From pop-punk queen to fashion icon, Gwen Stefani has forged a one-woman empire. She exclusively tells ELLE’s Kerry Potter about her rock-star marriage, being a beauty junkie and how hard she’s worked for that body.

Four hours in hair and make-up and Gwen Stefani, 37-year-old multimillion-selling rock star and fashion icon, finally takes centre stage at the ELLE photoshoot. She’s immaculately painted, cartoonishly flawless and Amazonian in stature. White-blonde hair fiercely straightened, wearing a tiny pair of shorts with giant heels, she glares at the camera as her entourage (stylist, hairdresser, make-up artist, US record company execs, nanny) look on silently. So far, so intimidating, until we’re introduced and she immediately breaks into a broad, sunshiney smile. ‘Hey there!’ she says in a girlish all-American drawl and takes my hand. A few days later, we meet again, at a hotel, and this time I remember not to judge a book by its cover. Gwen turns out remarkably unassuming, chatty, free of pretentious pronouncements about her ‘art’, and strangely honest about everything – from how hard she works to stay trim to the problems with a long-distance love affair (she’s married to Brit Gavin Rossdale, former singer in Rock band Bush).

Beneath the laid-back Californian exterior, though, there lurks a steely-eyed determination and control-freakery that comes with the territory when you’ve spent 20 years being famous and building you one-woman empire (see also: Kylie, Madonna).

Gwen Stefani may not overtly act like a megastar, but off-duty she still looks like one. Stefani is never knowingly underdressed. Today she’s resplendent in tight indigo Stella McCartney jeans, a blue cashmere jumper from her clothing line L.A.M.B and black lace-up Alexander McQueen stiletto boots. The hair is artfully piled high, her face punctuated with the neatest eyebrows ever and a slash of sheer red lip gloss. A unashamed grooming fanatic, she’s one celebrity you never see papped looking spotty, drunk, picking her nose or buying a pint of milk in her pyjamas.

‘If you’re going out of the house, it’s better to realise you’re probably going to have your picture taken, to get ready properly and think, well, it’s just part of my life,’ she says, helping herself to a bottle of water before sitting demurely next to me on the sofa. ‘And even if I’m not getting my picture taken, I’ve always enjoyed the process of getting ready. I have a high tolerance of the make-up chair. I’m the kind of person who spends most of my time getting ready for a party, when I finally get there I have to leave within half an hour because I’m bored!’

It’s a good job Stefani is so Zen about those prying lenses, as her pregnancy and subsequent arrival of son Kingston, now six months old, were the source of a million paparazzi shots. ‘It was weird being pregnant in a fishbowl situation. Especially on the days when you feel really fat and disgusting and not cute. Pregnancy was challenging in a way I didn’t expect. I was on tour and I was so sick. It was like PMS times a million.’ Of course, we don’t like our celebrities to be fat, baby belly or no baby belly. Stefani admits she felt the pressure. ‘I worked out with my trainer throughout the whole pregnancy until about two weeks before. I cried during my last session. I was, like, “I can’t breathe, I can’t do this anymore. What am I doing?” It was crazy. All my life I’ve had to work hard to stay in shape. I’ve always struggled with it. I was a little chubby when I was younger, and I didn’t want to be that person for ever. I became a swimmer at school – but only because I wanted to be skinnier! I’m extremely vain – I like wearing cute clothes,’ she grins. On cue, her sweater rides up an inch or two to reveal abs that’d give give David Beckham a run for his money. Six months on from giving birth she looks so healthy and toned it hurts. How did she do that? Boring, old-fashioned hard graft, I’m afraid. ‘There aren’t any tricks, it’s simple maths: you put this much food in, you burn that much working out,’ she says. ‘I gave myself three months – but if I didn’t have an album coming out, there’s no way I would have got back into shape in that time. I worked out with my trainer five days a week, with weekends off. I would really recommend doing weights. I’m not into yoga and Pilates – they don’t work for me and I don’t have the patience. I’m more like a man, I like going to the gym and lifting weights or doing a little boxing.’

Stefani got back into a healthy eating regime thanks to her mum, Patti, and dad, Dennis. ‘Gavin was away working, so my parents came to stay with me and Kingston, and we all ate healthily together. Once you start seeing the results, it’s great – like when I could actually fit into my size Large sweatpants again! And I had three collections of L.A.M.B [her clothing line] sitting in my closet, size 6 [UK size 10], going “Wear me, wear me!’ ”

Now back in her size 10 jeans, what does she make of the size 0 debate, I wonder? ‘It sucks that that’s what is supposed to look good and that’s what everyone strives to be. There’s more to life than being on a diet. Clearly, I spend time thinking about it and it’s something I’ve had to deal with in my life. As I get older I try not to focus on it, it’s boring, it’s a waste of life. What I have learned is that whether I am fatter or thinner, people seem not to mind, they like me either way. It’s more in your own mind than anyone else’s.’ She’s similarly level-headed on womankind’s other current favourite body obsession: cosmetic surgery. ‘Each to their own. I enjoy a great surgery TV show as much as anyone – I watched a lot of those shows when I was pregnant! But it’s pretty bizarre that that’s where we’re at – that you can place an order for how you’re going to look. People take it pretty lightly, but it’s a big deal. I’ve thought it over but I’m not at that stage yet.’

When she’s not making records or designing clothes for L.A.M.B, Stefani likes ‘laying around watching TV, doing nothing’ with Kingston and Gavin in their new LA house (they have house number two in London’s Primrose Hill but are spending the majority of their time on the West Coast at the moment). Stefani and Rossdale, 41, met in 1995, when she was touring with her ska-punk band No Doubt and he was doing the same with Bush (although British, they were huge in the States, but not at home). After conducting an on-off-on again romance for years – they eventually got serious and married in 2002. Is it hard having a two- rock-star household? ‘There are negatives and positives but, for the most part, it works. He can tell me about things going well or badly and I can totally relate to that. But when we’re both working it’s hard to see each other.’ They try to keep those job-related absences down to a minimum. ‘We know that after three weeks it starts to get messed up. We were very lucky to find each other and we have this ongoing crazy love affair, with its hills and valleys, like everyone else’s.’ Presumably one of those valleys was the discovery in 2004 that Rossdale was the father of his old friend Pearl Lowe’s then 15-year-old daughter, Daisy. The DNA paternity test and subsequent court case, the outcome of which has never been made public, were said to have deeply upset Gwen – unsurprisingly – but the marriage survived and she’s clearly moved on. ‘Having Kingston has been the most romantic thing to have happened to us,’ she smile.

As is often the case with new parents, the Stefani-Rossdales enjoy hanging out with other couples with kids. One of those couples is Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. ‘We saw them one time after we had our babies, which was really fun.’ Did Shiloh and Kingston play together, I ask. Gwen goes gooey: ‘Yeah! They were like two blobs when they met.’ Maybe they’ll get married when they grow up? ‘That’d be cute!’

Stefani’s new album, and the thing she keeps politely but firmly steering our conversation back to, is called The Sweet Escape, the delayed (blame Kingston) follow up to 2004’s Love Angel Music Baby, Stefani’s phenomenally successful solo debut, which saw her branch out from No Doubt’s trademark ska-punk sound into hip-hop, dance music and pure pop. Stefani has been in No Doubt, currently on hiatus, since she was 17. It was her older brother Eric’s band (he later left to become an animator on The Simpsons) but, after the suicide of depressed singer John Spence in 1987, the band decided to regroup with little sister on lead vocals. They plugged away on the local California rock scene for many years, living on a smelly tour bus and out of a suitcase. Stefani was certainly no overnight teen pop sensation. It wasn’t until 1997’s Number One single Don’t Speak (remember Gwen’s blue polka dot tea dress in the video?) that No Doubt struck gold, and Stefani found her songwriting mojo. The song detailed her painful split from Tony Kanal, her bandmate and boyfriend of seven years but, despite effectively washing their dirty relationship linen in public, the two remain firm friends to this day.

