Attitude Magazine (December 2012)
Big Gay Following
Gwen Stefani and No Doubt team mate Tony Kanal lead Owen Myers through the back catalogue
On the sofa of a razzy London hotel suite, Gwen Stefani is miming the act of fellatio. At last, that’s what I think the 43-year-old entrepreneur, mum of two and No Doubt frontwoman is doing. We’re talking about ‘Bubble it if that’s what you want,’ a lyric in the title track of the band’s current album Push and Shove. There seem to be a myriad interpretations. ‘I think it means to have champagne,’ muses Tony Kanal. Gwen’s bleach-haired bandmate, ex-boyfriend and career-long collaborator sitting beside her, ‘You know, drink up!’ Gwen’s not convinced. ‘I think it means…’ - and gives a knowing look, pouting her pillar-box-red lips, cupping her thumb and index finger in an ‘O’ and emitting a satisfied slurrrp! How’s what as an introduction to a superstar?
No Doubt first captivated the world with Don’t Speak, a confessional mid-tempo number that chronicled the end of Gwen’s romance with Tony and spent three weeks at Number One in 1997. The song catapulted the band to instant stardom, and their album Tragic Kingdom sold 16 million copies worldwide. As a breakout break-up song, Don’t Speak was perhaps the Someone Like You of its day, with the exception that, as Gwen puts it, ‘the problem that I was writing about’ was playing bass behind her. Gwen and Tony’s relationship healed, and Don’t Speak turned out to be a red herring for the joyous, immaculate pop singles that No Doubt would go on to produce, such as Bathwater (from 2000’s introspective Return of Saturn), Hella Good (2001’s Rock Steady), and their excellent cover of Talk Talk’s It’s My Life. Going it alone, Gwen made two B-A-N-A-N-A-S solo albums flanked by pom-pom-wielding Harajuku Girls, and started her own clothing line inspired by her iconic Valley Girl punkette look. ‘It was kind of a guilty pleasure,’ she shrugs now of her solo career, which spawned one of the very finest dance-pop records of the Noughties, Love. Angel. Music. Baby.
Gwen Stefani isn’t the polite but withdrawn LA star one might expect to meet as we sit down with Tony to reflect on their career. Up close, her poise and beauty are striking, but her magnetism really comes from her vivacious eye-twinkle as she swears like a sailor, hollers the lyrics to her songs, and warmly reveals how happy she is to hear that the angst-ridden Return of Saturn was the soundtrack to my emo teenage years. Perhaps she describes herself best in No Doubt’s fabulous recent single Settle Down, where she raps, ‘I’m a rough and tough and nothing’s gonna knock this girl down’ among Eastern strings and a fist-pumping drum beat.
It turns out that ‘bubble it’ actually refers to smoking marijuana from a pipe, but Gwen takes my incredulous questions about an ‘oral act’ in her stride. How many other pop stars could dovetail from blowjobs to bongs without skipping a beat?
How wasted were you in the Push and Shove video?
Gwen: It was real! We did it guerilla-style on the streets of New York, we didn’t even really plan to do it. Literally the day before, we were like, ‘Let’s just get in the van’. We just had a light on a stick, a camera and a boom box.
Tony: And some tequila! The great thing about making that video was that it was so spontaneous. When we started, everything was on the fly, so it’s nice to still do those things.
The new record is great. Why did you choose to have Mike ‘Spike’ Stent [Madonna, Beyonce] produce and oversee the whole thing?
G: He mixed Rock Steady, and he had a lot of great ideas to pull things together that were done with different producers. We just fell in love with him, and he did so much production on my second album The Sweet Escape.
T: It’s good to have another person in the room to be a referee for all of us. That way we fight less!
G: He wrote to us yesterday saying ‘Congratulations’, because it’s been a crazy journey to get this record done. We were just praying to God that we could write a song, let alone having any idea of what sound it would have. Settle Down is to do with being completely overwhelmed by everything, and just trying to get back to not feeling insane.
Juggling family life must have added another obstacle.
G: That was the biggest obstacle. I was so burned out by having the second baby.
T: Gwen’s a great mom of two boys, and she wanted to be a committed mom, and she was also really committed to making a great record with us. Watching her deal with that challenge and rise to the occasion was really inspiring. She made it work.
G: They were so patient and encouraging with me. Tony and I wrote lyrics together, and it was the first time we’d ever done that on a record.
Why leave it so long before writing songs together?
G: Well, with Tragic Kingdom I was writing about him! He was the problem I was writing about. [T laughs] We wrote a lot on my solo records together, though. That was super-fun because we were writing the kind of music we never did in No Doubt. It was the music he grew up on. When I met Tony he was 16 and into Club Nouveau, Prince, The Time, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. He brought that music to me.
So did Love. Angel. Music. Baby. feel like indulging a guilty pleasure?
G: That was the idea. It was all about making a record that is not supposed to be serious but is your guilty pleasure because it’s so cheesy and fun.
Carly Rae Jepsen is having success with a similar 80s pop sound now.
