Gwen Stefani knows you always want to give your hometown crowd a little something extra. And she didn’t disappoint over the weekend in her native Orange County, California, when the other members of No Doubt joined her onstage for the band’s first live performances together in three years..During her Friday solo show at Irvine’s Verizon Amphitheatre, No Doubt drummer Tony Kanal, guitarist Tom Dumont and drummer Adrian Young slipped onstage and took over for Stefani’s touring band for a wildly received run through the group’s hits “Just a Girl,” “Spiderwebs” and their cover of Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life.” At Stefani’s sold-out show Saturday night, the group pulled its surprise reunion again, performing four songs for an equally rabid crowd.
Amie Apodaca, 21, was at the second show and she said the surprise jam blew her mind. “This weekend had to have been the best in a long time for me!” the Los Angeles native wrote on MTV News’ You R Here blog. “She is the ultimate entertainer! … To make the night even more amazing, at one point she ran up into the audience and landed right by my friends and I. She was right in front of me!
“All of a sudden the boys from No Doubt came out for the encore!! Everyone went crazy!” she continued. “They played four songs … they started off with ‘Just a Girl’ then played ‘Hella Good,’ ‘Sunday Morning’ (my fav) and ‘Spiderwebs.’ I will NEVER forget that night!”
Stefani, who is on the road promoting her second solo album, The Sweet Escape, has plenty of No Doubt material waiting for her once she gets off the road in October. Just a few weeks before the live reunion, Dumont told MTV News that the rest of the band has continued to work on material for the follow-up to 2001’s Rock Steady .
“Tony, Adrian and I have been busy preparing material for the album since this time last year,” Dumont said, adding that it’s not likely anything would see the light of day before next fall. “So we have a lot of instrumentals looking for words.”