Although Stefani has been on our collective radar for a decade, it was Love Angel Music Baby that propelled her to stardom in Britain, selling 1.2 million copies along the way, thanks in no small part to first single What You Waiting For? and its ubiquitous, trippy Alice in Wonderland-esque video. Musically, The Sweet Escape sees Stefani sticking with what she knows (insane single Wind It Up aside, with its Sound of Music-inspired yodelling), and many of her collaborators remain on board, notably Pharrell Williams and Linda Perry. The latter, a former rock singer who’s sprinkled her writing and production gold-dust on the work of Christina Aguilera, Pink and Courtney Love of late, has known Stefani since the mid 1980s, when they were the only two girls in bands on their label, Interscope. ‘Gwen is humble, very intelligent and very dorky – and I really like that about her,’ says Linda. ‘She’s like a secret weapon – her humility means you don’t realise how powerful, talented and focus she is at first.’

Visually, like any self-respecting pop chameleon, Stefani has moved things on for this record, binning the Alice stuff and Harajuku girl dancers who trailed her during the last campaign (the result of a longstanding love affair with Japanese fashion), plumping instead for a trashy-sexy new look inspired by Michelle Pfeiffer’s character Elvira Hancock in the classic 1983 gangster movie Scarface. ‘I was in Lake Como filming a video and went out for dinner with a girlfriend who was wearing a really long, clingy, peach polyester dress. It really reminded me of that movie. I worked the look into my spring/summer 2007 L.A.M.B collection, and it rolled over into the music, too.’

Although the celebrity clothing range is often shorthand for ego gone wild, Stefani, who launched her quirky streetwear line in 2005, does seem genuinely enthralled by the process of designing clothes. Yes, it’s an extension of Brand Stefani, a lucrative merchandising opportunity, but, to give the girl her due, Stefani does have previous experience. With a grandmother and mother who loved to sew, she grew up in an unremarkable southern Californian town Anaheim (Orange County – but less The OC, more Swindon) making her own clothes and scouring thrift stores, gradually developing a sense of style, that in a world of glossy Hollywood clones, is unique. As her stylist Andrea Lieberman puts it, ‘She touches on the glamorous, the tomboy, the rockabilly girl, the disco queen. Without a shadow of a doubt, she’s the most innovative woman in music.’ Believe it or not, though, Stefani’s entry into the world of fashion was a nerve-wrecking time. ‘I was so naïve growing up. I knew about buying fabric from the store and making clothes, but I didn’t know about real fashion. I didn’t go to a fashion show until I was 30, and that was Vivienne Westwood in New York. I met her and it was scary – it was like meeting the Queen. She’s got such an edge, I was shaking when I met her.’

But the respect is mutual. ‘I love that she loves clothes and getting dressed up. You have a much more interesting life if you wear impressive clothes,’ says Westwood. Around that time, Stefani also attended a John Galliano Dior couture show and admits to being reduced to awestruck tears. ‘That show was mind-blowing – that someone can have those ideas… It’s like a living, walking art show.’ She composed herself enough to meet and become friends with Galliano, and he designed her wedding dress in 2004, which she wore to her LA and London ceremonies. ‘John seems shy at first and you wouldn’t believe he had all that in him. But then, when he starts to talk about what he loves, it’s just… the passion.’

Stefani see L.A.M.B as a long-term career, not a short-term cash-in. ‘It’s something I want to do for the rest of my life. I’ve always done it,, but I’m doing it on a larger scale now. And I don’t care if anyone criticises it. It’s not going to make me give it up if someone says “Oh, you’re a celebrity.” I know I’m right at the beginning and I have a long way to go. But I’ve got really far, really fast compared to the music. Every collection gets better.’

Inevitability, Stefani has always dabbled in the movie world. She auditioned for Mr & Mrs Smith, the film that brought Brad and Angelina together. How different the celebrity landscape would have been if Stefani rather than Ms Jolie had played Mrs Smith… ‘I don’t know if I nearly go it but I certainly put a lot of effort in. They were clearly looking for a certain girl, and you couldn’t get more opposite than me and Angelina.’ she says. Stefani eventually made her movie debut in 2004 in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, playing 1930s screen siren Jean Harlow to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes. Yes it was a thirty second cameo, but it became an Oscar-winning Scorsese movie. Have the offers been flooding in ever since? ‘Not at all!’ she pouts hammily. ‘Of course, if Scorsese calls me up again tomorrow, I’d be there in a second, but it’s not something I’m thinking about all the time. A film is a big commitment. Right now, I’m enjoying the music, the fashion and the baby.’ And so she must leave, to tend to said baby (she’s the first new mother I’ve ever heard describe her child as ‘rad!’). Life, she concludes, couldn’t be sweeter. ‘I still read a menu and go, “Look at the price – I can get that.” I still think “I’m in First Class, this is awesome,” It’s insane what’s going on in my life – I just can’t believe my luck.’

Gwen Stefani’s new album, The Sweet Escape, is out now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madonna thinks she is ripping her off but who is the bigger star now?

When Madonna accused Gwen Stefani of copying her style last week – “She ripped me off. She married a Brit, she’s got blonde hair and she likes fashion” – it seemed like business as usual. With a new album to promote, her Madgeness has a habit of slapping down her best friends/rivals. But this time it was personal. Because for many, Stefani is the new Madonna, and her new solo album, Love.Angel.Music.Baby, is the album Madonna should have made.

It’s been a great year for Stefani, a genuine pop original in a sea of Jems and Nora Joneses and Didos. She was voted best international female at the 2005 Brit Awards and the and the album, which marries 1980s mutant electro-pop with hip-hop, has sold a staggering five million copies.

More remarkable still in the racially segregated world of American radio and MTV, Stefani, a white singer-songwriter, has achieved crossover to a black audience. The high-profile collaborators on her solo album include super-producer Pharrell Williams, rapper Eve and Outkast’s Andre 3000. The albums most polemical track, “Long Way To Go”, deals with race issues and ends with a quote from Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Last week in concert Stefani dedicated it to the late civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks.

But not only is Stefani more than just a pretty face, she’s also more than just a singer. Known for her outrageous fashion sense (who else would dare to wear a fur stole with hot pants, accessorised with crown and sceptre, on her album sleeve?) she also runs her own diffusion label, L.A.M.B. Stocked by Harvey Nichols in the UK, the range already has a cult following which includes Cameron Diaz and Paris Hilton. In September, Stefani staged her debut catwalkshow in New York, and Anna Wintour, the steel-tongued editor of US Vogue declared, “We will soon see Gwen Stefani’s range L.A.M.B competing with Donna Karan’s DKNY.”

With her ash-blonde bleach and slash of carmine lipstick. Stefani combines old-fashioned Hollywood glamour with tomboy cool. After a cameo as Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, it’s been announced that Stefani will play Richie Berline in Factory Girl, alongside Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick, doomed muse of Andy Warhol.

Stefani knows how to act the good girl while dressing the rebel. She’s never been snapped falling out of a club wasted. And at the grand age of 36, a dinosaur in rock terms, she has a huge teen audience. Despite her vampish appearance, her main audience is young women.

“When I think fans, I think girls, because my overall thing isn’t sexy” she says. Her sparky, self-deprecating lyrics mean that she is perceived as cool but authentic by her teen fans. A self-confessed “dork” and “geek”, she admits she has to watch her weight and makes no secret of the fact that her biological clock is ticking, as the first single from her recent solo debut, “What You Waiting For?”, chronicles.

According to Sarah Ivens, editor of OK! in the US, “Gwen is constantly daring to be different, and searching for all things radical and trend-setting, while remaining almost sugary sweet. She’s a girl’s girl and hangs out in her gang in a way that teenage girls across the country do – dancing, trying new looks and laughing about boys. Her songs aren’t just about love – they are about friendship and fights and standing up for yourself – useful things for teenagers to learn about”.

So is Stefani the sex goddess with the Minnie Mouse voice, or the earnest family girl who claims she has only ever had two boyfriends and who lived with her parents until she was 30?