G: Mmm, that’s true. That’s interesting.
You’re not embarrassed by the solo records, are you?
G: Well, I don’t think I could have done them if I went into it thinking, ‘This is my big solo moment’. I was thinking, ‘Let’s make a dance record, it’ll be so much’. I had such a clear idea of what I wanted it to be.
You’re probably the only band to ever put a birth-control dispenser on your album cover [for Return of Saturn].
G: That was ‘cause I was thinking, ‘Am I gonna have a baby? Am I gonna be married?’ It was a really nasty time period for me. I can’t listen to that record. Ever.
It’s my favourite No Doubt album.
G: [gasps] That makes me happy but… I found the journals to that record and I can’t read them. It’s so dark!
Especially a lyric like ‘I’m full of artificial sweetener, my heart’s been deceitful’.
G: [gasps again] I can’t believe that. I don’t wanna know about that! That record is so self-indulgent. There’s some really good songwriting on that record, though. I think Magic’s in the Makeup is one of the best songs I’ve ever written.
Your new single Looking Hot addresses a similar theme to Magic’s in the Makeup.
G: It’s true! You’re a smart little boy! It’s great that you could pick up that it’s not literal. I wanted to write a song about how people see me, how I see myself, and how I don’t give a fuck what they think. Looking Hot is a song about how everybody hides who they really are behind a facade. It’s funny that people don’t see the irony.
T: [witheringly] You know, it’ll be like, ‘Hey, let’s play it at a fashion show’.
G: [laughs] Yeah
Gwen, do you get pissed off by the tabloids always commenting on your looks?
G: You have to understand that when you’re in it, none of it’s real. There’s nothing real about it. What difference does it make if some person says this or that? It’s irrelevant to me.
There’s a great line in your song Yummy: ‘If yours didn’t come out right / Go to Kinkos, Xerox me’. You must have noticed that your style influence - pink hair and bindis - are very on-trend.
G: That’s true. I don’t really think about it, though. Early on, I realised that just embracing who you are is gonna make you more unique. That’s a lot more interesting and powerful than trying to be something you’re not.
I liked it when you had braces.
G: I wore the braces because I had always wanted braces, and then I got rich and I bought ‘em!
What were you listening to while making Push and Shove?
G: We listened to so much great music while making this record.
T: There are all these songs that we wish we wrote. So we put those songs on, pulled the lyrics up, and we got inspired. This record was different from previous records - we were really investigating songs this time.
G: You listen to a song and you’re like, ‘This is the vibe. I want it feel like a John Hughes movie. I want it to be the prom song.’
That sounds like quite a different approach from a song like Don’t Speak, which is very raw.
G: It is a little bit different.
It seems more considered.
G: I think it comes with the experience of being a songwriter. Me and Tony aren’t really ‘musicians’; we just kind of go on instinct. Every song has a different story of how it comes. Don’t Speak was a total re-write. That was a song that my brother had stayed up all night writing on the piano, and then me and him re-wrote the whole song. [Looks at Tony] I can remember writing the lyrics at your house on your computer! That computer by the kitchen.
That sounds really intense. I could never do that after ending a relationship.
G: Well, we didn’t end a relationship. We were friends and bandmates more than anything else, and the relationship developed in different kinds of way.
As a gay teenager, I really connected with Just A Girl.
G: Aw, cute! I wrote that song because… when you’re a little girl, you don’t really think about the differences between humans, and then all of a sudden you start to realise, ‘Wow, if I walk down the street, a boy might whistle at me or notice me. I can have power over people because I’m a girl. And then at the same time, people don’t treat me the same way because I’m a girl. My Dad won’t let me drive at night. There’s so many things I can’t do.’ As you grow older you realise your limits of being that gender - and your strengths. I was probably 23 or 24 when I wrote that song and it was so naive, because at the time no one was ever gonna hear the song since we were never going to make it. I can remember playing it live before it was even recorded, though, and it just connected. That song made people go off.
It must be fun to sing now.
G: It is fun, and you know what? I was always thinking, ‘How will it last?’ ‘cause the lyric is ‘girl’, and obviously I’m not just a girl any more. But you break that song down and it still really holds up lyrically.
It’s also a really good ‘fuck you’ to the people that thought you were ‘just a girl’.
G: That’s true! [laughs]
I read that your red dress from the Tragic Kingdom album cover was stolen from the Fullerton Museum in California.
G: Yeah. It’s gone! That dress was bought for $15 at a store called Contempo Casuals in the mall, which is kind of like Primark. I remember that was a huge time for me, because me and Tony and had just broken up. I finally did my hair bleach blonde, and I discovered that I was a songwriter. I found myself.
T: That dress kind of symbolises that.
G: It does for me.
Which song of yours do you wish could have been a single?
G: [sings] ‘Go on baby get the lighter, we gonna start the fire’.
T: I love that song [Start the Fire from Rock Steady]. We have to invite everyone over to my room tonight, put that song on and have a drink before we go out.
G: I mean, that never would have been a single, but I fucking love that song.