The Telegraph (April 15th 2000)

Full of doubt

With her Minnie Mouse voice, crop tops and Indian-influenced make-up, Gwen Stefani became an unlikely American icon. Yet, amid all the acclaim, the lead singer of No Doubt has been tortured by self-loathing and broken relationships.

Every so often there is a celebrity so very beautiful and so very blonde that she inspires not only gossip but also lookalikes. In the Forties, factory owners requested that Veronica Lake change her signature eye-covering tresses because they were causing accidents in the workplace. In the Eighties, concerned mothers, the Far Right and even the Pope voiced their disgust at a new singing sensation called Madonna, who was causing girls to wear bras as outerwear and crucifixes hanging down in barely existent cleavage.

In 1996, a ska-tinged Californian band broke the charts worldwide after a decade of trying. Propelled by the hit Just a Girl and the ballad Don’t Speak, No Doubt sold more than 11 million records in the US alone.

While bassist Tony Kanal, drummer Adrian Young and guitarist Tom Dumont watched in bemusement, their singer, Gwen Stefani, became America’s sweetheart.

Right now, scrunched up on a sofa in Manhattan’s Four Seasons hotel, Stefani herself looks like a drag queen. ‘Yep, me and my make-up artist are rocking the drag-queen thing at the moment,’ she admits. Her once blonde hair is in cerise corn-rows, tight against her scalp. Her eyebrows have been removed and replaced with stark black lines. There is a glittery tear painted in pencil beneath her eye. Her lipstick is purple red, with a thick black outline. Her skin and eyes are dead. She speaks slowly, almost painfully, as if struggling to stay awake. Her sentences trail off, as she tucks her feet under her and snuggles into an oversize silver coat.

For an acknowledged beauty, she looks pretty terrible, as if she’s been sleeping in her make-up for weeks.

Not like a person about to go the gym, which is how she signs off each conversation we go on to have. She looks like a person unhappy in her heart, a beautiful girl wanting to look in the mirror and have visual confirmation of how disgusting she feels inside. Later listening to the tape of our conversation, I can’t help noticing how many times she says the word ‘ugly’.

Acute anecdote will begin, ‘This sweetest little girl came up to me all excited and told me how much she loved me and how beautiful she thinks I am’ and will end with the coda ‘which is crazy, because I was feeling so ugly.’

‘I remember waking up the morning of my 29th birthday and I knew I was going out to dinner with the band, so I spent an hour scrubbing myself, trying to get the ugliness off. And I dressed accordingly, in a stretch waistband skirt because I felt so fat. Then it turned out that they had planned a huge surprise birthday party. And I had to be fat and ugly and turn 29 in front of everyone!’

No Doubt’s new album, Return of Saturn, is based, she says, on the notion that for the first 29 years of someone’s life (the same time it takes the planet Saturn to orbit the sun), a person is only beginning to understand themselves.

‘I thought, “Hmm, maybe that’s what I’m going through. Maybe that’s why I feel so crap.” ‘

I ask how the crapness manifested itself. ‘I was not happy on a daily basis. Before if I was depressed, I would eat ice-cream. But in the past few years that hasn’t worked. I’ve felt in a rut and sluggish. I definitely came off tour saying don’t look at me. I felt like an old tennis shoe, all used up. I still get embarrassed about sitting and singing in the studio in front of the band, who I’ve known for 13 years. I was like “don’t look at me”.’

The less she wanted people to see her, the more extreme her make-up became, until it was practically Kabuki. The first thing she did when she turned 30 was have braces put in. She wore them proudly to the MTV awards. She didn’t even need them.

‘I turned 30 and I just wanted to be a kid again.’

Trying to picture her without the dark lipliner and corn-rows, I ask her if she would be prepared to look bad in order just to look different. She grins through teeth tinged grey by the reflection of her blue-red lipstick.

‘Lots of times I do that. I mean, braces, for goodness sake. I just thought, “F- it. I look bad. So what?” ‘

Stefani sighs. ‘I definitely was carrying an extra 10lb the past two years. I didn’t know why it was there, but I knew I couldn’t get rid of it. I think it was depression? or protection.’

A thought strikes her. ‘The night Tony broke up with me I put braids in my hair.’

Guitarist Tom Dumont sits in on our first meeting, ostensibly because the band is keen to be recognised as a musical outfit rather than mere back-up for Stefani. But he is also there to deflect questions about her complicated relationship with bassist Tony Kanal and her current turbulent on-off romance with Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale.

She and London-born Kanal were together for seven years before he broke up with her. It was Kanal’s Indian mother who inspired Gwen’s notorious bindi fixation. The singer is not supposed to speak about the aftermath of the relationship that inspired their breakthrough album, Tragic Kingdom, in 1997. Like Lindsay Buckingham to Stefani’s Stevie Nicks, Kanal spent the past two-and-a-half years on the road, performing songs about how he had all but destroyed her.