“She seems very benign and wholesome” says Garbage singer Shirley Manson, who has know Stefani since the mid-Nineties, “but underneath lurks an incredible toughness and powerful directness.”

Stefani was brought up in Anaheim, California, one of four children in a close-knit Irish-Italian, Roman Catholic family. Her parents were “like, totally rad”, but also quite strict. A shy girl who spent most of her time in a bedroom plastered with Marilyn Monroe posters, she nevertheless assumed she was destined for greatness. “I’d always felt famous, at least in Anaheim”, she says. “But when it went worldwide, well that was just plain weird. I’m a very private person, and so getting used to that kind of limelight was never going to be easy.”

In fact, Stefani has been around a lot longer than you realise. She first came to notice as the girl singer with 1980s ska-punk band No Doubt, founded by her older brother, Eric, and guitarist Tony Kanal. “I had no idea I could even sing.” she says, “but my brother has always been my leader, and so I just went with it.” The band developed a cult following, but it wasn’t until 1997 when they released the No 1 single “Don’t Speak”, inspired by the torturous end of Stefani’s seven-year relationship with Kanal, that they achieved global status.

Stefani has spoken frankly about the depression she suffered at the time. But in 1998 she met Gavin Rossdale, frontman of British band Bush, and four years later they married at St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, where Stefani wore a Galliano couture gown and the groom was escorted down the aisle by Winston, a sheepdog decked out in a rose-covered collar and lead.

Cue a fairy-tale happy ending? Not quite. Earlier this year a DNA test revealed that Rossdale is the biological father of Daisy, the teenage daughter of Pearl Lowe (from a brief fling 16 years ago). Stefani was reportedly devastated. But the marriage survived and earlier this year she quipped: “In my next life I am going to be a guy and I’m going to be a complete slut.”

After 8 years as a performer, she controls every aspect of her career, from videos to merchandising. The only true female rock star left on US radio or MTV, she has eclipsed all the competition.

When Mrs Ritchie, pop’s other big Italian-Catholic female releases her new album, also inspired by the 1970s and 1980s dancefloor, later this month, it promises to be a fascinating battle of the bottle blondes. Book a front row seat.

Gwen Stefani: The singer, dancer, actress and fashion designer sees children in her near future

Gwen Stefani, 36, is doing a little short of building an empire. After achieving worldwide success with her band, No Doubt, she is making as a big a name for herself as a solo artist with her debut CD, Love. Angel. Music. Baby.

In between recording and performing, she’s found time to launch her own fashion label, L.A.M.B, and forge ahead in her acting career! But Gwen – who is married to Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale – is also starting to gear herself up for an even more demanding role – as a mother.

With your music and your clothing line, do you ever get a chance to relax?
I’ve had a few seconds to myself. It was weird, and I think that I really brought me down. I was like, “Let me go back to work; I don’t know how to deal with this.” I’m trying to live in the moment and really enjoy this wave that I’m riding.

Do you and Gavin get much time together?
For about the last three years we’ve seen a lot of each other. We’re together most days. But in the previous years, because we’ve been together nine years, there was a lot of time apart because we both were touring so much. But we try not to get too far apart or else that’s when all the disasters come! Stay close, hold hands!

What about having kids?
You know, it’s definately on my dream list. One of the big reasons I wanted to do this dance record was because I knew that my passions were going to change soon and I’m to want to have a family. But right now I’m trying to live in the moment and really enjoy this wave that I’m riding. It’s not up to me, is it? If it happens it happens, it’ll happen when… To me it’s such a miracle anyway, that when it’s suppose to happen to me, I guess it will.

Gavin is British – do you spend much time over there?
We spend a lot of time over there. We had a dog there that passed away, and being over here I think has made it easier on us because somehow it just kind of masks it a little bit.

What inspired you to take a break from No Doubt and start a solo career?
When we did the Rock Steady record, that was probably the highlight for me in the sense that we were such great friends at that point. The tour and everything about it was just so fabulous that I pictured a break was the next thing we needed to do. We have never taken a break from each other at that point. So everybody agreed and I had just gotten married. The band were so committed to each other that you kind of don’t even realize it because it’s just up passion. But it was time.

How did you tell the band?
I said to Tony [Kanal], “I really wanna frickin’ make a dance record,” because I heard a Club Nouveau song, “Why You Treat Me So Bad.” I just thought it would be a fun thing to do, and it was very innocent. Like, Tony would be part of it, we would do it in his studio at his house, and it would just be this thing we were going to do. So we started trying it and it turned into this major project where it was like this challenge I had for myself because I never really wrote songs outside of the group.

What does the rest of the band make of your solo project?
Like I said, everybody was very ready to take a break from each other. Tony was so involved in the record that in some ways it didn’t feel like a huge break. It’s almost like it was out of our hands, like we were sent to each other because the idea that we could actually stay together that long is pretty insane, you know? Eighteen Years! I mean, marriages don’t even stay together that long! I never thought the solo record would turn out as good as it did.

Are you surprised your solo album was received so well?
I never thought the solo record would turn out as good as it did, it has so many different styles on it. I think there’s a nice balance of silly stuff on the record. I mean, the whole idea behind it is that it’s a silly dance record, you know? It was based on the whole Harajuku scene in Tokyo and the idea of self-expression through fashion and being unique and individual. I was on a quest. I was like, ” I know, I’m goin to get some Harajuku Girls and I’m going to roll with them everywhere I go.”

What was the significance of the Harajuku Girls?
It was like my fantasy come true. When I first wrote “What You Waiting For?” I’d written a line in the song and it said “I can’t wait to go back and do Osaka,Tokyo, you Harajuku Girls, damn you got the wicked style.” I was giving them a shout-out basically because they’re wicked.

You’ve had such a long working relationship with your band. Was it hard to adapt to working with new people like Pharrel Williams and Andre 3000?
To get out there and write with all these different people was really hard because you to put your ego aside and you have to get out there and open yourself up to not only new people who you respect and you’re a fan of, but also a whole different culture of music as well. So it was a pretty big trip, I have to say. It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be and my ego had a real problem with it a lot of the time. What really defines me, when I think about myself and what makes me feel good about myself is that I’m lyricist – I write lyrics and I express myself through music, and I write melodies. I don’t know how I’ve ever done it, it’s all a mystery to me, music, like I go, “Wait, how did that song happen?” So the idea of getting in with somebody I don’t know and trying to make that magic happen is kind of risky and intimidating.

But what an amazing experience.
When the magic really did come, it was really unbelievable because the people I was working with were unbelievably inspiring and talented. It was just so amazing after 18 years to get in a room and see how other people do it because no on taught me; it was just instinct and just trial and error. It was really cool to get in the room with Pharrell and go “oh that’s how you do it,” or Dr. Dre and seeing how he does it.

So how did you get into music?
I think what happened was my older brother brought home a Madness record that had one hit, “Our House.” So when we discovered that when we were like 14, 15, that was it! We were in and we thought we had found the coolest thing around. We were really inspired by the whole ska thing, which turned us onto reggae music as well, and then we just said “We’re gonna start a band.” There was nothing else for us to do in Orange County.

Was your family supportive?
My parents were kind of conservative, strict. At the same time they were musicians and I grew up on Bob Dylan. My first concert I went to was Emmylou Harris. So my parents are a little bit of a contradiction because musically they love all kinds of hippie folk groups, but then they’re very Catholic and strict. When we started the band they were very supportive of it being a hobby, but at the same time we were all meant to go to college and be something when we grow up.

You have done so much more than ‘be something’. You did you first fashion show with L.A.M.B this year at New Your Fashion Week. How was that?
It is different whe you know that you’re actually doing a show, you know? It’s a little bit more pressure. I have a whole other accessories line, too. When you put out a record, like with No Doubt, we always have merchandise line. That’s just the way you do it and it’s pretty ordinary.

Where did the name for the L.A.M.B clothing line come from?

