Melody Maker (Sept. 13th 1997)
Over And Doubt
No Doubt have went from garage band to worldwide stardom. But is it the end of the band as we know it? We join them in New York to talk about Gwen’s love life, what the future holds for the band, and, er, masturbation…
You get a better class of religious nutter in New York. Standing on the corner of 6th Avenue and West 44th, just off Times Square, a scrawny preacher man is making his point with a microphone and full-on sound system. "Diana rejected Jesus he bawls, his eyes burning with indignation," and that's why she's dead.
She is not a saint. A few good deeds don't bring you righteousness. Only the Lord can do that." Above him, a giant TV screen shows the princess frozen in a faint smile
Over in the palatial Trump Tower, in a suite overlooking Central Park, another child of Jesus is contemplating recent events. She gives a sad little sigh as she remembers watching Diana's funeral, live at 4am that morning, and turns to face the figure dozing on the nearby chaise longue.
He looks like he's spent the evening bowling and drinking strong lager and the thought of him partying like a mad fool makes her think of the MTV Music Video Awards two nights before, where her band. No Doubt, won the Best Group Video gong, and the guy- No Doubt drummer Adrian Young went on-stage in a nappy. She smiles, quietly.
"He's getting sued for that," giggles Gwen Stefani, No Doubt singer and all-round gorgeous individual. "We got a fax last night saying that the guy from Funkadelic has been wearing a diaper on-stage for 30 years and he had it patented and if Adrian does it again, he's going to sue him."
"I'm gonna fart in public on television and then trademark it," grins Adrian. "So when somebody does it, I can sue them."
Adrian first stepped into a nappy after the police threatened to charge him with indecent exposure for drumming in the nude. He took to it immediately.
"The guys in the band have a lot of bodily fluid problems," reveals Gwen, coyly. "Adrian has this thing, because he drinks a lot, called burn ass. It's like he's on fire. And when he started wearing a diaper on stage, he said it was so much more comfortable because it had a cushion for his sore bottom. The thing is, he always pees on stage as well. He started that during "Just A Girl" in our live set. First he would leave to go for a pee while I was doing a shout out to the girls and then he got a diaper and peed onstage. It's crazy, but it's funny."
And did Adrian piss in his nappy for the MTV Awards?
"Yep," he beams, "right on the stage."
WELCOME to the topsy-turvy, slightly pervy world of No Doubt. You'll know its figurehead, Gwen Stefani, from the beautifully tear-jerking Number One ballad "Don't Speak" and the perky, female empowerment anthem "Just A Girl". She's the one with the grace and looks of a 40s film star and the manic bounce of Symposium on a pogo stick; the bodacious, ska- loving Californian babe whose sweetness is most definitely our weakness. You'd call her the Queen of Hearts if it was any other week. Or any other day, even.
"My boyfriend (Gavin Rossdale from Bush) was saying 'I can't believe how I feel now'," Gwen sighs. "We weren't even in England and he was like 'I need to be there'. I never really followed Princess Diana, but it's pretty upsetting to think she had to die like that. I was watching the funeral this morning in the middle of the night and it's so sad. All the people coming together. God."
Caring about something that she has no obvious emotional connection with is a typically Gwen thing to do. She's a sucker for sob stories, melting at the slightest hint of misfortune or anguish. Of course, in this case, it's easy to draw comparisons between the paparazzi's treatment of Diana and the award-winning video for "Don't Speak", in which the band are manipulated by photographers.
"I got booed by photographers the other day," relates Gwen. "I I walked out of a party and these bootleggers were pretending to be fans who wanted me to sign some stuff. I refused because it's unfair to the real fans that buy the stuff for hundreds of dollars and they booed me and it was a really bad feeling."
"We were at an airport at six in the morning and these guys were trying to get us to sign stuff and our security guard was telling them to leave us alone," adds Adrian. "And they went 'What happened to you guys? You were so nice. I can't wait until next year when your second album dies'. An obvious fan, as it's going to be our fourth record. And then they kept approaching and they got so close, they started walking right up to Gwen and touching her."
"It's weird though," Adrian continues with a smirk, "because at the MTV awards, the Spice Girls manager tried to get me to back off when I went to change in their wardrobe room. I was just getting out of my piss-filled diapers..."
THIS keeps happening time and time again.
Just as we're approaching the heart of No Doubt, one of the band releases a torrent of toilet-related nonsense, which either means the foursome are essentially a bawdy, juvenile affair or that there's some mean displacement tactics being employed here. Halfway between the two is where we'll probably find the truth, as No Doubt are clearly still coming to terms with the fact that the world's only interested in Gwen.
