“I don’t know how good we are… But I know we’re having fun”: How No Doubt became a global phenomenon

The Coachella line-up reveal is always one of the biggest moments of any festival season but, for rock fans, 2024’s announcement was bigger than ever.

Why? Because, this year, when the poster and its perennially-debated font size came out, two little words – right at the bottom of the list of names, but in all-capitals and untethered to any particular day of the two-weekend, six-day line-up – stood out from the crowd of hipster-friendly current sensations: NO DOUBT.

When the long-dormant band’s socials confirmed, “We’ll see you in the desert this April!”, the online world duly went into meltdown.

“Watching the internet blow up with how excited the fans are… It’s inspiring us,” a “completely overwhelmed” Gwen Stefani said later. “It’s going to be amazing.”

So why all the fuss over a band who last released an album in 2012, last played live in 2015, and whose singer is now more famous for her role as a judge on spinning-chair talent show The Voice?

Well, because for a while there in the late ’90s and early ’00s, No Doubt – completed by guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal and drummer Adrian Young – were probably one of the biggest (and definitely one of the best) rock bands on the planet.

They had irresistible alt.rock hits to die for, such as Spiderwebs and feminist anthem Just A Girl (‘Oh I’m just a girl, all pretty and petite / So don’t let me have any rights’). Their live shows were joyous, riotous, sweat-drenched affairs. And in Gwen, they were blessed with one of the most charismatic, inspirational rock stars of a generation.

Not that anyone was predicting such superstardom when No Doubt first emerged from the SoCal ska scene in the late 1980s. In the early days, the then-shy-and-retiring Gwen was joined on vocals by all-action co-frontperson John Spence, while Gwen’s older brother Eric was in charge of the band’s musical direction, heavily indebted to the UK’s two-tone scene.

John tragically died by suicide in 1987, with Gwen reluctantly going it alone upfront, while Eric made his final contributions on 1995 LP Tragic Kingdom, leaving the band for a successful career as an illustrator just before their big breakthrough.

It probably looked like a better bet at the time. No Doubt’s 1992 self-titled album had barely registered outside Orange County and, while 1995’s semi-official follow-up The Beacon Street Collection (recorded behind their record label’s back) had given them some momentum, anyone predicting that Tragic Kingdom would achieve a rare Diamond certification (10 million sales) in the U.S. and shift over 16 million copies worldwide would have been laughed out of the room.

That that is precisely what happened was, of course, due to the quality of what Gwen called No Doubt's “big salad of sound”, stuffed with infectious pop-ska-grunge bangers and Gwen’s captivating articulation of life as a lone female in the male-dominated ’90s rock scene, and her unflinchingly raw take on her break-up with bandmate Tony (“I spilled my guts out on it,” she proudly told Kerrang! at the time).

But it was also thanks to a shift in the musical landscape, caused by Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994.

“It’s a timing thing – when our first record came out, we were illegal!” Gwen told K! in a 1996 interview, conducted just as Tragic Kingdom was passing two million sales and Gwen’s fledgling romance with Bush’s Gavin Rossdale was taking off. “The grunge police were like, ‘I do not think so…’”

Somewhat ironically, No Doubt found themselves caught in precisely the same intense glare of fame that Nirvana had found so difficult to deal with. A 1997 K! feature found Gwen being besieged by Gwenabees on the streets of California and, while she seemed to be coping well (“For this to happen after all the years of being a cult underground band is incredible,” she said, “I have to get people to slap me across the face in case it’s all been just a dream!”), the attention on her was causing fault lines to appear within the band.

“Nobody really wants to talk to the band – they all want to talk to Gwen,” grumbled Adrian in one K! interview. “Which is awkward, because this has been a band for nine years. It’s not Madonna with back-up musicians.”

No Doubt eventually turned this tension to their advantage, acting it out in the memorable Don’t Speak video, apparently based on a Kerrang! photoshoot that saw the band cut out of the pictures in favour of a solo shot of Gwen (although that didn’t stop them inviting K! along to watch the video being made).

In any case, Don’t Speak soon turned Tragic Kingdom into such a juggernaut that the band could call any shots they wanted. Number One in the UK for three weeks in 1997 and a Number One airplay hit Stateside (it was ineligible for the main chart as it wasn’t issued as a physical disc, a requirement at the time), it saw No Doubt gulping down large lungfuls of the rarified air only found at the very top of the rock mountain.

“I don’t know how good we are,” Gwen told K! at the peak of Tragic Kingdom mania. “But I know we’re having fun.”

Now, of course, we know just how good No Doubt are. They may not have quite scaled the commercial heights of Tragic Kingdom again, but its underrated follow-up Return Of Saturn (home to anthems such as Bathwater and Ex-Girlfriend – a song about ex-husband Gavin Rossdale that Gwen says now hits so hard it makes her “almost throw up in my mouth”) and 2001’s eclectic classic Rock Steady (featuring Hey Baby and the banger-to-end-all-bangers Hella Good) cemented their legacy as the band who took rock to a happier, more open place.

And it's no wonder their music is still connecting to new generations: Just A Girl has featured on everything from Captain Marvel to Yellowjackets, while Don’t Speak is still a radio regular with over 672 million streams on Spotify alone.

Meanwhile, Gwen blazed a trail for every other female rock musician struggling for acceptance, influencing and inspiring everyone from Hayley Williams to Olivia Rodrigo, and turning herself into one of the world’s biggest pop and TV stars – with a new marriage to fellow musician/TV judge Blake Shelton that U.S. tabloids seem utterly obsessed with – somewhere along the way.

The gravitational pull of her original band remains irresistible, however. They last got back together in 2009, producing 2012’s genre-blurring Push And Shove record, but the current reunion feels right on the zeitgeist, with appetites whetted by Gwen’s spectacular, No Doubt-heavy solo shows at London’s BST Hyde Park festival last summer.

“It’s just going to be cool,” Gwen said recently of getting the band back together. “It’s just going to be, get up there and do what we always do, which is play our music and try to connect and be so grateful that we got this amazing career that we never expected to have.”

And that’s why, when No Doubt finally step back on stage in the Colorado desert this April, you can guarantee the whole world is going to be feeling (Coac)hella good.

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