I was trying to think of a name and I had a dog, Megan, for 16 years. She was this little stinky dog that I loved so much and I used to call her Lamb. For most of her life she was called Lamb, because she used to follow me everywhere , she was so dependent on me. When she died, I was just trying to think of a name and I call everybody Lamb, like anybody I love, it’s like my pet word. So I just thought it was a good way to kind of let her live on. It’s really hard because it becomes something more that the name it has this whole new life. It just seemed like the right thing and instead of just saying “Lamb,” I wanted each letter to rotate and I would give different names to it, and the first ones I came up with were “Love, Angel, Music, Baby.”

Do you enjoy the process of designing clothes?
The whole design process is something I’ve done my whole life and it fulfils me in the same way as music – you have nothing and then you have something. It’s just a very creative, fulfilling, passionate thing that I like to do. It’s something I’d like to do for the rest of my life and that’s why I started the clothing line. I think that every season it just gets better and better. I still have a lot to learn, though. I’m still totally a baby at it.

So there will be more No Doubt albums?
That’s the plan. I really didn’t know that it would take so long to make Love. Angel. Music. Baby. Then we ended up putting a greatest hits record out and that took up time. We went on tour. It was amazing — we never even thought we would have a greatest hits record out. I never intended for this record to take so long, but I kind of want to ride the wave while it’s out there.

What about acting? You were amazing as Jean Harlow in The Aviator.
I would love to do another movie, like to have a real role – not that that wasn’t – I mean Jean Harlow in a Martin Scorsese movie is not bad! But I would love to do a film. I have something I’m developing right now, but with films there’s so many poeple involved and it costs so much, and there’s so much at risk; I don’t like to talk about it. When it’s coming out, I’ll talk about.

She’s a punk-rock pin-up, a female David Bowie, the new princess of pop, a style icon, a hip-hop superstar, a movie starlet, the red-carpet goddess, a cultural chameleon. Just don’t call her a faker…

“What I would say to those people,” spits Stefani in her helium-tipped Cali-purr, “is do your research. I was in a band with all guys since I was 16 years old. I’ve been in a fucking rock band touring the fucking world for eighteen years. So if you’re gonna try and erase that, then I’m gonna stick my finger right up in your face. ‘Cos you know what? I did it. And you try and be a girl and do that in 1987.

“I know what it’s like to be up onstage with anyone from a stupid, fucking wannabe, punk rock band with a bunch of fucking wannabe punk rock kids in the audience to, like, opening for U2, opening for The Rolling Stones. I mean, we’ve shared the stage with so many different kinds of groups. We played the fucking Warped Tour! I was one of the first females to do that – it was like (tampon-flinging girl grungers) L7 and No Doubt!”

A pause for breath and a flash of that winning Hollywood smile: “You can tell I get a little bit angry… No, not angry, but I feel a little bit like, y’know what? I don’t need to hear it.”

The truth is, Gwen Stefani is whoever the goddamn hell she wants to be. The other night she was Rock Gwen, accompanying her husband and bush frontman Gavin Rossdale to see heavy metal headfucks Helmet on tour (“That was pretty scary”). Earlier today, she was Fashion Gwen, emerging airbrushed-immaculate from three hours in hair and make-up to work the camera like a seasoned pro while wearing pieces of her very own clothes label, L.A.M.B.

And then suddenly she’s Street Gwen as ‘Rich Girl’ – the pop-ragga track she’s worked on with two of hip-hop’s most celebrated heavyweights, Dr Dre and her old sparring partner, Eve – blasts through the photo studio speakers and she lip-synchs along, pulling gangster poses and giggling to herself.

In her astonishing 18-year-career, Gwen Stefani has proved she can turn her hand to anything – bindis, Two Tone, ’80s clubbing, Japanese styling – and instantly make it the coolest thing in the world. For anyone with an ear for cross-pollination and an eye for fun, she is the only 21st-century superstar that matters any more.

Contrary to popular stereotyping, Gwen Stefani was not the token pretty girl drafted in to give parochial, Orange County new wavers No Doubt an MTV-friendly face and send them on their way to mid-’90s stadium success. Sure, she gave them that, but that was just the beginning. As a 16-year-old tomboy, it was Gwen who knew her stuff better than the boys, and first turned her hopelessly un-hip disco-loving bassist boyfriend Tony Kanal (perhaps more famous as the object of her lost affections in No Doubt’s 1997 breakthrough ballad ‘Don’t Speak’) onto what was to become their signature sound.

“I was into ska, like, hard ska. Like I was really into Madness, The Specials and The Selecter and all these groups you didn’t get to hear on the radio over here,” babbles the astonishingly warm (she’ll compliment on the sundress we’re wearing numerous times over the course of the day and ask us almost as many questions about ourselves as we ask her) and beautiful (for a 36-year-old, she could put many of pop’s pubescent pin-ups to shame) Stefani, sitting down in post-cover shoot spivs, to talk about her debut solo album and much-hyped career break from No Doubt.

Named after her fashion line, ‘Love Angel Music Baby’ is so crammed with celebrity cameos that Stefani prefers to call it her collaboration record (“It would be a little too greedy and untrue to call this my solo record”). With André 3000, The Neptunes and New Order just some of the ice-cool names on board, the album has crossed over to become – like Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake and OutKast – the pop record of the year it’s OK to like. From the opening bars of super-kitsch and self-berating bubblegum anthem ‘What You Waiting For?’ (just as likely to be heard on a hip indie dancefloor as it is on CD:UK) through to the style-obsessed Japanese Harajuku girls that littler the lyrics and artwork, it is totally credible, up-to-the-minute sound of now now now.

Actually, according to Stefani, it’s the sound of ex-boyfriend Kanal’s much-derided high-school music taste and her own best-forgotten nights out at Disneyland in the ’80s.

“I used to go dancing at Disneyland embarrassingly,” she blushes, “because there was a club in there and I lived across the street so I’d sneak in! I love all that music even though I couldn’t admit it then. Imagine, like Madonna had just come out, no-one had seen her before; it was like, ‘Who the fuck is that?!’ And Depeche Mode, imagine that music for the first time – you’d never heard that kind of music before! I wasn’t into all that at the time – Madonna and Depeche Mode – but as I grew up I realised that all that music, the stuff that was popular at the time, was the backdrop of my life.

“So I wanted to take that music and make it into a modern record that made me feel good but make it with modern people from the clubs today like Dre and André 3000 and Pharrell.”

Dre’s input metamorphosised ‘Love Angel Music Baby’’s latest single ‘Rich Girl’. “I kind of played him early hip-hop, almost embarrassingly hip-hop – y’know, great stuff really! – like Salt-N-Pepa and all that shit. He’d basically roll his eyes at it all, like ‘Naahhhh!’ He was actually the one who came to me with ‘Rich Girl’. I was like: ‘Really?” How am I gonna make that lyric work for me? ‘Cos y’know, I don’t see a white girl from Orange County singing that!’ And he’s like, ‘Ah, you’ve got to play the characters.’ ”

Meanwhile, André 3000’s involvement spawned two collaborations – the co-written cartoon Prince parody ‘Bubble Pop Electric’ and ‘Long Way To Go’, a politically charged duet in which Stefani and 3000 play the parts of a stigmatised mixed-race couple.

“André was on top of my list because if I could be a boy, I would be like André. I was always excited about coming into the studio to see what he was going to be wearing. Even on his dress-down days, he looked fucking fabulous. I was definitely like ‘Hmm, what am I going to wear for him today?’ ”

What began life as a passing fancy to make “a stupid little dance record” quickly began sprouting countless star turns. Suddenly Stefani was hooking up with everyone from Courtney, Pink and Christina collaborator Linda Perry to NME Godlike Geniuses New Order.

While Hooky and the boys were too busy recording their own album to write an entire track for her, they did find time to record the instrumental parts for the Linda and Gwen-penned New Order homage “The Real Thing”. When she wasn’t being followed around by four mute Harajuku girls every time she appeared in public, Gwen celebrated the completion of her fantasy-party album by dressing up as Alice in Wonderland at every available opportunity. “It was very magical, that’s where the Alice in Wonderland thing came up ‘cos it felt like I was falling down this hole and and plopping into this world, like ‘OK, go here next, do this next.’ It was very surreal, y’know, it was like a maze and I had the clock just ticking in my ears, like, ‘I need to get this shit outta me ‘cos I wanna do another No Doubt record, I wanna have a baby, I want to do all these things’ and I was, like, time is not on my side!”