"I was extremely pleased that we won that award," says Tony who, coincidentally, was Gwen's boyfriend for seven years before he dumped her. "Because we did the video to make a point and I felt vindicated that it was the right thing to make the video about. It‘d be easy to say it doesn't matter, but it felt amazing to win."
"It was so exciting," nods Gwen. "I remember the guy going 'No Doubt' and we just went 'Yaaaaaaaaaay!'. It was really emotional for me. I was trying to control myself and I looked over at Tony and he was crying and then when you look at each other and you all start having tears. It's a feeling I've never had before. I want to win everything now because it's such a good feeling."
Thinking more about the parallels between Diana and Gwen and the harassment the singer has endured from the media, we inevitably find ourselves talking about the band's new single, "Spiderwebs". It's a party tune, first and foremost, but the lyrics present a cautionary tale of... guess what... an over-obtrusive fan. Hmm.
This is starting to get spooky.
"Does the person that you wrote the song about know yet?" asks Adrian.
"No," Gwen replies. "He still calls me all the time. I haven't called him in two years and he calls and leaves messages. He doesn't even care that I don't ever call him back. He says 'Yeah, give me a call because I really need to talk to you'. He used to be really sweet and call me up and recite his poems and play me songs... but at three in the morning! I guess I was too nice. I could never just go 'Please don't call me'."
Was he a former boyfriend? "No. He was just a friend, a guy that I met and he called me one day and he never stopped.
I have to be in my room to get my messages, so sometimes I come back and I have a massive tape to listen to. I get a lot of crank callers going 'Hey Gwen, we think that you 're a total bitch! Aaagh!' Like, totally mean messages. And then some are like, 'Er, we just wanted to say that we love you!’ I get a lot of fans. I should change the number really."
"I was at a punker party in Longbeach this summer,' says Adrian, "and this girl said to me 'I don't like the girl in your band very much. She's so f***ing stupid'. And I go, 'Do you know her?', and she goes 'No, but I don't like her', and I go, 'How can you say that when you don't know her' and we got into a big argument."
"Aww." Gwen looks genuinely upset at this.
"Then at the end," continues Adrian, "she was sitting on some guy's lap and I said 'In case you're wondering if you're an asshole, you're a f***ing asshole'. I looked at the guy and said 'Hey, when you're f***ing her tonight, give her a couple of extra pumps and think of me'."
"Oh gross, Adrian!" squeals Gwen. "I guess I've come to realise that 11 million people may have bought our album, but there's another 11 million that really hate us. Like, there were some punker girls on the cover of an Orange County music paper and they were wearing 'Gwen Is Dead' T-shirts, and I couldn't help feel hurt because I used to be that Orange County punker girl."
"There used to be this one shirt going around that said 'Gwen F***s Dogs'," chips in Adrian, helpfully.
"People are so rude!" frowns Gwen. "It was this Orange County band and the singer wore it to be nasty, because we were doing well. We played a show with them and we had to share a dressing room and it was really tense."
"I confronted that guy too," says Adrian. "I said 'Where's your shirt? I thought you were a f***ing punker'. He goes 'You got the wrong guy!’ He totally f***ing pussed out."
Do you ever feel threatened by a fan?
"Only sometimes," says Gwen. "I was at an airport buying cookies and the guy at the counter looked at me and went 'Oh my God' and grabbed my arm to show his friend. Like I'm not human, like I'm just some kind of thing. He didn't realise he was scaring the hell out of me. It's funny because I was just in Europe for a month and nobody recognised me. All I had to do was gain 10 pounds and cut my hair off. But when I came back to New York, I got out of the car and people started noticing me again. I was like 'Oh no, that Gwen thing's back again."
With widespread popularity comes responsibility, of course. If it's not bad enough being harassed by sad obsessives with dingy box rooms stuffed with merchandise bearing your face, the successful pop star also has to act as a morally minded role-model. Suddenly, all the fun goes out of stardom.
"I've only recently felt like a role model because our audience has gotten so young," says Gwen. "When 'Don't Speak' came out, the whole thing broadened and we got older people and really young kids, like from age three. I know that sounds crazy, but, it's not a joke. There's a six- year-old Persian boy who could barely speak English and his parents were trying to communicate to me that he knows every single word to all of our songs. That's so weird. So yeah, I can be onstage and cussing and there's a five-year-old girl with her daddy and you start to feel a bit uncomfortable."
Gwen's first role model pronouncement was pretty memorable. She said that she thought girls should wait until they're married before they have sex.
