlikely to perform this feat. (“The rest of the group, they have this entertainment ethic,” he says later, in the drawl of a philosophizing patrolman on Cops. “I love music, and I love playing guitar, but showmanship isn’t my strength.”)

Kanal is undeterred: “Cock’n'roll, yo!”

The bandmates are here to tape an intro for the premiere of their new single and video, “Ex-Girlfriend,” and their homey little bedroom tableau is the first pre-album publicity they’ve had to do in five years. That is, since the days when Stefani was blonde, Anaheim was home, and “ska” was considered a hot growth stock.

Much has changed since then. Homes have been bought, SUVs have been registered, and the group has labored for two years on a follow-up to their 15 million-selling ‘95 smash, Tragic Kingdom. The result, titled Return of Saturn, is a rambunctious and assured burst of new wave revivalism by people who clearly grew up within broadcast range of ’80s-era KROQ-and who are quite aware they aren’t kids anymore.

Fittingly, the video recasts the band as a fresh but familiar-looking rock entity: : kind of like the ‘96 Smashing Pumpkins, with a pinch of Garbage, a bit of Puffy, and a lot of fluorescent clothing. Like most No Doubt videos, the Hype Williams-directed, anime-inspired vignette also contains a wry autobiographical wink. It stars Stefani as a pink-cornrowed, kung-fu-fighting assassin whose assigned hit turns out to be her ex-boyfriend. “I play the ex-boyfriend,” says Kanal. “Surprise.”

Kanal has already endured the worst revenge a jilted girlfriend can exact: being made to perform her he-done-me-wrong songs before thousands. But Kanal has long aged out of the role of mute romantic villain-both in and outside No Doubt’s circle. Despite the fact that he caused their heroine enough heartache to power a platinum-selling weeper like “Don’t Speak,” today’s younger No Doubt fans, who dish in chat rooms like soap addicts, hardly consider Kanal the devil.

“Gavin is the devil,” jokes Nina Young, Adrian’s new wife and No Doubt’s former production coordinator. She is, of course, referencing Bush singer and Stefani boyfriend Gavin Rossdale. “The kids online, they want Gwen and Tony back together. To them, Gavin’s like the Yoko Ono of No Doubt.” (To which Rossdale replies, “Jesus Christ!”)

Concerned fans would probably be gratified to see the vibe here today. Under the gaze of numerous Gavin snapshots, here cuddles a group it would take one hell of a “Yoko” to shake. “Tony! I wanna be with Tony!” cries Stefani’s little niece Madeline, who clambers onto the bed.

“C’mere, little lamb,” Stefani calls from the middle, beckoning not her four-year-old roommate but her older, smaller one: Maggen, a shaggy, 16-year-old Lhasa apso with a ribboned topknot. The cast assembled, the ersatz but inseparable family called No Doubt is ready to greet the world. The cameraman asks them to move closer together.

“Come on, nerds,” Stefani coos brightly, pulling them tighter. “Come on! Come on, nerds!”

No Doubt’s members are all around 30; they’ve been together since high school-two facts that make them a special brand of modern-rock act. While most bands today resemble hockey teams or rapping Navy SEALs, this quartet recalls a not-so-distant era when men and women toiled together in the making of rock’n'roll songs-a time of bouncy, Anglophilic high jinx known as new wave. “We love music from the ’80s,” Kanal says. “Even the cheesiness of it. That was what we grew up with.” And like well-adjusted children of Simon LeBon, No Doubt wear the ’80s exceptionally well.

Produced by studio svengali Glen Ballard (Alanis, Aerosmith), Saturn has many of the sugar-high thrills we expect from the folks who brought us “Spiderwebs” and “Just a Girl.” But they’re colored by an audible wistfulness, the kind you might evoke by sticking an Adam Ant pin on your Fubu sweatshirt.

“The songs’ DNA contained a profound knowledge of ’80s pop,” Ballard says. “And I think there was an unconscious decision to key in on the sounds and textures that evoked what Gwen was writing about, in terms of a reflective look back.” Named for the astrologically designated moment of adulthood (a 30-year mark at which the planet Saturn realigns with its position at your birth), Return of Saturn is about pondering the past, taking stock, and freaking out. “Assessing my life / Second-guessing,” sings Stefani in “Artificial Sweetener.” Two songs later she’s getting Oingo-existential (“Six Feet Under”). And in both songs, the fretting about romance and destiny comes with so many Split Enz guitars, Cure bass lines, and Missing Persons keyboards that few survivors of the John Hughes administration will brave with a dry eye. But the members of No Doubt are actually quite far from the futuristic androgynous of the classic new wave era.

