The Guardian (March 2nd 2007)

'I just want to make music and babies'

How can you balance 42 gigs in 70 days, a clothing label, a nine-month-old baby and a spot of yodelling? Gwen Stefani gives Chris Salmon some tips

'La! Gur-la! Ah!" Gwen Stefani's ninth-month-old son Kingston is making so much noise that his immaculately-dressed mother stops mid-sentence to look across the exclusive London members' club to where he's sitting with his nanny. "He's OK," says the singer brightly, "he's just in a talking mood."

For years, Stefani, now 37, spoke of her desire for children, to the point where the frantic "tick tock" motif of her debut solo single, 2004's What You Waiting For?, was widely believed to represent her biological clock going into overdrive. Now she and husband Gavin Rossdale - the singer of British grunge-era band Bush - have Kingston.

It's not as though she's a typical parent, though. Although she has a home in London, she's staying in a hotel on her current visit. "It's just so much easier to have all my clothes and my stylist next to me," she says. "Plus my nanny, my manager, my trainer. It's a whole team of people."

Stefani was back in the studio just 13 weeks after her baby was born, making the follow-up to her 2004 solo debut Love. Angel. Music. Baby, which sold 7m copies worldwide (and shared its name with Stefani's clothing line, L.A.M.B, which she launched a few months before the album). Her second solo effort, The Sweet Escape, was released in December last year, a few days after Kingston turned six months old. Given her relish for parenthood, it's surprising she didn't take a longer break. "Well, the good news about my life is that he can come with me everywhere," she says. "But I didn't really want more time off. What I'm doing is too fun to stop. If you were me, you wouldn't take time off either. Y'know, this isn't gonna last forever."

Stefani's ascent to pop princess has been a long and unlikely one, which perhaps explains her desire to make hits while the sun shines. It's 21 years since she formed No Doubt with friends in Anaheim, Orange County. United by a love of Madness and the Specials, the band were unheralded mainstays of the California ska-punk scene for nearly a decade before their breakthrough third album, 1995's Tragic Kingdom. That record sold 15m copies, largely thanks to the power-ballad Don't Speak. The band released two further albums, the second of which, 2001's Rocksteady, featured a shift towards 1980s-flavoured, beat-driven pop, notably on the peppy Pharrell Williams collaboration Hella Good. That year, Stefani guested on R&B singer Eve's Let Me Blow Ya Mind single, a collaboration that won the pair a Grammy. Stefani had somehow reinvented herself as a credible, urban-flavoured pop star. Out went the sweaty tracksuit and vest from the ska-punk days, and in came the haute couture threads of a living fashion plate. The style press had found a new hero. "She embodies all the qualities we look for in a cover star," says British Elle's executive editor, Christopher Hemblade. "She's sexy, stylish and spirited, with a genuine love of fashion. Her look never feels forced. She owned the Dior-meets-Japanese Harajuku Girl look of the last album as much as she does the Michelle-Pfeiffer-in-Scarface reinvention of the current one."

Magazines were suddenly full of articles on how to achieve that elusive Gwen Stefani look; in 2005 Harpers & Queen chose her as its No 1 "fashion icon"; earlier this year she and Rossdale were voted - in a spectacularly meaningless poll - the world's "most stylish celebrity parents".

As Stefani's profile rose, there was speculation that her bandmates were unhappy at being perceived as her backing band. Some sort of solo career seemed inevitable. It duly followed, on three fronts - as a musician, an actor (she played Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator), and as a fashion designer.

"It wasn't about wanting all the attention for myself, although I do love attention," she says of her move from being singer-in-a-band to solo performer. "It was more about being able to indulge my theatrical, cheesy side and make something really fluffy, fun and light-hearted. It was nothing to be taken too seriously, it was just a silly dance record."

In fact, Love.Angel. Music. Baby was one of the most interesting and unusual pop records in years. Alongside an A-list of collaborators including Pharrell Williams, Andre 3000 and Dr Dre, Stefani made a weirdly wonderful album. Sassy hits such as Hollaback Girl and What You Waiting For? sounded unlike anything else on the radio, yet became permanent fixtures on it, redefining the pop landscape along more experimental lines than anyone had expected.

Stefani's ubiquity - all over the radio and TV, fashion pages and celebrity pages - inevitably started to rankle with some. She was criticised for wearing fur, and the album's Harajuku Girls theme led to accusations of near-racism. The real Harajuku Girls are the hip Japanese teenagers who inhabit one of Tokyo's shopping districts. Stefani borrowed their bugglegum style and employed four Japanese dancers -whom she named Love, Angel, Music and Baby - as Harajuku Girls to fawn around her on stage and in videos. One Asian-American writer suggested Stefani had "swallowed a subversive youth culture in Japan and barfed up another image of giggling, submissive Asian women". The mood of Stefani's detractors was summed up in a line from the acerbic US cartoon Family Guy, "I don't know what a Hollaback Girl is - all I know is that I want her dead."