Baby-envy is a recurrent theme in Stefani’s conversation (the ‘tick-tock’ refrain of recent single ‘What You Waiting For?’ is, she says, the intense clattering of her biological clock). Needless to say, the revelations that she shares a step-child with Supergrass’ Danny Goffrey (husband Gavin Rossdale recently discovered he has a 15-year-old love child with Danny’s missus and Sadie Frost’s best mate Pearl Lowe) have not been enough to satisfy her brooding. Especially when the US tabloids picked up on the story, giving her and Gavin’s marriage the kind of week-in, week-out gossip column coverage usually reserved for supermodels and their crackheads. While legal restrictions prevent Gwen giving her version of events, she is more that ready to ride-out the latest red-top rumours about her and Gavin splitting over the strain.

“Oh, we’re still together. We’re married!” she shrieks, thrusting her wedding ring before our eyes, convincingly aghast, “Marriage is forever, y’know, and, um, he’s great. He has a new record coming out and it’s wicked!”

Does he get pissed off by the fact you’re much cooler than he is? “Well, I mean, that might be your opinion and I should probably slap you because you’re speaking about my husband and you better watch your mouth, girl!” she says, suddenly getting all rude girl on our ass. “He’s got so many amazing gifts and he loves me way! So, y’know, there is no competition.”

Maybe so, but like Rossdale, whose first movie role proper is in Frances Laurence’s Constantine which opens in the UK this week (March 18) , Stefani has also recently turned her hand to acting. Following unsuccessful auditions for Girl, Interrupted and Helena Bonham Carter’s part in Fight Club, she finally got her much-hyped, big Hollywood break last year when Martin Scorsese cast her in a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo as Jean Harlow in his Howard Hughes biography The Aviator.

“I’ve been trying to do films for years. Yeah, it’s hard, it’s very competitive, they’re very specific about what they want and I think also for me it’s doubly hard because I don’t want to do anything that will fuck up what I’ve done already because people know who I am.”

So now she is a fully paid-up member of the north London rockistocracy (well, she does own a mansion in Primrose Hill and is practically a blood-relation of Camden’s most ubiquitous Britpop ligger, Danny Goffrey, these days), it’s time to test Gwen on her indie credentials. Who’s your favourite band right now? “I do love Franz Ferdinand, I really like that, though I haven’t got the record yet. The thing is about me is that – and I admit this! – I’m a bit of a singles girl. I like hits and it’s very rare I’ll give a record a whole listen. The Keane record, that was the last record where I really listened to the whole thing. I got turned onto it because someone at my label wanted me to write with those guys.”

Really?

“I wish I did it! I’m really happy for them that… actually I’m happy for me that I’ve found a record I can listen to the whole of! I love the Coldplay record too, the last one (suddenly starts laughing at herself), but they’re kinda similar, huh? What other British bands are there…”

Well there’s The Libertines, but they’ve split up?

“The Libertines have split up? Haven’t they only been together a few minutes?” They sure have. And have you heard the latest about your mate Kate Moss and Pete? Apparently they’re back together again, it’s all over the newspapers. “I know Kate vaguely, I’ve met her a couple of times… ooh, you love it (salacious scandal) over there, huh? You guys!” Stefani should know: when it’s not her private life racking up column inches, then it’s her professional one. Recent months have seen all kinds of speculation as to what Stefani’s solo move means for the future of No Doubt.

“This record, for me, is exploring some more of my musical, theatrical side that I would never have dared put my band through the torture of. Y’know have little Japanese accessory girls run around with me!” she giggles, “But I miss those guys.” Does it ever bother you what people say about you? “No, not at all. I mean, what am I so worried about? I’ve been beyond the scope of dreams, I have a really fancy life and I have everything I’ve ever dreamed of. So no, I’m not going to about what other people think at this point really.” Our time is up. Gwen stands up, compliments us on our outfit one last time and turns towards the door, readying herself to walk straight into a high-profile TV interview. Suddenly she pauses, and turns back to face us.

“Y’know someone one time called me a cheerleader, negatively,” she smile, arching one perfectly groomed eyebrow. “And I’ve never been a cheerleader. So I was, like, ‘OK, fuck you. You want me to be a cheerleader? Well, I will be one then. And I’ll rule the whole world, just you watch me.”

Her cutting-edge evolving style inspires fashion trends everywhere. Here, Gwen Stefani speaks candidly about her evolution from offbeat rocker to chic sophisticate, her introduction to couture and why John Galliano made her cry. By Phoebe Eaton.

Her eyes cast toward heaven in one of her trademark blessed-virgin-in-ecstasy poses, Gwen Stefani is feeling secretly jet-laggy as she mambos through Harper Bazaar’s photoshoot, where three security guards are on hand to monitor the glistening piles of jewelry that – these days – Gwen’s retrosexual looks seem to demand.

Her hair is definitely platinum, her eyelashes comb-ably thick and her mouth painted a subtle, meet-the-parents pink. As she dances to her first solo album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby, No Doubt’s 35-year-old lead singer-songwriter shows she still has those wicked washboard abs and hard-won tummy dimples that Pilates instructors like to refer to as Apollo’s belt.

Away from the camera, Gwen reverts to a delicate and vulnerable Fay Wray in the leathery palm of an upstairs couch. Hot coffee and Kleenex to dab away the sniffles are produced, and a man-mountain of a bodyguard (Gwen’s very own) lurks nearby. Gwen wastes no time kicking off her ’70s-style suede rock-chick mules so she can wiggle those gunmetal-gray-painted toes.

There is little chance to take a load off recently. “I’ve feel like I’ve been running and running for the past two years,” says Gwen. “But if I get excited about something and the passion comes over me then I can’t stop myself.” Growing up in Anaheim – whistling distance from Disneyland – Gwen was something of a tomboy, whose parents always helped their kids whip up some prize-winning Halloween costumes. Her father worked in marketing for Yamaha, but none of his four children was allowed to own a motorcycle. He did take Gwen to one of her first concerts: Emmylou Harris at the Palomino club.

Her mother and grandmother always sewed their own clothes, and it wasn’t long before Gwen was stitching her own midriff-grazing, suspender-dangling stage wear out of bras, balloon pants and kilts. Going to all those industry award shows at the beginning was a lot like getting ready for Halloween, Gwen once said, and there was something Kabuki about that early crop dusting of face powder, those ballpoint eyebrows and the gash of red lipstick. (She admits lipstick is the one thing she’d pack for a desert island – with a toothbrush and toothpaste.)

Why all the trowel-applied makeup? Gwen hired her first makeup artist in the ’90s, “and I thought, He is so-o-o-o talented,” she says with a musical giggle. (Even in the course of regular conversation, Gwen has a talent for holding a note.) “I was like, ‘This is great! Put on more!‘ ”

It was high camp, but it worked for her, as did the henna and bindis, the rhinestone-studded bra straps, the pizza-guy undershirts with camouflage boy pants and that black headband. Just like Madonna, Gwen has a talent for keeping her fans guessing. And just like Madonna, Gwen was determined to emerge from the chrysalis of her 20s as a fashion icon.

Right now, Gwen is genuinely engaged in L.A.M.B, her edgy clothing line stacked with wacky-waistline pants, Old English-lettered sweaters and va-va-va-vintage-looking halter tops and dresses. But it’s true there has been something of a glorious transformation. That can perhaps be traced to Gwen’s yen for the kind of longevity that making movies can only provide. “But, just to get a part, it’s so competitive, it’s crazy,” she says. Still it never hurts to dress for the job you want. Gwen credits stylist Andrea Lieberman, who collaborates on L.A.M.B, for escorting her through the looking glass to the loot to be had on the Paris, London and Milan runways. At last year’s Golden Globes, Gwen’s street style gave way to a vintage Valentino gown, and there would be more magic red-carpet rides in her future: Cast as Jean Harlow in The Aviator, Gwen Swans through an onscreen film premiere as if she had been born wearing diamonds, white satin and Leonardo DiCaprio on her arm.