For proof of this, look no further than the album’s real surprise, “Simple Kind of Life.” In this beautifully crafted ballad, Stefani weighs dreams of motherhood against career. “All I needed was a simple man,” goes one verse, “so I could be a wife.” Five tracks later she’s pining for nuptials in “Marry Me,” pouting “I can’t help that I like to be kissed / And I wouldn’t mind if my name changed to Mrs.” (“Kind of a sledgehammer of a hint,” quips Rossdale.)

Girl Power? Jewel wouldn’t sing lines like these. But this is exactly the kind of unfashionable, unpunk sentiment No Doubt shouted out in the middle of grunge season, giving voice to legions of kids who knew that, deep down, they weren’t nearly as “alternative” as they dressed. “You can’t argue with Gwen’s passion for honesty and openness,” enthuses Rossdale. “It takes a lot to be that vulnerable and lay yourself open like that.” And this is something even the most jaded No Doubt detractor would have to admit: Makeup or not, these guys aren’t faking a thing.

Orange County, circa 1985: a sunny Reagan stronghold with a variety of disgruntled musical youth. Of these, the ska fan was probably the least imposing. Neither as icy as the goths nor as tough as the hardcores, ska kids were generally fun-loving and integrationist hipsters with good organizational skills and bad dance moves. While No Doubt has long outgrown this scene, its members are still imprinted with some of these traits.

Take Tony Kanal. A dreamy-eyed 29-year-old of Indian descent, he’s No Doubt’s second-prettiest member. (“You are a beautiful man,” reads a letter from a gay grad student, closing with a hopeful “P.S.: I have lots of muscles.”) Onstage, he’s a sweaty, head-bobbing dynamo. Offstage, he’s pretty far from a wild-livin’ rock dude. In his bedroom closet: ten pairs of carefully stacked, different-hued Dickies (“that’s what I always go for first”), a pile of neatly folded Beefy-T’s (“pick any out, you can’t go wrong”), some warm-up pants for sportier occasions, and several flavors of Puma. In his office bookshelf: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra and Power to Burn: Michael Ovitz and the New Business of Show Business. Kanal has been the band’s business manager and archivist for over a decade.

“This is where I spend most of my time,” he says, leading the way into the first-floor office of his still partially furnished Hollywood Hills home. By the desk is a framed poster from the movie Scarface. “I usually watch that or The Godfather: Part II before most business meetings,” he says, then laughs. “It really does work.” Pointing to another wall, he shows me a framed ticket stub from his first concert: Prince, “Purple Rain” tour, February 23, 1985. “Wear something purple,” it reads. “And I did,” Kanal confirms. Below it is another stub: the Untouchables, March 14, 1987, Kanal’s first ska show. Deprived of wardrobe suggestions, he showed up dressed a bit study-hall, fretted at the punkish crowd, and hit a thrift store to re-gear-up.

Within months of joining No Doubt in 1987, Kanal was managing the band and dating leader/songwriter Eric Stefani’s sister, who took over as singer when John Spence committed suicide. Then Dumont joined up, defecting from a heavy-metal band led by his sister. (“Yeah, I had a mullet,” he confesses. “But it was a more forward-thinking mullet.”) Last came Young, who soon established a rep as the band’s hardest partier and most frequently naked member. Such was the high-energy live act signed to Interscope for a self-titled, profoundly ignored debut in 1992-the year No Doubt’s story got truly interesting.

Just as the band was beginning work on their second album, two things happened. Eric decided to quit the band, and Tony decided to quit Gwen. These are precisely the events supposed to end bands’ histories, not begin them. But what follows is a classically ’90s tale of female empowerment: Girl grows up happy in the shadow of guys. Guys fail her. Girl finds hidden strengths. Girl rescues guys, goes platinum. “Suddenly, all the lyric-writing responsibility was kinda dropped into my lap,” Stefani says. “And I had all this stuff on my mind. Broken-heart stuff.” Which led to Tragic Kingdom’s “Just a Girl,” “Don’t Speak,” and “Happy Now?”- hits that blew these four friends into the stratosphere. And that is how Gwen Stefani, her bandmates, and her bindi helped pull America out of the grunge age. Which was a breeze, they say, compared to making their latest album.

