Tag: Tony Kanal

Gwen cuts loose

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

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

The Coronation of Gwen Stefani

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

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

Bound for glory

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. Read the rest of this article »

Blonde on blonde

Gwen Stefani has ditched No Doubt in a bid to be the next Madonna. Complete with English husband and questionable movie career.

“My album will probably end up being called Fuck You or something,” shrugs Gwen Stefani and then cackles for a while, shattering the silence of her floor-to-ceiling white suite in the sickly contemporary St Martin’s Lane Hotel. Read the rest of this article »

Dancing Queen

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

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

Blown away

Thanks to a radical hip hop reinvention and a series of credible creative hook-ups, Gwen Stefani has emerged in recent times as a major music player. Now, on the eve of her solo launch, the iconic blonde talks about boys, girls, celluloid dreams and making “a little dance record of her own”. Pop goes the superstar!

Somewhere within Gwen Stefani there must be an element of sadness, dourly gestating, imprisoned, waiting to break free. Not that you’d know it from the woman herself. You won’t get so much as a breath of negativity from eight straight hours in her company. Spending time with Gwen is like mainlining a curious, buoyant cocktail of Sunny D and liquid seratonin; it’s as if helium has magically found it’s way into the air-conditioning. She oozes essence of zesty, goofball, feelgood California. She’s got a succession of quickfire, cheerful punchlines beamed straight in from The OC script office on some delirious repeat edit and raises an iconic eyebrow by way of saucy punctuation for each one. If I had a dollar bill for every time I heard the word ‘dude’ coming from her big, smiley, slasher Hollywood mouth, I’d most probably have a couple of hundred bucks by the day’s end. Read the rest of this article »

Solo Stefani

A lion in lamb’s clothing By Elysa Gardner

NEW YORK — If you want to know how Gwen Stefani maintains her youthful enthusiasm, not to mention her girlish figure, try chatting with her for half an hour. But take your vitamins first.

“I’m just going to keep talking until you ask another question,” Stefani chirps, plopping onto a sofa in MTV’s green room. No Doubt’s 35-year-old, cellulite-free lead singer has described herself as having been a chubby teenager, but her breathless energy suggests the metabolism of a hummingbird. Read the rest of this article »

Just A Girl

For the past 17 years, she has stood as the punky siren of the band No Doubt. But there is more to Gwen Stefani’s platinum-blonde life than meets the eye. There’s her fashion line, her acting career, and her first solo dance album with a little help from some music-industry heavies. Christopher Bollen meets the girl underneath it all.

When a certain then-unknown pop star landed for the first time in the New York and climbed into the back seat of a cab, she spoke those immortal words that have now become firmly cemented in rock-music legend: “Take me to the center of everything.” The driver dropped her off in Times Square. Whatever your feelings may be about this particular pop icon, the anecdote does offer a profound lesson: It is relatively easy to stand for a few seconds at the heart of the universe (in 1978, according to this cab driver, that would be the corner of 42nd and Broadway). The tough part is being able to stay there. Read the rest of this article »

The Greatest Show on Earth?

Well, No Doubt’s greatest hits, anyway – which is what they’ll be playing on their last tour before Gwen Stefani drops a solo CD. By Chris Willman.

Shooting what little breeze there is on a hot, insufferably still LA day, Gwen Stefani suddenly feels the need to cull a statistic from a bandmate. “How many times do you think you’ve thrown up in your life, Tony?” she asks. Tony Kanal looks like he’s not certain he wants to play this game. “I’m not sure it’s a lot,” the bass player answers with a nervous chuckle. Better to focus on the immediate future. “This time,” he insists, “it’s gonna be much more mellow and healthy.” Fifty points if you’ve already figured out our subject of the day: rock touring. Their little O.C.-teem-ska-band-that-could, No Doubt, is hitting the amphitheater circuit in June, pairing up with blink-182 for one of the summer’s most anticipated tours. (One of the most economical too: Ticket prices top out in the mid-two-figure range, or about $250 cheaper than it’d cost you for a similar seat to see Madonna.) It’s a nationwide victory lap in honor of their recent blockbuster hits collection, The Singles 1992-2003, whose new song, a cover of Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life,” afforded them yet another top 10 smash (their tenth). This could be the optimal point in their history to catch the band: They’ve been together long enough to almost count as seasoned elder statesmen – 17 years, which is about 170 in rock years – but, being still in their 30s, they’re vigorous, scrappy, and in no danger yet of outgrowing their audience. Read the rest of this article »

It’s good to be Gwen Stefani

With a solo album in the works, a new fashion line in stores, and a big movie on the way, Gwen Stefani’s career is on fire. Oh yeah, and did we mention she also has that rock-god husband, Gavin Rossdale? Today she let us in to her fab world. By Jennifer Kasle Furmaniak.

When Gwen Stefani walks into the trendy 60 Thompson hotel in New York City, it’s obvious why she’s touted almost as much for her unique style sense as she is for her amazing singing and songwriting abilities. She’s dressed in an old pair of Levi’s, a Vivienne Westwood belt, a funky Libertine jacket, and sexy-as-hell green Christian Dior snakeskin stilettos. The ensemble is made even more striking by Gwen’s signature platinum-blond hair, porcelain-pale face and saturated red lips. Read the rest of this article »