But even as she got busy selling 26 million albums worldwide with No Doubt, Gwen battled her body. “If I had my laptop, I’d show you pictures of me in eighth grade,” she says. “That’s the fattest I ever was.”

Yoga didn’t do it for her: “I’m old school,” Gwen says. “I like to run around and sweat, jump rope, run three or four times a week. Before our greatest hits tour last summer, I started weights again. By the end, I got so buff, I thought I was a man!”

And now she’s even more buff than ever. One guesses her recent investment in the latest elliptical trainer – “Whooo-ooo! That thing is hot!” she says – is partly responsible. People are fixated on her incredible shrinking waistline and how they might replicate the feat, but Gwen says she’s tired of indulging the chatter: “I wish everyone would just shut up about it, but I understand why people want to know, because half of my conversations are about working out. You talk about it with your friends all day long.”

Fashion has also been propelled to preoccupation now that Gwen has more of a bank account to speak of. In her latest single, “Rich Girl,” Gwen fantasizes about cleaning out a Westwood boutique in her Galliano gown. The David LaChapelle-directed pirate-themed video was inspired by a Vivienne Westwood ad from the 80s. “I am a Vivienne Westwood maniac!” Gwen says. “She is so magic!”

Gwen remains big on the Westwood bustier, but it was Dior designer John Galliano who was drafted to create Gwen’s cream and pink wedding gown and her 2001 and 2002 Grammy dresses. She has called Galliano her muse and notes that they are both exercise obsessives. “John has a hot body,” Gwen observes admiringly. The first couture show she ever went to was Galliano’s. “I cried,” she remembers.

Someone at the shoot suggests that the music be turned to something upbeat “so Gwen won’t get depressed.”

“I am not depressed!” she insists. Because of what appeared in recent papers, it’s easy to assume that Gwen is feeling slightly peaked. In October, tabloids snitched that Gwen’s husband of two years, Gavin Rossdale of the grunge band Bush, had fathered a daughter (now a teenage model) before he met Gwen. London gurgled that Rossdale had always denied any dalliance with the child’s mother, which is why Gwen is now believed to be, quote unquote, devastated. There were even rumors that the Gavin-Gwen merger was in trouble.

Gwen’s eyes drift when the subject of Rossdale comes up: “Anything you’ve read about Gavin is not true. I don’t even like to talk about him because I’ve gotten in so much trouble mentioning him in my interviews. Our marriage is so sacred that the idea of sharing it with the world, and people judging it, is just gross.”

“They are dealing with this between the two of them,” says a source close to the couple. “But it hasn’t ruined the relationship, ruined the marriage. Gwen and Gavin remain very, very committed.”

Once, after they had split up years ago, Gwen dyed her hair fuchsia. “because that’s what you do when you break up with someone,” she remembers, laughing. “I saw a poster of some ’50s girl with cotton candy-beautiful hair.” Instead, she ended up with a shade of flamingo she lived with for an entire year: Some fans had dyed their hair pink too, and she reasoned it would have been cruel to turn up at concerts with her old meringue hairdo.

“I look at it [now], and I go ‘uccch,’ ” she says softly, “but it so perfectly reflects exactly where I was, which was very unsure of myself. But if I you read the lyrics of that record [Return of Saturn, released in 2000], they are some of the best I’ve written in my life!”

Rossdale remains a constant inspiration. Gwen is always pillaging his closet, and it was he who turned her on to Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, “Gavin’s got really good taste,” she says. “I try to impress, so when I go out to buy something, I think, Will he like it?” she says, “because you want to look for good for the person you are hot for.”

Right now is the first time in a long while that Gwen doesn’t see her future. Gwen does want kids, and the backbeat of her debut solo single, “What You Waiting For?” is a ticking clock: “Your moment will run out ’cause of your sex chromosome,” the song chides.

Gwen allows that having children might help restore some perspective: “I always say that my children are going to save me from my vanity.” But there’s some fear of the unknown, too: “It’s just like being engaged or married. People can try to tell you what it’s going to be like, and you can watch movies, but until it happens to you… I think that’s kind of how it’s going to be with children.” With a house on the West Coast, in Los Feliz, and one in London’s Primrose Hill – “I feel super-duper lucky to have both,” she says – there is now the necessary square footage in Gwen’s life. She considers this: “Having children is going to be my biggest collaboration ever.”

She’s hot, she’s the most beloved pop star in America, and now No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani is about to break out as a solo artist and Hollywood actress. Story by Jessica Hundley, Photography by Mark Squires, Styling by Andrea Lieberman.

She’s not the new Madonna. Sure, there are similarities – the platinum blond hair, silent screen vamping, the ever-evolving, always iconic style. But Gwen Stefani is defiantly her own woman. Rather than strained self-seriousness and ice-cool divadom, Stefani possesses the air of a girl midway down the first drop of a really badass roller coaster, an air of glee and triumph and just a touch of wonder, as if she still can’t quite believe she dared get on the ride in the first place.

After over a decade as the charismatic frontwoman for the biggest ska/ rock/ pop/ punk/ dance band in the land, No Doubt, Gwen Stefani is about to have a ball on her own. She’s got her clothing line, L.A.M.B; she plays Jean Harlow in the new Martin Scorsese film, The Aviator. And on her first solo album, Love, Angel, Music, Baby, she collaborates with the likes of Eve, André 3000 and Dr. Dre. Complex caught up with her – where else? – in Hollywood.

Gwen Stefani: Oh my God, I’m so glad you didn’t talk with me yesterday. Yesterday I was in the worst mood. One thing about my success is that, well, there really isn’t room to complain. If you even try to, you look so stupid. But let’s face it, sometimes at the end of a day of interviews, I’m like, “I can’t do the last one; they’re going to hate me! I hate myself!” I mean, how long can you really talk about yourself? I enjoy it, but come on!

Complex: On that note, let’s talk about you.
Alright!

Tell us about your new record.
It just kind of snowballed. I heard this track by Club Nouveau and this Lisa Lisa song. I had been listening to them forever, groups that I grew up on-Prince, the Time, Lisa Lisa. I was a ska girl, but secretly we loved all these bands. We’d go see Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam at the Anaheim Theater. I heard that Club Nouveau track, and I felt like it would be fun to do a dance record, a fun ’80s record, the kind of stuff they played when I used to go to the Circle K or Knott’s Berry Farm.

Was finding time to do this album your main reason for taking time off from No Doubt?
I wanted to do a film. I had this clock ticking in me. I was going, “Oh my God! You’re going to die and you’ve been doing the same thing for 17 years!” Actually not the same thing, because we’ve gotten to be a lot of different types of band. It’s an incredible thing to become famous with your best friends. I wouldn’t have changed anything about it. But I was pushing myself, getting married, going on that last tour. I knew that I was running out of it me and I needed to get going. Because when would I do a movie? When would I have a baby? I knew that I wasn’t going to put out this album unless it was ridiculously good. Because doing it away from the band-I’m not going to ruin everything we’ve done. So I never though it would be this great. And I don’t mean that in a braggy way; there was so much collaboration that I can say that and not feel too guilty about it. That was one of the biggest challenges, to put my ego over in the corner and say, “Shut up!” To go ahead and dive in with people like André 3000 and be open to their ideas. The lyrical thing is very difficult for me to give up. I’d be saying, “Go ahead, give me your ideas,” but in my head I was going, “Fuck off!”

It must have been frightening to work with people other than the band you’ve been working with your whole career.
I was crying before I went in, I was so scared. But I needed to get my feet wet and I did it. In the first song we did, Linda Perry came in and she had this chorus, “What You Waiting For?” and she was basically saying to me, based on my confessing my fears about the whole project, “Gwen, what the fuck are you waiting for?” For someone to come to me with something like that – it basically triggered something in me. It was like, “Fuck me! I think I just wrote my first single.”