“If you hit the hole in four you get a par,” says Adrian Young, holding forth on a Long Beach, California, golf course. “If you hit it in three it’s a birdy. Two, it’s an eagle. Five is a bogey.” According to this scale, I am currently hitting about a booty. Taking aim, I slice a ball deep into a bucolic wooded region. “It’s so strange that you don’t know anything about golf,” says Young. “Where did you grow up?”

In many ways, Young is the living embodiment of No Doubt’s ’50s-flavored So-Cal dream, his lifestyle more like an ring-a-ding anesthesiologist’s than a rock drummer’s. He plays golf, drives a black Mercedes, and lives with his wife in a huge house with orange trees and a well-stocked wooden bar. Only his cheetah ‘do and slightly maniacal eagerness conveys that Young is, as Stefani puts it, No Doubt’s “cool-meter,” he who kicks most ass.

We jump into the golf cart and tear off, two Big Gulp-sized cocktails jostling in convenient beverage holders. “I take this game way more seriously than I take anything in life,” Young says, cornering so sharply my margarita nearly upends. “It’s an obsessive thing. It makes me more mad than anything-any girl, any band fight. It’s just full of anguish.” He stops, grabs a club, and hits an impressive drive onto the green. “Go in…go in…motherfucker!”

The making of Return of Saturn held lots of its own brand of anguish for No Doubt. The process began in early ‘97, two months after the Tragic Kingdom tour ended. It continued, three producers and four false starts later, through January 2000. DMX would have put out five albums in that time.

“Here’s the thing about our band,” says Kanal. “We have really strong opinions individually. And you get 13 years into a band, and you learn not to step on other people’s sensitive areas.” While conducive to band harmony, this diplomacy makes efficient songwriting next to impossible.

After months of wheel-spinning, they decided to sack their longtime producer Matthew Wilder – too much a buddy now to effectively whipcrack. They met with Rick Rubin (Chili Peppers). They worked with ex-Talking Head Jerry Harrison, recording the Go soundtrack hit “New.” They recruited Michael Beinhorn (Marilyn Manson, Hole), who bowed out over scheduling conflicts.

And all the while, their singer and lyricist was slowly, gracefully sinking into despair. “I just couldn’t write words – I had nothing to say,” Stefani says. “It was one of the darkest phases of my life. And there was so much pressure, because everybody was waiting on me.” Finally they met producer Ballard – a calming, Zen-like presence and, significantly, someone who’d already ushered another ’90s rock woman into mega-platinum sales. Ballard reviewed songs, picked winners, and suggested arrangements. He also helped Stefani determine what she really wanted to say.

“Gwen kept repeating, ‘The person who wrote “Just a Girl” isn’t me anymore.’” he says. “She had to figure out where she was emotionally then, not six years earlier. And that’s always a hard thing to do.” Indeed, it must be hard to hear “Just a Girl” at 30 without noticing the lyrics’ extra layer of irony – especially when you’re out of the spotlight, back in your parents’ house, and feeling, as Stefani says, “like an old, fat tennis shoe.”

“I think I lost bits of myself when I was on tour,” she says. “I spent the last couple of years trying to find what was the real me, the real Gwen.” She got into Sylvia Plath. She studied the songwriting of Joni Mitchell. She went through rocky times with Rossdale. (“Ex-Girlfriend” is about him, not Kanal.)

Finally, she rediscovered the person who could make all this sadness and confusion tuneful. But Stefani didn’t exactly emerge from the experience full of heady soundbites on, say, the writer’s craft or journeys of self-discovery. This is how she describes the genesis of “Simple Kind of Life”: “I had just gotten my period so I was, like, real emotional? And then I just started playing these chords, and I was like, ‘Hey, I just wrote a song.’ And I went to play it for the guys and I was on the verge of tears, ’cause it was so emotional. And Glen just looked at me and was like, ‘That’s an amazing song.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you think so?’ ”

Phrases like this got our sweet, open, slightly spacey California girl dissed six years ago, chided as a Valley Girl among the moody rock chicks. But set against neo-navel-barers like Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson, Stefani’s particular brand of frankness seems complicated, even mysterious. In person, she can come off girly, glamorous, or surprisingly tough – calling her friends “Poop” one minute and “Dude” the next. She’s shared rock stages with punks like the Vandals and Vogue spreads with movie stars like Heather Graham. In a way, today’s emphatically “strong women” like Lauryn Hill and Courtney Love make this bipolarity seem even more unusual.

