'La! Gur-la! Ah!" Gwen Stefani's ninth-month-old son
Kingston is making so much noise that his immaculately-dressed mother stops
mid-sentence to look across the exclusive London members' club to where he's
sitting with his nanny. "He's OK," says the singer brightly, "he's just in a
talking mood."
For years, Stefani, now 37, spoke of her desire for children, to the point where
the frantic "tick tock" motif of her debut solo single, 2004's What You Waiting
For?, was widely believed to represent her biological clock going into overdrive.
Now she and husband Gavin Rossdale - the singer of British grunge-era band Bush
- have Kingston.
It's not as though she's a typical parent, though. Although she has a home in
London, she's staying in a hotel on her current visit. "It's just so much easier
to have all my clothes and my stylist next to me," she says. "Plus my nanny, my
manager, my trainer. It's a whole team of people."
Stefani was back in the studio just 13 weeks after her baby was born, making the
follow-up to her 2004 solo debut Love. Angel. Music. Baby, which sold 7m copies
worldwide (and shared its name with Stefani's clothing line, L.A.M.B, which she
launched a few months before the album). Her second solo effort, The Sweet
Escape, was released in December last year, a few days after Kingston turned six
months old. Given her relish for parenthood, it's surprising she didn't take a
longer break. "Well, the good news about my life is that he can come with me
everywhere," she says. "But I didn't really want more time off. What I'm doing
is too fun to stop. If you were me, you wouldn't take time off either. Y'know,
this isn't gonna last forever."
Stefani's ascent to pop princess has been a long and unlikely one, which perhaps
explains her desire to make hits while the sun shines. It's 21 years since she
formed No Doubt with friends in Anaheim, Orange County. United by a love of
Madness and the Specials, the band were unheralded mainstays of the California
ska-punk scene for nearly a decade before their breakthrough third album, 1995's
Tragic Kingdom. That record sold 15m copies, largely thanks to the power-ballad
Don't Speak. The band released two further albums, the second of which, 2001's
Rocksteady, featured a shift towards 1980s-flavoured, beat-driven pop, notably
on the peppy Pharrell Williams collaboration Hella Good. That year, Stefani
guested on R&B singer Eve's Let Me Blow Ya Mind single, a collaboration that won
the pair a Grammy. Stefani had somehow reinvented herself as a credible,
urban-flavoured pop star. Out went the sweaty tracksuit and vest from the
ska-punk days, and in came the haute couture threads of a living fashion plate.
The style press had found a new hero. "She embodies all the qualities we look
for in a cover star," says British Elle's executive editor, Christopher Hemblade.
"She's sexy, stylish and spirited, with a genuine love of fashion. Her look
never feels forced. She owned the Dior-meets-Japanese Harajuko Girl look of the
last album as much as she does the Michelle-Pfeiffer-in-Scarface reinvention of
the current one."
Magazines were suddenly full of articles on how to achieve that elusive Gwen
Stefani look; in 2005 Harpers & Queen chose her as its No 1 "fashion icon";
earlier this year she and Rossdale were voted - in a spectacularly meaningless
poll - the world's "most stylish celebrity parents".
As Stefani's profile rose, there was speculation that her bandmates were unhappy
at being perceived as her backing band. Some sort of solo career seemed
inevitable. It duly followed, on three fronts - as a musician, an actor (she
played Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator), and as a fashion designer.
"It wasn't about wanting all the attention for myself, although I do love
attention," she says of her move from being singer-in-a-band to solo performer.
"It was more about being able to indulge my theatrical, cheesy side and make
something really fluffy, fun and light-hearted. It was nothing to be taken too
seriously, it was just a silly dance record."
In fact, Love.Angel. Music. Baby was one of the most interesting and unusual pop
records in years. Alongside an A-list of collaborators including Pharrell
Williams, Andre 3000 and Dr Dre, Stefani made a weirdly wonderful album. Sassy
hits such as Hollaback Girl and What You Waiting For? sounded unlike anything
else on the radio, yet became permanent fixtures on it, redefining the pop
landscape along more experimental lines than anyone had expected.
Stefani's ubiquity - all over the radio and TV, fashion pages and celebrity
pages - inevitably started to rankle with some. She was criticised for wearing
fur, and the album's Harajuku Girls theme led to accusations of near-racism. The
real Harakuju Girls are the hip Japanese teenagers who inhabit one of Tokyo's
shopping districts. Stefani borrowed their bugglegum style and employed four
Japanese dancers -whom she named Love, Angel, Music and Baby - as Harajuku Girls
to fawn around her on stage and in videos. One Asian-American writer suggested
Stefani had "swallowed a subversive youth culture in Japan and barfed up another
image of giggling, submissive Asian women". The mood of Stefani's detractors was
summed up in a line from the acerbic US cartoon Family Guy, "I don't know what a
Hollaback Girl is - all I know is that I want her dead."
Stefani, though, had other things on her mind. She discovered she was pregnant
midway through a 42-date North American tour, playing to 12,000 people a night.
"I was surprised how much I didn't enjoy pregnancy," she admits. "Having
something growing in your stomach feels so unnatural. Your body's changing and
you can't control it. You just feel gross. I was having to get up on stage
wearing bathing suits, looking fat. Nobody knew I was pregnant except me. They
were constantly having to add extra panels into my costumes. To be honest, I was
feeling pretty bad about myself." Stefani says only her adoring audiences of
teenage girls kept her going. "I swear that saved me. I realised I'd got a whole
new audience, which is crazy. They'd be looking up at me like I was Cinderella.
