Sunday Telegraph (March 27th 2021)
Singer Gwen Stefani admits she’s obsessed with how she’s ageing
Global superstar Gwen Stefani talks about the lasting impact of her hit song ‘Just A Girl’, falling in love again, and the never-ending fascination with her youthful appearance.
When the world met Gwen Stefani in 1995, the frontwoman for pop-punk band No Doubt seemed to materialise out of nowhere. With their smash single ‘Just A Girl’, forcefully sung by Stefani with an edge of brattiness, the band blew onto music charts and TV screens in a puff of fairy floss rather than smoke.
Visually, Stefani was an instant icon: a gen-X Varga Girl with bleached hair, ab-revealing crop tops and a sparkly bindi that would become a signature (and later controversial) accessory.
More than 25 years later, their breakthrough song continues to resonate – it’s been immortalised in classic ’90s movies like Clueless and Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion; more recently, it appeared in 2019’s Captain Marvel and was covered by Pink on her last tour.
When Stefani took up a Las Vegas residency in 2018, she named the show after the song, which was particularly timely since the feminist anthem had taken on greater import in the face of the Me Too movement.
“When I sang ‘Just A Girl’ in Vegas, it really resonated,” the singer tells Stellar down the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “It felt more important and had more meaning than it had ever had in all the years I’ve done that song – because of what was going on in the world. I’m so proud of it.”
While the hit has had a renewed and lasting impact, the 51-year-old singer never expected to still be performing it so many years after she first wrote it. “I really did think that song would go out of style for me, personally,” she says.
“How am I going to be that punky girl who wrote that song, and now as a woman, as a mum, as all the different roles you play as your journey goes on… How would I do that still?”
In fact, Stefani admits that when she wrote ‘Just A Girl’, she wasn’t sure it would hit the airwaves or if she would ever perform it at all.
“The song was written from such a pure, innocent place – never thinking anyone would hear it, not even really knowing what a feminist was, not trying to tell people what to do or how to feel, it was just what I was feeling. It’s interesting so many people felt the same way, or still feel the same way.”
With the Vegas residency wrapped up just weeks before the pandemic hit, Stefani had plenty of time to ponder her next move as she spent lockdown in a tiny cabin in Oklahoma. She was there with her now-fiancé, US country singer Blake Shelton, and her younger sons Zuma, 12, and Apollo, 6 – two of the three sons she co-parents with her ex-husband, British musician Gavin Rossdale of the rock band Bush (they also have 14-year-old Kingston).
Stefani and Shelton met in 2014 when they were both coaches on the US version of The Voice (“I had no idea who he was,” she admits) and literally fell in love on national TV.
They revealed their relationship in November 2015 (four months after he’d announced his divorce from US country singer Miranda Lambert), and got engaged last October with a ring he’d hidden in his pick-up truck.
Shelton was on tour when COVID hit last March, with Stefani along for the ride on the tour bus, so they drove to the cabin on his ranch to hole up and lock down. For two multi-millionaire recording artists, it’s no superstar hideaway: a shack with a double bed, fold-out bed and couch for the boys and lots of cooking and home-schooling.
At one point Shelton called in a sound engineer to work on his music, and Stefani had a light-bulb moment. She’d scored two unexpected country hits last year by duetting with Shelton, and while she had detoured to make a 2017 Christmas album, Stefani’s last studio record was 2016’s confessional This Is What The Truth Feels Like, which discussed her messy divorce from Rossdale – who recently called their public split after 20 years together the “most embarrassing” moment of his life.
Stefani had kept herself busy with work on The Voice, a role in hit 2016 film Trolls and the successful Vegas residency but being in lockdown, with a sound engineer on hand, got her thinking about rebooting her music career.
“After being quarantined in Oklahoma with the boys for 100 days straight I was quite thirsty to investigate any music coming out of me,” she tells Stellar.
Her working method is to text herself song ideas – she salvaged one called ‘Cry Happy’ and recorded it with Shelton’s engineer. “After hearing it back, there was this fire in me. Usually, I have to pry myself to get to the next thing. But if I’m feeling that fire, it has to be something,” she recalls.
“I wanted to go back to where I first started loving music, which was ska and reggae, when we started No Doubt. I think I was 12 when I got introduced to that music; it really spoke to me and defined who I was. I wanted to go back and be nostalgic and write music with that good energy – up-tempo, with positivity.”
Two songs came back-to-back, her latest singles ‘Let Me Reintroduce Myself’ and ‘Slow Clap’, with lyrics that remind the world of Stefani’s talent. “Not many people get to be as lucky as I have, which is to have a trail of music – not in a braggy way, but in an ‘I’m so blessed’ way,” she says.
“The idea behind ‘Slow Clap’ is that everybody experiences feeling like the underdog at some point, not just at school. It continues to follow you through your life, because you’re always evolving, always being challenged with new things and playing different roles.”
It’s a topic she explored last year in her video for ‘Let Me Reintroduce Myself’, which saw Stefani revisit some of her most iconic fashion choices through the years – from the polka-dot dress in the ‘Don’t Speak’ video to the black beanie from ‘Hollaback Girl’.
For the 2021 remake of ‘Just A Girl’, Stefani repositioned the bindis below her eyes, not between them, to avoid the cultural-appropriation claims that have dogged her.
While the singer always made an impact on red carpets, music videos and – as Pinterest can attest – her still very popular pink-hued gown from her wedding to Rossdale, she tells Stellar that her sense of style wasn’t the work of a hired professional.
“I was always a misfit,” she admits. “I didn’t have a stylist telling me what to wear. They were my clothes,” she recalls.
“Those clothes became peoples’ Halloween costumes! The more that you’re yourself, the more unique and original you are. I look back on all the things I’ve done and think, ‘Gosh, how did I stumble upon that?’ [But] I didn’t – I was just being me. The one thing I always knew was that I would always follow my truth and what I liked and who I was.”
Comments on the YouTube video for ‘Let Me Reintroduce Myself’ – and often made by the public in general – revolve around how she still looks as young as she did in the original music videos. It’s a sentiment echoed by Shelton, who said in February, “I don’t know how it’s scientifically possible to look how she does.”
While celebrities who defy the tell-tale signs of ageing is a perennially popular topic, it’s been particularly newsworthy of late due to fellow 51-year-old singer Jennifer Lopez and her olive-oil beauty remedy. Like Lopez, Stefani isn’t offended by public interest in her appearance but does acknowledge the associated pressures.
“It’s really hard for everyone to age and have to face life. Especially for females and people who have been in the spotlight it can be daunting, but you tackle it by just trying to be the most beautiful version of yourself inside and out,” she says.
“People talking about my ageing is a compliment, I guess. I’m kind of obsessed with how I’m ageing, too.”
If you’re hoping she would reveal a miracle anti-ageing cream – or, indeed, olive oil – as her beauty secret, you’re out of luck. The singer puts her youthful glow down to her relationship.
“Blake is the greatest guy. I look back over the past few years and look at pictures of when I first started kissing Blake, and I look the best I’ve ever looked in my life in those photos. Love must look good on me. I feel like that does show through – it really does.”