“With us, it didn’t matter that I was a girl,” Stefani recalls of No Doubt’s early club years. “That was the whole point. I could still get up there amongst all the other punk-rock fuckin’ bands in Orange County and make the crowd go off just as hard.” Standing in the doorway of her Hollywood Hills house, Gwen Stefani takes time out for some acting – a little sense-memory exercise.

Having just posed for the cover of Young’s golf-mag-with-attitude, Schwing!, she’s wearing a gray zip-up hoodie, oversized khaki slacks, and a classically Gwen-ish found-fashion accessory: a white hairnet. “Okay,” she says, “you stand right there.” She’s about to re-create her immediate reaction to her current home. “I’ll show what I did when I first walked in.” She goes outside and shuts the door. While Stefani has taken some tentative forays into Hollywood, auditioning for roles in Fight Club and Girl, Interrupted, she is an inexperienced actor. Still, she brings great verve to the enterprise. She opens the door, walks in, stops, and gazes at the interior. “Oh my GAAAAAAAAAHD!” The crazy, hysterical scream of delight echoes against the stone walls. “It was just like that,” she says. “Well, almost that loud.”

Stefani’s dramatic Spanish-style chateau has a wrought-copper gate and Rapunzel-ready balconies. In the entryway stands a three-foot, blue-robed Virgin Mary, directly across the rotunda from a multi-armed Hindu goddess – a fitting icon combo for the nice Catholic girl who brought Indian forehead fashion to the mall. “I thought it would be good, ’cause it’s all girls living here, to have Mary right there to kinda greet us,” she says. “A little reminder to be good girls.”

The girls in question are Stefani, her sister Jill (a quiet 27-year-old Berkeley grad in art history), and Jill’s daughter Madeline. Her niece was born when Stefani was on tour and, like many little girls across the country, got to know her primarily from videos. Clearly a Gwen favorite, Madeline receives another shriek of delight as she comes running into the entryway. “Sissy!” the four-year-old calls, using the standard appellation for all household members. She is holding a pink, bear-shaped lollipop. “Look! I painted my sucker the same color as your hair!”

Stefani leads us through the living room, passing a curious array of pharmaceutical apparati: a distillation tube, beaker, and Erlenmeyer flask. “That’s a birthday present I got for Gavin,” Stefani explains. “Because his record’s called The Science of Things? And he has a song called ‘The Chemicals Between Us’? So I thought that would be a cute present.” Off in the kitchen, the phone rings. It’s for Gwen – whose reaction makes it pretty clear who it must be. “AAAGGGHH!” She clomps over on her high heels, head thrown back dramatically. “Hi!” she exclaims, grabbing the phone. “What’re you doing?” Silence. “Oh, that’s so cute!”

It is, of course, “Gav,” calling from Vienna. Rossdale has become an extended family member in No-Doubtland. He is, Stefani says, both a better cook and a better dresser than she is. (“He doesn’t let me wear bright yellow pants anymore.”) He often introduces her to new authors. He helps Tom Dumont’s schoolteacher girlfriend grade papers. (“Imagine if her students knew who was grading them!” Stefani says.) He even helps field phone calls from the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, mouthing “Do it! Do it!” as the reclusive pop genius called Stefani for a collaboration.

The Artist had first terrified No Doubt by attending one of their Minneapolis concerts, after which he invited these lifelong Prince obsessives back to his paisley pad to jam. “First of all, I do not jam,” Stefani says. “And I mean, he’s not like somebody you meet and walk away going, ‘Oh, he’s a normal person just like you and me-da-da-da.’ You walk away going, ‘That is the Artist Formerly Known as Prince!’”