Stefani, though, had other things on her mind. She discovered she was pregnant midway through a 42-date North American tour, playing to 12,000 people a night. "I was surprised how much I didn't enjoy pregnancy," she admits. "Having something growing in your stomach feels so unnatural. Your body's changing and you can't control it. You just feel gross. I was having to get up on stage wearing bathing suits, looking fat. Nobody knew I was pregnant except me. They were constantly having to add extra panels into my costumes. To be honest, I was feeling pretty bad about myself." Stefani says only her adoring audiences of teenage girls kept her going. "I swear that saved me. I realised I'd got a whole new audience, which is crazy. They'd be looking up at me like I was Cinderella. It was the greatest feeling ever. It makes me wanna cry just thinking about it."

When her pregnancy reached its halfway stage, she finally put her feet up. "I just sat in bed watching hundreds and hundreds of TV programmes. I'd really earned that."

With Stefani's attention focused on her bump and the remote, both Nelly Furtado and Fergie took the chance to sashay into her edgy urban-pop spotlight, releasing albums that were obvious descendants of Love. Angel. Music. Baby. Did Stefani feel threatened?

"Not really, because I was so consumed with being pregnant. Besides, it's an amazing compliment to see yourself in someone else. It's also really inspiring. It forces you to move forward in different ways." In other words, it only made her determined to reset the agenda with another album.

After Kingston was born, Stefani stayed at home. "Then after three months, I was like, enough's enough, I want my life back. I'd gained 40lb, so I went on a diet. And I decided to go back into the studio."

She didn't find those first steps easy. "I remember showing up for the first day feeling really chunky, hormonal and guilty," she says. "I was like, should I be here right now? I decided that if it felt too hard, then it wasn't meant to be. But the whole experience turned out to be really great."

Joining Stefani on that first foray into the studio was Keane's keyboard player/songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley. "It wasn't the only offer I'd had to write with people," Rice-Oxley tells me. "But it was easily the most compelling. She's undeniably the queen of pop right now, in the genuine sense of pop music that's in the moment and defines an era. I don't think she gets the credit she deserves for what she does. She really is the source of all the ideas. You can sit in an office putting a pop-star package together, but unless it comes from the person who's at the centre of it all, it won't ring true."

The pair came up with Early Winter, one of the album's slow-burning highlights. Having already made five tracks with Pharrell Williams before the baby, the remainder of the album fell together smoothly, apart from one abandoned session with producer Timbaland. "He's one of my favourites, but I just couldn't write anything," says Stefani. "I'd done three straight weeks of songwriting and I was tired and burned out. He got me at a bad time. I had a little breakdown and went home crying. It was so embarrassing."

Despite that setback, The Sweet Escape was still released in time for Christmas. Then came another setback. The album was preceded by the single release of its least enjoyable song, Wind It Up, a bizarre hotch-potch of hip-hop and Sound of Music samples, which seemed to prioritise experimentation over a decent tune. Stefani can't have enjoyed the less-than-sparkling critical and commercial reception it was afforded. "It didn't feel good," she admits. "But do you think that I didn't know that me yodelling on a song is not gonna appeal to everyone? I was hoping it would win over people's hearts, but I understand that it was weird. But I think the most exciting thing I could do was to mash the Sound of Music with a Pharrell track. Nobody was doing that, so I wanted to."

Her chutzpah is admirable, but, tainted by the single, the album debuted at a lowly No 26 in the UK, with comparatively poor reviews and sales across the globe. Stefani insists she wasn't too worried: "I'm really proud of this album and I knew that it had other more obvious singles." She wasn't wrong. The second release, the album's title track, is currently riding high in charts on both sides of the Atlantic. "I was like, phew," she smiles. "It's always great to have a hit." Happily for her, the album appears to have several more. Happily for us, none of them feature yodelling.

With the album receiving a new lease of life, Stefani has announced another enormous US tour, in which she'll play 42 dates in 70 days. "It is a lot, but I feel like it's going to be easier having a baby outside my stomach, rather than inside."

When she was a kid, Stefani once witnessed Emmylou Harris breastfeeding in the middle of a show. While it's unlikely she'll borrow that idea ("I'm not sure he'll still be nursing by then"), she does think the tour will be good for her and the baby. "Because we've travelled so much, he's never got into a schedule. I think that this tour is going to be the greatest time to get him on one." Kingston will have a crib on the tourbus, which will drive all night between venues. By the time they arrive, a room will have been set up with his toys, a changing station and a rocking chair. "So I'll be rocking him to sleep in the dressing room every night before I go onstage and rock out," she guffaws.

She has also just finalised the latest collection for her L.A.M.B. fashion label, which could explain why everything in the current range is half-price on its website. "Is it?" she asks, surprised. "I didn't know that. I do the creative part." It might explain why she's not yet making any money from the venture. "It's gonna take a lot of years before that happens," she says. "But it's something I'm passionate about that I can hopefully do for the rest of my life."

There's also, she says, going to be a new No Doubt album. "We actually all had lunch yesterday," she says. "We had a heart to heart about things. I think it could be one of our greatest records because we've been starved of each other for a few years. It's really exciting."

Last but clearly not least, she'd like another child. "I'm gonna try and enjoy this year of touring and then hopefully get pregnant again. I'm on repeat. I just want to make music and babies." With a car waiting outside to whisk her to an appearance on Charlotte Church's chat show, Stefani walks over to pick Kingston up for a cuddle. "He's going through a real mommy phase," she beams. "He's my biggest fan. Things are a lot of fun for me right now. I feel very lucky."