The Guardian (Aug. 11th 2002)
How Gwen got her groove back
Gwen Stefani, the blonde-haired frontwoman of No Doubt, flops into a chair in the interview room and laconically asks, "Can we turn down the lights?" It's not a slur on the decor, even if the room has apparently been furnished with cast-offs from a Warsaw office block. It's just that she was up late last night, celebrating a gig that went particularly well.
The light duly dimmed, Stefani cautiously removes her sunglasses. At 32, she still has the peachy skin of a 20-year-old, and her tiredness is hardly visible. "Better," she says, sliding into a roughly horizontal position.
Until recently, Stefani's band seemed destined for pop-footnotery, remembered only for the 1997 hit I'm Just A Girl and the accompanying 12 million-selling album Tragic Kingdom. Subsequent singles and an album in 2000, Return of Saturn, underperformed, as the euphemism goes. Few would have bet on them making such a splashy return, one hyped by the New Musical Expressthus: "As comebacks go, up there with Elvis."
Much of the new-found interest is down to Stefani herself. Fifteen years after joining the band formed by her brother in Anaheim, California, she is of-the-moment. Chiming with the current taste for unconventional female stars such as Chloe Sevigny and Sarah Jessica Parker, her camp, goofball blondeness and tremulous vibrato are now hip, causing her to be reassessed by many who had never taken her or the group seriously.
"Any perception of you is weird. You have your own life and reality, and anything people might think of you is their own perception. It's like when you don't see someone for a while, and they say, 'Your hair's grown', or, 'You're so skinny', and you don't realise it about yourself."
Stefani's activities are now routinely reported in gossip mags. Often, she's pictured with her rock star fiance, Gavin Rossdale.
One reason for the interest, perhaps, is that she undersells herself. She claims to be an "ordinary suburban" girl from "a goody two-shoes" family who lived at home till she was nearly 30. "I didn't travel at all till Tragic Kingdom. I'd been to Italy, like, 15 years before. One of the best parts of the band is meeting people."
One reason she was attracted to Rossdale, she has said, is that he wants a wife and children (the couple are due to marry in September, with twin ceremonies in London and Los Angeles). She's protective of her London-born boyfriend, whose band Bush sell by the million in America but are less successful at home.
According to Bush biographer Karen Shook: "I got the impression Gwen does that female thing of thinking that she's so normal and he's so deep." On cue, Stefani muses: "My boyfriend told me to read The Bell Jar, and I got totally into Sylvia Plath's saga and journals and Ted Hughes. She died across the street from our house in Primrose Hill (in north-west London). The purple house."
The couple's paparazzi appeal is obvious. Stefani is the sunshiny yin to his studiedly dark yang. She thinks their relationship was predestined and talks of seeing him on TV before they met and knowing they would be together. "I didn't have a choice; I met him (while supporting Bush on an American tour) and fell for him. We got engaged on New Year's Day. We had a night out in London and woke up at three in the afternoon and he asked me. I'm so happy."
Her only other relationship, with No Doubt bassist Tony Kanal, ended with his leaving her after seven years, a crushing experience that inspired the song Don't Speak. "I'd never envisaged moving on after breaking up with Tony." She glances at Kanal, next to her, and pats his knee. "I'm grateful to have him as a friend."
Her new-found coolness could turn out to be fleeting, but there is a sense of having permanently crossed a line. On one side, the zany frontwoman of an achingly naff Los Angeles ska band (ska was mysteriously popular in southern California when No Doubt formed in 1987); on the other, the confidently stylish leader of a quartet that's suddenly had its lease on the charts renewed.
Like most women who front male bands, Stefani professes surprise that she gets the lion's share of the attention. Echoing Debbie Harry (who wore badges saying "Blondie is a group"), she refuses to do interviews alone, and was outraged when American music mag Spin computer-erased the other three from a cover photo.
Kanal, though, is resigned to it. He tells a story about Prince flying the band to Paisley Park to play on one of his songs. When they arrived, it was Stefani alone who was ushered into the studio, while Kanal, Dumont and Young ended up twiddling their thumbs outside. "We expected to work with him, but it didn't work out that way," he shrugs.
Fashion magazines approach Stefani to model, and other musicians seek her out for the tomboyish sass she imparts to a track. She has worked with Moby as well as Prince, but it was her guest vocal on rapper Eve's hit Let Me Blow Ya Mind that made her cool.
"Dr Dre called and I went down and sang," she explains. "The band were like, 'Go for it!'" She casts a sidelong glance at Kanal, who grins encouragingly. "It was fascinating to go into Eve's world, so different from anything I've done before. When I left I was like, 'Whoa, I've just worked with Dre!' "
It provided an entree to an audience that had probably never bought a No Doubt album. As Danny Eccleston of Q magazine puts it: "She's taken on board that bling bling R&B lustre, which gave her a sense of being culturally aware of that world. She looks very modern now. She's always been colourful, with those cropped tops and crazy shoes, but now R&B is like that, and she fits in."
Her biggest problem these days seems to be accepting that she's first among equals in No Doubt, but a couple of years ago she was depressed and shellshocked by two years of touring, then facing the poor performance of Return of Saturn.
"I had a very hard time making Return of Saturn. Tragic was all about our (Stefani and Kanal's) relationship, and then I went on tour for two years. I felt like I was fine when I got home, but then I went into a depression, which has never happened before."
Cheerful again, she says something very Stefani: "I've blossomed so much with this album, but I remember something I said in Jamaica. I was sitting on a raft and talking about how we'll make one more album and then I'll get pregnant."
At this moment, she's every inch suburban Gwen. She even gets a little misty as she says: "I mean, I'm 32 and I think about babies a lot."