Later, he modified and recorded the No Doubt-penned song “Waiting Room,” as yet unreleased. “It was so weird,” says Stefani. “Because it was Prince singing lyrics I had written about Gavin with music I had written with Tony.” The mind does indeed boggle. But No Doubt may be the only rock group in history that could make a surreal, vaguely incestuous entanglement between a British neo-grunge singer, a pink-haired rock diva, her ex-boyfriend bassist, and a five-foot, purple-hued, ambisexual pop genius seem normal – even…wholesome.

“Excuse me,” says the fabulous man with the Robin Leach accent. “We’re having an argument. “Do you…sing?” Our two unbidden guests are hovering over No Doubt’s table at Pastis, the newest Manhattan hotspot, the kind of super-chic place where Air is the Muzak, the busboys are flossin’, and everyone seems quite desperate to be perceived as somebody.

With her sparkly makeup and tightly woven pink braids, Gwen Stefani is clearly Somebody. Our friends just aren’t sure exactly who. “I sing,” Stefani says meekly. “I sing in the shower.” “You’re in a baaaahnd, aren’t you?” insists the visitor. “What’s the name of your baaaahnd?”

These questions evince a particularly poignant cluelessness, since Stefani’s band is, in fact, surrounding her. In a room filled with Prada, the boys’ attire includes a black jersey, an Abercrombie-looking button-down, and a Black Flag T-shirt. To the star-spotting fabulousie, they are invisible. To Stefani, though, they are, quite literally, an entire world.

After the inquiring minds wander back to the bar, the rest of No Doubt explodes with laughter. “Is that you, daaaahling,” says Kanal, almost head-butting Stefani. “Are you the one…the one with the baaaahnd?” Young asks. The four friends from Orange County recommence the fart noises and cartoon voices. “From the beginning, no matter who we played with, or who we hung out with, our band was always just its own little group,” Stefani says. “Like, its own little land or something. If I started something new today and looked for three other guys, and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do this for the next 13 years….’” Stefani trails off. “I can’t imagine it.”

A blur of Gucci and pashmina whirling behind her, she still seems a bit incredulous. “But somehow, you know, it happened.”

With thanks to Mike McKeaney of ND Universe

Being in a group can be like a soap opera! Find out how sudden fame, serious jealousy, and a gorge guy named Gavin almost broke up the hippest band in the land.

It’s been a most major week for No Doubt. Their Tragic Kingdom album has hit number one, they’ve rocked out on Saturday Night Live, and they’ve had a private tour of the White House. But even with all that under their belts, the Anaheim CA, quartet is stressed about tonight’s concert, their first full show in a few months.

Backstage at Rockland Community College in New York, the band members chill out different ways. Bass player Tony Kanal is taping a scene with his camcorder. Drummer Adrian Young is hanging with his girlfriend, Christine. Guitarist Tom Dumont is digging through his huge bag of free diesel gear, trying to find something cool to wear for the show. Singer Gwen Stefani, meanwhile, has the college’s gym all to herself – a starstruck staffer was only too glad to open it for her.

Anyone who’s seen No Doubt’s babe of a lead singer high-kicking it in their videos or in concert will find it hard to believe that there was ever a time when Gwen wasn’t in great demand-or in great shape. But she remembers it differently. “I was fat all over,” she says of her teenage self.

You’re probably thinking Yeah, right! But Gwen insists that she’s forever battling her weight-in fact, this very minute, she’s working on dropping the five pounds she’s piled on during her vacation. But she’s not stressing over it. “I’m enjoying being a little chubby,” she insists. “I love life, and if I want a rad slice of pizza, I’ll have it!”

Right now, Gwen has good reason to love life. After ten years of struggling for stardom with her best buds and bandmates Tony, Tom, and Adrian, she couldn’t possibly be happier-or luckier.

Rock Romance

“That’s my boyfriend,” Gwen says as Bush’s “Swallowed” comes on the radio. She used to play the “we’re just good friends” game whenever Bush singer Gavin Rossdale’s name came up. Till now, she’s admitted to having had only three boyfriends in her life-the most significant of them having been Tony, No Doubt’s bassist, who was her prom date and main man for seven years.

Gwen was guyless – and heartbroken – after Tony broke up with her two years ago. She tried to deal by writing songs about her feelings; many of those tunes, including “Don’t Speak,” ended up on Tragic Kingdom. But as hard as she tried, she just couldn’t get over him.