If Stefani looks haggard, Kanal is a picture of bullish good health. There is something of a young Brando quality about him. In a Details magazine interview published after they had just split up, Stefani had revealed that she still pounced on Kanal in the tour bus bed and tried to get him to make out with her. His response? ‘Get off me!’

‘Imagine, he was my best friend. Tony was so much more than just my lover. I depended on him for my happiness. When he confessed that he needed more space and that he didn’t think we were going to make it, I thought, “You can’t say that to me. You’re my best friend. You’re taking my life away from me.” ‘

Kanal, for his part, when I asked him later that afternoon about the potential difficulties of touring with an ex-girlfriend said, ‘The greatness of the songs outweighed any weirdness.’

Dumont becomes uncomfortable when Stefani begins to describe how a temporary break up with Rossdale inspired the new album’s strongest song and debut single, Ex-Girlfriend, with its heartfelt, hopeless chorus, ‘I kind of always knew I’d end up your ex-girlfriend. I hope I hold a special place with the rest of them.’

Stefani is surprisingly frank about what she sees as her shortcomings. ‘I’m insecure and jealous and paranoid. I just want to be worshipped. I just want to be cuter than them and everyone else. Girls get so paranoid about the fact that there were people before them that their boyfriend could possibly have cared about. I don’t want to look like anyone else and I don’t want to be on a list.’

There’s something especially awful about watching a strong, sassy pony of a girl break her heart over a man, and exhilarating as the tune is, the lyrics are incredibly raw. Another standout track is Simple Kind of Life. A paean to a suburban, married life, it begins with the admission that ‘All these simple things are simply too complicated for my life’ and ends with the plaintive whisper, ‘You look like you’d make a good dad.’

The songs from Tragic Kingdom provided a hook-laden, pop savvy antidote to the American musical landscape at the time. Bush, a third-rate Nirvana who found massive Stateside success due, in large part, to Rossdale’s pin-up boy image. The two bands were diametric musical opposites, but in 1997 No Doubt agreed to go on tour as Bush’s supporting act. Stefani and Rossdale became lovers.

‘We were on the same label,’ says Kanal, ‘and they thought it was good exposure for us, which it was. And Gwen’s really glad we did it,’ he whispers slyly.

Of the emotional menage a trois that resulted from Stefani and Rossdale’s touring relationship, she says, ‘I’m not gonna say it’s been easy. But me and Gavin want it to work so much. To tell the truth, I’m way less cool about his ex-girlfriends than he is about Tony.’

Asked in a recent interview if he was keen to have kids with Stefani, Rossdale responded, ‘Well, you really do have to find the right person before you do that.’ The implication being that a 30-year-old woman with pink hair and braces on her teeth might not be the one.

Between our first and second interview, I bump into Stefani and Kanal during New York fashion week. They are front-row centre at Vivienne Westwood. Stefani is wearing a silver leopard-print dress that goes down to her ankles, up to her neck and covers her arms. It looks pretty itchy, and fashion writers nearby turn their noses up at it. But the photographers crowd round her, snapping for so long that the show is delayed.

‘Who was the girl with the pink hair?’ asks a woman who had rushed to take her photo.

Gwen Stefani from No Doubt.

‘Will my daughter be proud of me?’

Yes. I say hello to Kanal, who seems suspicious as to why I’m there. Then I wave to Stefani.

‘Oh, hey! Hey, how are you? Tony, look who it is!’

Today she is all exclamation, whereas the night before she had been sentences half finished, half hearted. Of course, this could be a different kind of melancholy – one that dresses to the nines for high-profile appearances at shows, who waves and smiles, and greets the press with good grace.

Stefani has always been very accessible, a cartoony kind of icon rather than sex symbol, as charming and tame as a Blackpool postcard. At the beginning of her fame in 1997, Stefani dominated MTV with the same rock-hard body,

Minnie Mouse voice, strong, Italian face and Lana Turner bleach job as Madonna. But where Madonna was then in her genteel, pseudo-British phase, Stefani was a pogoing, sweating, crop-top-wearing Tasmanian Devil of a performer. She made her own punk-meets-Vegas-showgirl costumes and wore a trademark bindi on her forehead. Everywhere they played,

Stefani would look into the audience and see little girls (‘babies!’ she calls them) dressed just like her. Madonna had left her young fans long ago in pursuit of respect, post-feminist theory, kinky sex as artistic expression.

Looking at her smiling for the press, I was reminded of a question I’d asked her at the Four Seasons. What did she think of the dichotomy of being rock’s number one Love Goddess, adored by the crowd, yet unlucky in personal relationships. She had blinked her dark eyes several times until the panda make-up began to smudge. For a moment the glittery fake, drag-queen tear beneath her eye looked alarmingly real.