A lot of people see you as an inspiration.
It’s crazy. I guess I’m getting used to the idea of being an inspiration to someone. I never saw myself as that person. I always feel liked I can’t even spell and I like to watch Entertainment Tonight. I mean, I wake up and it’s all about me: “What can I do for myself today? Work out? Write some songs?” So when I hear that I’m inspiring, I feel guilty. I’m that same person from high school who happened to get lucky.

But being who you are, without apologies, is inspiring in itself, isn’t it?
It’s funny – I remember thinking, I wish I could be in the ’30s, it was so glamorous and I would have fit in better then! But I know how lucky I am that I got to be with the guys and tour the world and be a fly on the wall in a man’s world. I know I’m respected; when I go in with my band, my vote counts. And I know that when I go into the label, everyone is looking to me for the idea. And it’s a great feeling as a women to have that. There’s moments of every woman’s life when they feel, Oh, I’m less? I didn’t realize. When I wrote “Just A Girl,” I realized, you just do your own thing and then at one point you realize, “Oh. They look at me like that!?” But it’s great to be who I am right now.

Who inspired you?
I always loved the whole starlet thing. Marilyn Monroe and Jean Harlow, anyone who had blond hair! Madonna-she can do anything. Musicals. Julie Andrews was really magic to me. I loved old movies. I loved the clothes and the stupid stories about making it big and how to marry a millionaire. I loved glamour.

What do you think makes a woman sexy?
I feel like there’s kind of room for everyone. I love Bjork. I love Pamela Anderson. We need all the different varieties. I think sexiness comes from talent and creativity. Not just in women, but humans in general. I find myself attracted to anyone who is passionate and talented. I just get crazy over someone like John Galliano or Vivienne Westwood, these talents that you can’t touch.

So those are the things you find attractive in men as well?
Well, I’m married and I’m pretty preoccupied with that. I’ve never really had too many relationships. Just two really, and I married one of them. I never had that whole dating experience. When I hear friends talk about “I’m seeing this younger guy and this older guy who has kids,” I’m like, “You’re seeing two people at one time!? Ahh, my God! Tell me more!” I can’t imagine going on a date. I’m too insecure. But in my next life, I’m going to be a guy and I’m going to be a slut. I’ll try that one on for size. But I do have my fantasy guys.

Andre 3000?
I want to be him! If I were a boy, please let me be him!

You idolized Jean Harlow and now you’re playing her in The Aviator?
It was such an honor to play someone who was such an inspiration to so many people. I mean, she was the original “original.” I’ve tried out for so many movies and it’s such a humiliating and challenging and horrible experience. But there’s something a kind of fun in that challenge. I feel like I have it in me; if someone gave me a chance I feel I could use those muscles. They sent me the script and I found the one page that had my one line. And even though it was only one line, when I went to the first audition, I kept messing it up. Afterward, they said, “If Marty calls, will you come down?” And I’m like, “Hello? Duh!” And he called and I got the part. Basically, they told me, “Come down and audition for him and don’t dress like a rock star.” They wanted me to dress the part.

That mustn’t have been hard, since you obviously love playing dress up. Was that part of what inspired the L.A.M.B line?
That’ll always be a passion, but I hated talking about it in my youth, because I was like, “Well, fuck, the music is the most important thing. ” Everyone would want to talk about it and I was like, “I’m not going to talk about my friggin’ outfit!” But then I met this stylist, Andrea Lieberman, who is like the cooler, Jewish, New York version of me. We just connected and after that we always worked together. She taught me a lot about fashion. I was so ghetto. I came from Orange County and I didn’t know anything. I was a thrift store girl. But Andrea taught me about that world and how artistic and expressive it is. L.A.M.B is the one thing in my life that is so easy. It fulfills me, but it doesn’t have that deep thing that music does, that weight. It’s just so greedy that way. You sit at a table and think of what you want to wear.

On the album you talk quite a bit about the fashion in the Harajuku area of Tokyo.
One thing that I’m learning is to have some sort of theme and roll with it. With the line we try to have that and with the album too. On the album there are quite a few things, but my main inspiration was Harajuku. It was never intentional, but at the same time I knew that that was my muse, if you can call an area a muse. Japan is so inspiring anyway, because you feel like you’re on a different planet. One of my favorite parts about my success is being able to travel and I try to keep my eyes open. In Japan, I was just blown away by the fashion, the creativity. This whole thing of taking bits and pieces of our culture – for me it’s this whole ping-pong match between East and West and how we really inspire each other. It keeps evolving. The whole album is about that too, musically, becaue I was inspired by things I love. I was stealing and stealing and stealing, but trying to make it my own as well, trying to make it become fresh and new. It was yours and now it’s mine!

And then it becomes someone else’s.
Hopefully it becomes the backdrop for someone’s prom when they’re making out! I feel like the whole Harajuku theme is part of my impression of that place and the way that these girls have found a way to express themselves. You can see where their inspiration comes from, but they put a twist on it and make it theirs.

Experimenting without inhibition.
And I feel like No Doubt tried that, too. We’ve never stood in one place. It’s funny. I was in the garage the other day, and I looked down and there was this box of old clothes. It’s always such a bum-out to get older, really. At a certain point you think you’re never going to get older because it just doesn’t happen to you, and then all of a sudden you realize it’s happening to you. That’s when the race is on. I’ve had a great time, but I mean, fuck – I didn’t do this! I didn’t do that! I looked down at these clothes and I thought, Thank God I’m not that girl anymore. I was really proud that I had been that girl, but I’m not anymore and I’m so grateful. It’s weird how you have to evolve and change that way.

Especially in what you’re doing. As a pop icon you have to be continually evolving.
That’s really weird. Being famous or being a celebrity of whatever, I mean, I can’t even say the words without laughing.
When it happens to you, let’s face it, egos are big and it feels really good to have the attention. But you quickly realize it’s all fake. Whatever everybody thinks about me is just a collection of facts they gathered that could be true or not true. And whether what they think about me is good or bad, I can’t pay attention or it’s going to make me crazy. If they build me up to be more than I really am, I’m going to look in the mirror and say, “You’re fucking not that!” And I’m going to be hard on myself. Or the opposite: If they say negative things, it tears away your confidence. So I try really hard to know that my reality is me and my world and the people I see who are actually living in my world. Right now, before the album comes out, is a magic time. Because no one has judged it yet and the fake world hasn’t taken over. It’s still the real world, thank God.

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

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.

What a Year! The best (and worst) of 2004

Introducing Gwen Stefani as our chick of the year. By Parker Ray.

It’s hard to believe that this is Gwen Stefani’s first gay press interview – especially considering how much we queer boys love our stylish, ballsy, independent, hard-working, trendsetting, pop star blondes (real or dyed). So much so they can all be addressed by their first names: Madonna, Debbie, Britney, Christina, Kylie.

But there is a difference between the ladies above and Gwen. She nails it when she tells Instinct, “I don’t feel like I’m very controversial, I don’t want to upset people. I just want to make them feel good.”

That pretty much sums up why Gwen Stefani is our Chick Of The Year. Not only would we switch for her in a heartbeat – just name the time, place and what kind of wine we should bring – but she embodies the type of female that gay men should be adoring. She doesn’t stir up controversy because, really, what does that accomplish other than killing trees to print copies of Us Weekly and Star?

No, instead Gwen inspires – and she doesn’t need to get hitched in Vegas while drunk or expose herself ina coffee table book to get attention. She just works her butt off. And she can’t get enough of creative people or the creative process, and vice versa. Just look at her list of collaborators: The Neptunes, Moby, Andre 3000, Linda Perry, Eve, New Order – among others.

By having Gwen as the first chick to appear solo on our cover, Instinct is officially proclaiming her the queen of the next wave of gay icons. She has all the ingredients we love without any of that lame tabloid baggage. And, even though she swears a lot (which we totally dig), in the end she’s what we all wish we could be: Classy, successful and respected.