“Then I met Gavin,” she says. “And that one night was all it took for me to say ‘Okay, I need to move on,’ ”

Her first close encounter with the Brit babe came around Christmas ‘95, when No Doubt was booked as the opening act for Bush’s tour. “The first thing he said to me was, ‘You’re gorgeous,’ ” she remembers. Gwen, though was not impressed. “I wasn’t looking to go out with a boy in a band – especially one who’s that good-looking. I’m usually attracted to guys with good personalities, ones that make me laugh. That’s what I think is sexy – not some dude with flowing curls who’s tall and gorgeous.”

But once she got to know him, she just couldn’t resist: within days the singers were smooching. “I couldn’t believe he liked me!” Gwen says. “I’d been down about the Tony thing for so long that my self-esteem was way down too. And suddenly this guy thinks I’m great – and he has a British accent!”

Last year, as their bands went on to rule the charts (It was Tragic Kingdom that bumped Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase out of the number one album slot), Gwen and Gavin continued to date but kept their private lives just that. When the Bush-No Doubt tour ended, their separate schedules put distance between then and put their relationship sort of on hold. “We kept it quiet – if we didn’t even know what we were, why tell everyone we’re girlfriend and boyfriend?” she says.

Long-distance Love

Though being separated from her sweetie on a daily basis bums her out, Gwen works hard to keep their romance alive. She has a photo of Gavin taped inside her makeup box, takes her cell phone everywhere so she’ll never miss one of his calls, and even phones other Bush members to track him down when she just has to hear his voice. Still, she can’t wait for the day when they can do “real stuff” together, like, “watch TV, go to the movies, and just hang out.”

Until recently, No Doubt had all the time in the world to hang out. Together since they formed in high school in 1987, Gwen, Tony, Tom, and the group’s founder, Gwen’s big brother Eric Stefani (Adrian joined late), were beginning to think they’d never make it big. Their self-titled debut album, released in 1992, pretty much bombed. Three years later, they forked over the money themselves to put out another CD, Beacon Street Collection, with also went unnoticed. Frustrated, Eric bagged the band to become a cartoonist.

Then came the release of Tragic Kingdom. Incredibly, the first single, “Just A Girl,” rocked the charts, followed by “Spiderwebs” and “Don’t Speak.” To date, Tragic has sold more than 5 million records.

The only glitch is, their sudden success has caused more internal band problems than all their years of struggling ever did. For nearly a decade, nothing could come between them. But for a while last year, it seemed like Gwen’s overnight superstardom might tear them apart. Suddenly, all people were interested in was Gwen’s singing, Gwen’s clothes, and Gwen’s bindi (the Indian jewel on her forehead). The press treated No Doubt as if it was just a girl-and three anonymous background boys. Naturally, the guys felt like they’d been kicked to the curb. “For so long, we were all equal,” explains Tom. “Then we have a hit, and it’s like we’re Gwen’s backup band.”

The group bravely addresses the situation in its “Don’t Speak” vid. “We made a video about breaking up at a time when we thought we might actually break up,” says Gwen. “It was so real. We were fighting while we were filming.”

Making Up

Luckily, the “Don’t Speak” video has helped clear the air and allowed the group to go back out on the road, where they’re sometimes forced to chill together 24/7-which isn’t always easy for Tony. Being in a band with an ex-girlfriend who’s just become a mega-star and hooked up with an English rock hottie can be a major adjustment.

At No Doubt’s next gig in Asbury Park, NJ, Tony’s standing before a door marked “group’s dressing room.” Next to it, there’s another door marked “Gwen’s room.” Tony is not amused. He asks a concert staffer to rectify the situation. “Can you take that down and put something like ‘number two room’? This makes us feel weird.”

Later, Tony opens the door that still bears the “Gwen’s room” sign and finds her talking about the shortlist of men in her life.

“Don’t include me on your list,” he says. “I want to remain anonymous.”

“We were inseparable for seven years,” Gwen pouts.

“Until you met Gavin,” he shoots back.

“Shut up!” she groans.

“That’s exactly what happened,” says Tony, who’s kind of teasing, but not really. “Everything was awesome until, ‘Oooh, big rock star. Well, Tony, he has a private jet. Bye-bye!’ That’s how I remember it.”

“I really love you a lot,” coos Gwen as he walks off. Then she reminds him, “We’re number one!”