"I wasn't telling anyone to do anything, I was just saying what I think, what I did, and what I think girls should do," she protests. Because being a girl and going through age 13 and now I'm going to be 28, you realise you're so young then and there's so much ahead of you and you can have a lot of regrets. Of course, I thought I was going to be married and have four kids by now, but I'm saying at least wait until you're older and not a kid anymore."
Sex before marriage is quite a Christian belief.
Are you religious?
"I was Catholic growing up. I went to church and did the whole thing and had a really good experience with it. I kind of strayed away. I don't go to church anymore, only on special holidays, but I'll probably become more spiritual. I think God understands that right now I'm busy."
"I'm an atheist," says Adrian. "But I'm still a happy nice person."
"Yeah!" agrees Gwen. "I think he's a good person and I don't try to push my Catholic upbringing on him in anyway."
Do you still believe in God?
"Yeah! Totally!"
So there's an afterlife.
"Er, yeah... I hope so. It would be crazy to think there's not something in control. I'm too tired to think about these really deep things."
A lot of religions are quite Pro-Life. Do you agree with that? "Yeah, I'm Pro-Choice, but I'm Pro-Life for my own. If I got pregnant I wouldn't have an abortion because I think it would be wrong and I would have too much guilt and I believe that I would be killing a baby. So that's my choice. I don't want somebody to tell me I have to have an abortion, right now, or have to have that baby. So that's why I stand for choice."
Hmmm. Interesting.
"We did a Pro-Choice benefit a long time ago and we were the only band that had a female in it. We've never been political, because we're just about playing music, entertaining people and our songs are about our lives and loves. So I had a lot of mixed feelings about the whole Pro-Choice thing and I needed to say something, so I said 'If I got pregnant right now, I wouldn't have an abortion because that would be my choice'. And the women that were in charge were going 'We would never have had Gwen on the show if we knew she was going to say something like that.' They were really offended and really pro-abortion. It was really weird."
This year No Doubt will have been together for 11 years, during which time they've mutated from an underground skate-ska band to an internationally renowned perfect pop group. How long this will continue, however, isn't so clear, as everyone with half a brain and a third of an opinion is convinced that Gwen will inevitably leave the group for a solo career.
She denies this, of course, but throughout our conversation there are hints that this episode of No Doubt is drawing to a close.
It starts with Tom admitting that a solo Gwen is not out of the question with the words "Maybe that will happen. You never know what the future holds." Next Tony says "If it's meant to be. It'll be OK," which sounds like he knows something we don't.
Then Gwen thickens the plot by saying, "Suddenly our lives are changed because we were permanently on tour. But we always wanted to play shows and have people come. And they do. All the time. And now I want to stop." And this after a relaxing five week holiday. Whatever happens, it's clear that a lot has changed for Gwen in the last two years and that she's changed with it.
"Being able to travel the world, you meet so many people and you're open and have a broader outlook on everything. I'm a little less uptight and you feel there's so many amazing places and California is not the greatest place in the world. Also I never had a boyfriend since I was an adult until now. I always went out with my best friend [Tony] when we were kids. To be in love when you're an adult is different from falling in love when you're 16 and growing up together and being best friends, which we still are. I think I've changed for the better. I'm way stronger. I feel smarter."
Ultimately you feel that Gwen is beginning to suspect that No Doubt has run it's own course. She's certainly happy to admit that it's no longer her entire life.
"The good thing is that we've got to experience every side of being in a band," she smiles in conclusion. "We were the garage band, the buzz local band, the nerd band, and now we're a worldwide pop band, and I don't feel like we ever want to go back. In a way, I think we all feel really fulfilled and that's why I think that really we didn't need to get that award. We've enjoyed everything and if the band broke up I think we'd feel sad but at the same time, we did it all. So we're really lucky." And with those words, Gwen smiles and jumps into bed with the rest of the band to record links for Asian and Australia TV shows. She is stardom incarnate. And when you have that, righteousness seems strangely irrelevant.
Dr Struth
Each week, a top pop star talks frankly about a personal sexual problem. First oft it's Adrian Young from No Doubt.
So, Adrian, you've never masturbated to orgasm. "That was true until the last time we played in London, about five months ago. That was my first time." Why hadn't you done it before?
"I've no idea. It just didn't work too well. You know, five per cent of men say they don't and four per cent lie? I was that one per cent."
It wasn't Catholic guilt then? "It definitely wasn't that, being an atheist. I know it's weird, because everyone tells me how weird it is."
So how did you crack it?
"I don't know. I just did it one day. Maybe I was in the right porno or something. It was probably the excitement of London. I came all over your country. Ha ha ha."