Rolling Stone (March 28th 2002)

Tour Report: No Doubt

The big question for the new No Doubt tour: Who's going to be in the house? Will it be the kids currently digging the multiformat hit "Hey Baby"? Or those who have followed the SoCal quintet since 1995's Tragic Kingdom? Even the band isn't sure. "I have no idea what the audience is going to be like," singer Gwen Stefani said with a laugh recently, happy to be home in Los Angeles after a seven-- week trek through Europe and the U.S. "At least I know this much: We'll be playing to some people who never heard of No Doubt before `Hey Baby.'"

That has happened to No Doubt several times in the last fifteen years, she says: "We've gotten to be so many different kinds of bands - we were a garage band, then a ska band, then a punk band. When we started playing more than just ska, the ska people said, `You're over.' I'm sure we lost people, but we picked up some new people, too. And then when Tragic Kingdom happened, with every single it was a totally different audience. We don't discriminate. We're not the cool band, and people who like us are not the cool people."

Noting that pop-radio listeners are hearing "Hey Baby" alongside hits by Britney Spears and other teen-targeted acts, bassist Tony Kanal views the tour as a kind of mission. "This is our chance to bring the people who listen [to pop radio] over to the rock side," he says. "Show 'em there's so much more out there." To do that, Kanal says, No Doubt will alternate highlights from previous albums with songs from the current Rock Steady. The new material is intricate: the quartet, which travels with two supporting musicians, needs four keyboard rigs to replicate the textures of "Hey Baby." All that technology doesn't bother Stefani, she says, because playing the new music so far has been euphoric live: "These are songs you can really dance to we were out dancing a lot when we made the record. The mood is just so up, energetic, and that dance-hall beat is the sexiest beat. I think this is probably our sexiest music."

As for making herself sexy, Stefani says that ever since the early days when she was the rare girl member of an Orange County punk band, she has enjoyed "getting all made up and doing the girl thing" before shows. These days it takes her forty-five minutes to get ready, but when she gets onstage she never thinks about being sexy: "I never really pulled that side out. Once in a while I'd throw a bellybutton around, because my dad said I couldn't go out of the house like that. But when you get onstage and you're into the music, it's not a girl thing or guy thing. It's about getting the audience off."