“You’re number one,” he says over his shoulder.

But all the traces of resentment and jealousy vanish when the band takes the stage. In concert, they’re simply unstoppable. At the end, delirious fans chase them across the auditorium as they head for their dressing rooms.

Backstage Gwen lets it all sink in. “There was this kid sitting in the front row wearing a Gwen shirt that he’d painted himself,” she begins. “He was singing along with every word and crying . I smiled at him and said ‘It’s okay.’ I wanted to say, ‘I understand; I’ve done that too.’ When you see someone like that, you realize how long they’ve spent listening to your record and how it’s going impact the rest of their life. Whenever they hear No Doubt, it will bring them back to this time period. That’s really special.”

No Doubt’s Dudes

Here, the lowdown on the boys in the band:

Name: Tony Kanal
Age: 26
Instrument: bass
Personality profile: He’s the serious, business-minded babe of the group. When the others got frustrated and wanted to give up before the platinum success of Tragic Kingdom, Tony was the motor that kept the band going.
Romantic status: Single. “I’m not looking for a serious relationship right now – I just want to meet new people and have a good time. I’m into intelligent girls who can give me my own space.”
Stage style: “I like Dickies jumpsuits, workman suits you can get at stores like Kmart, and gas-station-attendant suits. I have about 50 of them.”
Fave tunes: Anything by The Artist and Weezer and “any old school hip-hop”

Name: Tom Dumont
Age: 28
Instrument: guitar
Personality profile: He’s the kinda quiet, self-effacing, all-around nice guy who digs surfing the Net (he handles the official No Doubt home page).
Romantic status: Taken. He met his steady of two years at a club in Orange County, CA. “She’s cool about the whole band thing. I had another girlfriend who couldn’t handle it, and that was when we weren’t even famous yet.”
Stage style: “I usually wear collared shirts – they’re very California. I’m the nerdy character on stage; I love surf shirts with stripes and ugly colors.”
Fave tunes: Anything by ancient heavy-metal heroes such as Black Sabbath or Rush. (He once played in a heavy-metal band called Rising with his sister.)

Name: Adrian Young
Age: 26
Instrument: drums
Personality profile: He’s the closest thing No Doubt has to a party animal. A total jokester who popularized the crew cut with devil horns last year, you’ll usually find him making fart noises or playing b-ball-but probably not taking a shower. “I’ve always been a slobby, stinky guy.”
Romantic status: Taken. He hooked up with his honey almost four years ago while playing a show in Chicago. “She’s smarter than I am – I don’t know why she goes out with me.”
Stage style: “I’m getting into the mod scene-Fred Perry shirts, green flight jackets, stuff like that.” And he’s way over last year’s smeared-lipstick thing: “That was a tribute to my girlfriend, who’s an ex-Goth.”
Fave tunes: Abbey Road by the Beatles, Reggatta de Blanc by The Police, and Ad am Ant’s Greatest Hits.

Gwen Speaks

We got the girl to gush on sex, love-and more!

What were you like when you were in high school?
“I had bad style – my brother bought my this Godzilla T-Shirt and I used to wear it every single day with a pair of really old men’s pajama trousers.”

Describe your first kiss.
“I was in ninth grade at the time. I kissed this boy, Brad – I don’t even know his last name – on a family trip to Catalina Island in California. We kissed on the beach, in the sand, and I remember thinking, Omigod! This is so weird – I can feel his braces! My family left the next day. I wrote him three times, but he never wrote back.”

What’s your greatest vice?
“I’m a big slob. The makeup artist at the YM cover shoot was making fun of me because my makeup case is so disorganized. I didn’t have a cap on my lipstick, and she was all. ‘You don’t know how many bacteria are on there!’ ”

Are you close to your ‘rents?
“I’m very much into my family. We sing together all the time. My sister and I do ‘Edelweiss’ from The Sound of Music, and on the Fourth of July we sing campfire songs.”

How serious are you and Gavin?
“When you get older you don’t date someone just to hang out. I would never go out with a person who I don’t think I might have a future with. All Gavin and I want – I don’t know if I have the right to talk about what he wants ’cause we haven’t been together long enough, but I don’t think he’ll be bummed – is a family and a house. I’m not saying that we’re going to do it together, but we do dream about it.”