The Guardian (Feb. 15th 2002)
'We'll make one more album, then I'll get pregnant'
Gwen Stefani and No Doubt are back. But maybe not for very long. She talks to Caroline Sullivan
The dressing rooms at Top of the Pops are uniformly tiny cubby holes with barely enough space for a dispirited pile of weathered ham sandwiches, let alone people. Jennifer Lopez supposedly commandeered 15 of these rooms last time she was here. No Doubt have two and, despite being the band's sole woman, Gwen Stefani has democratically crammed in with bassist Tony Kanal, while guitarist Tom Dumont and drummer Adrian Young are sharing a cupboard down the corridor. There's not even room for their entourage of two - their manager and her assistant - who find themselves relegated to an anteroom wistfully known as the Star Bar.
On seeing the 10ft x 6ft space where she'll be spending the next three hours waiting to perform No Doubt's new single, Hey Baby, Stefani flops into a chair and laconically asks: "Can we turn down the lights?" It's not a slur on the decor, even if the dressing room has apparently been furnished with cast-offs from a Warsaw office block. She was up late last night, celebrating her first London gig in three years, which went particularly well. The light is dimmed and 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.
"As comebacks go, up there with Elvis," panted last week's NME, which is over-egging it, but it does convey the unexpected enthusiasm generated by No Doubt's return. Until recently, they seemed destined for pop-footnotery, remembered only for the leaky 1997 hit Don't Speak, and the accompanying 12m selling album, Tragic Kingdom. Subsequent singles and an album in 2000, Return of Saturn, underperformed, as the euphemism goes. Few would have bet on their making one of the splashiest returns of recent times, charting at number two with Hey Baby, and unveiling a new album, Rock Steady, to highly favourable reviews.
Much of the new-found interest is down to Stefani herself. Fifteen years after joining the band formed by her brother in Anaheim, California (home of Disneyland, hence the sardonic play on Magic Kingdom), she has suddenly been deemed 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," she says, uncomfortable with personal celebrity in a way that pop's other Italian Catholic princess, Madonna, would find inexplicable. She shoves her sunglasses back on. "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 magazines, which run shots of her undulating through awards ceremonies and restaurants. Her chum Marilyn Manson boasted of deliberately peeing on her toilet seat, presumably a form of Hollywood greeting. She even bagged a front-row seat at Vivienne Westwood's fashion show, a sure sign of someone who gets her calls returned. Often, she's pictured with her rock star fiance, Gavin "Big in America" Rossdale, but where photographers once aimed to get the best shot of Rossdale, it's now Stefani they focus on.
One reason, perhaps, is that she undersells herself. She belittlingly claims to be an "ordinary, suburban" girl from "a goody two-shoes" family who lived at home till she was nearly 30 (not all that unusual in Italian-American households). "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. She's protective of her London-born boyfriend, whose derivative grunge band Bush sell by the million in America but are less successful at home. He's only her second boyfriend, and their five-year relationship has been bumpy. He was often "linked" with women such as Andrea Corr and Natalie Appleton, and he and Stefani broke up several times. During one separation, she wrote a bitter song called Ex-Girlfriend, which brooded: "I always knew I'd end up your ex-girlfriend."
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. 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 on London and woke up at three in the afternoon and he asked me. I'm so happy."
Her only other relationship, with bassist Tony Kanal, ended with his leaving her after seven years, a crushing experience that inspired Don't Speak. "I'd never envisaged moving on after breaking up with Tony." She glances at Kanal, next to her, and fondly 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.
Jostled along by Jamaican dancehall rhythms, Hey Baby is good enough to almost erase the drippy memory of Don't Speak, which was number one for three long weeks in 1997. Its parent album, Rock Steady (the title is another nod to Jamaica, where it was partially recorded, accounting for its joyous pop-reggae slant) is by some way the best of their five LPs, including Tragic Kingdom.
Like most women who front male bands, Stefani innocently professes surprise that she gets the lion's share of the attention. Echoing Debbie Harry (who wore badges proclaiming "Blondie is a group!"), she refuses to be interviewed 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. But Prince did make up for it by producing the Rock Steady song Waiting Room.
"But this record is all about having fun!" Stefani quickly interjects, pushing her outsized wool beret off her forehead in a conciliatory gesture. Kanal waves his hand in a what-the-hell way and props his feet on a low table. Born in London of Asian parents who emigrated to California when he was a child ("In LA, people think I'm Mexican, black, Hispanic - never Indian"), he has a phlegmatic British attitude to his place in the No Doubt scheme of things. Just as well - 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 golden boy Moby as well as Prince, but it was her guest vocal on rapper Eve's hit Let Me Blow Ya Mind (rarely off the radio last summer) that zapped her to iconic coolness.
I tell her about hearing Alan McGee raving to friends in a restaurant that the song was the best thing he'd heard all year. She leans forward, pleased. "Dr Dre called and I went down and sang. 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 the blockbusting Tragic Kingdom, then facing the poor performance of Return of Saturn.
"I had a very hard time making Return of Saturn. Tragic was all about [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. Compared to most people, I wasn't really depressed, but I was figuring myself out. Saturn was my coming-of-age album."
She makes light of it now, but in an interview with the journalist Emma Forrest at the time of Saturn's release, she confessed to feeling "insecure and jealous and paranoid". Asked about it now, she frowns. "I never said insecure or paranoid. I'm not that way at all. I never said that." (Forrest maintains: "She definitely said it. I felt great empathy for her. She seemed so sad.")
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, even getting misty as she says: "I mean I'm 32 and I think about babies a lot. "