INSTINCT: Before we get started, I just want to say happy belated birthday. Did you get to do anything fun?
GWEN STEFANI: Thank you! I did. My husband had a little barbecue party for me. I hadn’t seen anyone because I was in London or wherever I was. [Chuckles] So they all came over and we ate lots of food and caught up with each other.

You have two big “firsts” coming up: Your first film role, in The Aviator, and your first solo album. Obviously, they’re two very different experiences. What was the most thrilling aspect of being in a film, especially one with Leonardo and directed by Martin Scorsese?
I’ve been wanting to do film for a long time. One of the big reasons I took time away from the band is, at the end of the Rock Steady Tour, it was almost like we were married to each other for 18 years and we never took any breaks. We kept going out of pure passion.

It seems perfect that you are playing Jean Harlow in The Aviator.
[Laughs] When I read who they wanted me to play, my stomach was on the floor – oh my god, Jean Harlow! [Laughs] Howard Hughes basically gave Harlow her first movie role and the scene that I’m in is when they go to the premiere of the film, Hell’s Angels, at the Mann Chinese Theatre. I thought it was kind of ironic that it was my first movie role and I was playing Jean at the premiere of her first film. It’s actually Herb Ritts’ fault that I got the part.

His fault? How’s that?!
Herb Ritts was the one that had done this photo shoot for Teen Vogue with me. It was his idea to do this Marilyn [Monroe] on the beach thing. I was just happy to finally be working with Herb. Martin Scorsese saw that cover on the side of a bus station and thought, Hey, let’s get that girl to try out.

Is this the type of movie role you were hoping for?
There is no small part in that film, but it was only; like, five days of work. It was really incredible to start off playing someone like Jean Harlow. I haven’t done much acting but I have a feeling that it is something that I would enjoy. Not that it can compare to playing for 20,000 people and getting that immediate reaction being on stage.

And with the new record, Love. Angel. Music. Baby, you get to explore your inner dance diva.
I had a specific record I wanted to make. But it snowballed and became this really hard, ego-busting project. The clock was ticking in my ears; I thought writing dance songs was going to be easy. You don’t have to think about anything, you just have to write, “Get on the dance floor and boogie.” I wasn’t looking to have a theme, just a guilty pleasures record.

Guilty pleasures. We like those. And because you’re, well, Gwen Stefani, you had quite the opportunity to work with a bunch of great producers.
I had a list of people I wanted to work with that I thought I could get a certain sound with. Linda Perry came up to me at the Grammys and I was so happy for her because I had known her for years. We were the first two girls signed to Interscope and I was happy for her success because I knew her journey. She’s a very aggressive girl. [Laughs] She came up to me and basically put me in a headlock. She gave me this intense look right into my eyes and she said, “We’ve got to write songs together!” I’m just kind of thinking, Dude you’re not Prince, you know? [Laughs] How are we going to write my dance record?

She did write that get-your-bootie-to-the-dancefloor song for Pink.
I was looking to work with people like Prince and Andre 3000. Robert Smith. Anyone that I liked back in high school.

But, come on, this is Linda Perry.
I didn’t know how talented she was. That some girl could run the board and has all this equipment, tons of guitars, drums, as massive studio, it was all very impressive for me. I’ve done this for half my life and I’ve never gone in and had girls who were able to run the board. We ended up the writing a song that first day called “Fine By You” which was basically: I don’t want to be inspired, I just want to be lazy, but whatever I want to do is fine by you and you like me still. I came back the in the next day and [Linda] didn’t even look at me when I walked in; she had been up all night and pressed play and this crazy maniac track came out. What the fuck? You did not just pull that shit out! It was almost like a dare. She’s, like, “Gwen, what the fuck you waiting for? You gotta do this shit now.” We looked at each other that dat and there was definitely electricity and you could tell it was all meant to be. It still bugs me that she wrote “What You Waiting For?” She wrote that line. Nobody fucking cares, I know. Nobody cares but me.

In that single you mention that this “dance” record you’re making is going to bring you “brand new fans.” As if you needed to make a dance record to get the gay boys to like you anymore…
[Laughs] You know, my hairdresser, who’s gay – go figure – he was, like, “There’s a category for gay guys?” Like you all like the same type of music. I knwo that isn’t true. I’m not stupid. I understand that there’s a whole club scene. Trust me. I’m surrounded by gay guys.

We guess it’s just that this solo project, especially since it’s more dancy, is going to bring even more gay guys to worship at the Altar of Gwen.
The one thing I’d like to mention: I feel really uncomfortable when people say I’m going solo because I feel this is definitely not somewhere I’m going. I feel like if I was going solo I would be leaving the band and not compromising and writing this whole record on my own and it would be pure Gwen. This is simply just me going, Fuck, I wouldn’t mind trying something different before I die.

That makes sense. Do you ever get a chance to make it out to queer clubs and check out all the hot, unavailable men?
[Laughs] I’ve been out a little bit in New York. It’s not like I make a conscious effort to go to gay clubs. It’s just that a lot of creative people that are around me just happen to be gay. This one time, up in San Francisco, we went to this one club one night and watched all these performances. I just love all the creativity and self-expression and I think that’s what attracts me to the scene.

It’s funny to have you on the same label as Eminem and a lot of other homophobic rappers. Plus, with regards to No Doubt, you have a lot of reggae and Dancehall influences, and both of those are rather homophobic.
I don’t really think twice [about hanging out with gay people], that’s why it’s weird. A friend of mine, he’s this talented and successful guy, and he told me this rapper didn’t want to work with him because he is gay. I was, like, “What?!” People would pay anything to work with him, so I was shocked. And the Dancehall/reggae community, I love that music so much, but to have a connection to that intolerance is really embarassing.

But Rufus Wainwright is now on Geffen, which is, I think, a subsidiary of Interscope.
I know Rufus. My head designer at L.A.M.B, Zaldy, and Danilo (who does Gwen’s hair), they’re all friends with Rufus. Sophie Muller, a good friend, she filmed Rufus’ video [for "April Fool's"] at my house. He’s sweet. I emailed him a few times and he called me wanting to do something together, but I was already 20 songs into my record.

Have you ever fallen for a gay guy?
I’ve had dreams where I was making out with Danilo, he’s so handsome. If my husband went missing I would definitely ask Danilo to fill in. [Laughs] he’s a great friend, though. But no, I’ve been smart never falling for a gay guy because you’ll only get your heart broken. right?

Some girls never learn that.
[Laughs heartily] Your funny. *Some* girls…

So L.A.M.B just launched this past spring. That’s what, like, 20 gigs you have going now? Singer, songwriter, actress, designer, babe…
[Laughs] That last one is the the toughest one! Clothes are something I’ve done my whole life. I’ve been sewing my clothes since high school. My stylist, Andrea Lieberman, she’s the New York super way cool Jewish version of me. I’m from Orange County so I don’t know that much about high fashion. Andrea opened my eyes to that whole world. When I started I was, like, I can’t do it. Sitting in front of piles of faux fur trying to make decisions. It’s a full-time job that I’m trying to do as a part-time job. But I fucking love it so much, it fulfills me, it’s my passion, that I would die if someone took it away from me right now.

It’s all women’s clothes right now?
Yeah.

So we’re going to see a lot of drag queens wearing your stuff?
[Laughs] I hope so!

Okay. you’re in the spotlight a lot – so how have you avoided the scandal?
I think I’m a pretty good girl. I try to be a good girl. I don’t feel like I’m very controversial. I don’t want to upset people, I just want to make them feel good. At this point it’s all about sharing and hoping people get what I got out of this record. I made it for myself. I just want to share what I’m doing and if they get off on it, too, that makes me feel really good. I really, really wanted to make a record that was going to be played in the clubs, yet I have yet to hear it in any of the dance clubs. But I’m going to be going out a lot to see if I’m making people dance.

Okay, I’ll do my part to make sure the gay boys are shaking it to your songs.
You’re sweet! Thanks for talking to me, dude.