It was the greatest feeling ever. It makes me wanna cry just thinking about it."
When her pregnancy reached its halfway stage, she finally put her feet up. "I
just sat in bed watching hundreds and hundreds of TV programmes. I'd really
earned that."
With Stefani's attention focused on her bump and the remote, both Nelly Furtado
and Fergie took the chance to sashay into her edgy urban-pop spotlight,
releasing albums that were obvious descendants of Love. Angel. Music. Baby. Did
Stefani feel threatened?
"Not really, because I was so consumed with being pregnant. Besides, it's an
amazing compliment to see yourself in someone else. It's also really inspiring.
It forces you to move forward in different ways." In other words, it only made
her determined to reset the agenda with another album.
After Kingston was born, Stefani stayed at home. "Then after three months, I was
like, enough's enough, I want my life back. I'd gained 40lb, so I went on a
diet. And I decided to go back into the studio."
She didn't find those first steps easy. "I remember showing up for the first day
feeling really chunky, hormonal and guilty," she says. "I was like, should I be
here right now? I decided that if it felt too hard, then it wasn't meant to be.
But the whole experience turned out to be really great."
Joining Stefani on that first foray into the studio was Keane's keyboard player/songwriter
Tim Rice-Oxley. "It wasn't the only offer I'd had to write with people,"
Rice-Oxley tells me. "But it was easily the most compelling. She's undeniably
the queen of pop right now, in the genuine sense of pop music that's in the
moment and defines an era. I don't think she gets the credit she deserves for
what she does. She really is the source of all the ideas. You can sit in an
office putting a pop-star package together, but unless it comes from the person
who's at the centre of it all, it won't ring true."
The pair came up with Early Winter, one of the album's slow-burning highlights.
Having already made five tracks with Pharrell Williams before the baby, the
remainder of the album fell together smoothly, apart from one abandoned session
with producer Timbaland. "He's one of my favourites, but I just couldn't write
anything," says Stefani. "I'd done three straight weeks of songwriting and I was
tired and burned out. He got me at a bad time. I had a little breakdown and went
home crying. It was so embarrassing."
Despite that setback, The Sweet Escape was still released in time for Christmas.
Then came another setback. The album was preceded by the single release of its
least enjoyable song, Wind It Up, a bizarre hotch-potch of hip-hop and Sound of
Music samples, which seemed to prioritise experimentation over a decent tune.
Stefani can't have enjoyed the less-than-sparkling critical and commercial
reception it was afforded. "It didn't feel good," she admits. "But do you think
that I didn't know that me yodelling on a song is not gonna appeal to everyone?
I was hoping it would win over people's hearts, but I understand that it was
weird. But I think the most exciting thing I could do was to mash the Sound of
Music with a Pharrell track. Nobody was doing that, so I wanted to."
Her chutzpah is admirable, but, tainted by the single, the album debuted at a
lowly No 26 in the UK, with comparatively poor reviews and sales across the
globe. Stefani insists she wasn't too worried: "I'm really proud of this album
and I knew that it had other more obvious singles." She wasn't wrong. The second
release, the album's title track, is currently riding high in charts on both
sides of the Atlantic. "I was like, phew," she smiles. "It's always great to
have a hit." Happily for her, the album appears to have several more. Happily
for us, none of them feature yodelling.
With the album receiving a new lease of life, Stefani has announced another
enormous US tour, in which she'll play 42 dates in 70 days. "It is a lot, but I
feel like it's going to be easier having a baby outside my stomach, rather than
inside."
When she was a kid, Stefani once witnessed Emmylou Harris breastfeeding in the
middle of a show. While it's unlikely she'll borrow that idea ("I'm not sure
he'll still be nursing by then"), she does think the tour will be good for her
and the baby. "Because we've travelled so much, he's never got into a schedule.
I think that this tour is going to be the greatest time to get him on one."
Kingston will have a crib on the tourbus, which will drive all night between
venues. By the time they arrive, a room will have been set up with his toys, a
changing station and a rocking chair. "So I'll be rocking him to sleep in the
dressing room every night before I go onstage and rock out," she guffaws.
She has also just finalised the latest collection for her L.A.M.B. fashion label,
which could explain why everything in the current range is half-price on its
website. "Is it?" she asks, surprised. "I didn't know that. I do the creative
part." It might explain why she's not yet making any money from the venture. "It's
gonna take a lot of years before that happens," she says. "But it's something
I'm passionate about that I can hopefully do for the rest of my life."
There's also, she says, going to be a new No Doubt album. "We actually all had
lunch yesterday," she says. "We had a heart to heart about things. I think it
could be one of our greatest records because we've been starved of each other
for a few years. It's really exciting."
Last but clearly not least, she'd like another child. "I'm gonna try and enjoy
this year of touring and then hopefully get pregnant again. I'm on repeat. I
just want to make music and babies." With a car waiting outside to whisk her to
an appearance on Charlotte Church's chat show, Stefani walks over to pick
Kingston up for a cuddle. "He's going through a real mommy phase," she beams. "He's
my biggest fan. Things are a lot of fun for me right now. I feel very lucky."