Peas boiling over

The Black Eyed Peas

The Black Eyed Peas are making their way - loudly - to a hip-hop club in Paris. Fergie, the "little sister" of the band is the one on the phone. But you can hear her bandmates will.i.am, apl.de.ap and Taboo hooting like primates in the background.

"I'm very good at being one of the guys," she says, before telling them to bugger off. "But I miss my girls. I mean, I have a very girly side. If I need my girl energy, I'll call my mum and call my friends and do all my gossiping and stupid stuff that we girls do. Or I'll watch a really soppy movie and have a good cry."

There have been plenty of tears since Fergie (aka Stacy Ferguson) joined the band in 2003, when Elephunk, the band's third album propelled them from underground hip-hop status to mainstream pop success. Before then the Peas were a very different beast, and Fergie has been at the centre of the transition whether fans have liked it or not.

That has made for a tough initiation, she says, but for now she's happy to put up with their animal behaviour as they celebrate the release of new album Monkey Business. Like Elephunk, it's a slick collision of what makes BEP unique: their Mexican, Filipino and Native American heritage, their energetic fusion of dance, hip-hop and funk-fed pop, their appreciation of soul in its many forms - guests on the album include Jack Johnson, James Brown, Sting, Justin Timberlake, Talib Kweli and John Legend.

First single Don't Phunk With My Heart has already hit number one.

Fergie remembers going to see the Black Eyed Peas for the first time seven years ago at a club in LA. "And I thought they had something so amazing and so different from everybody else. I knew there was some way I was going to connect with them. I didn't know how. I just knew."

Her instincts were right, but if it wasn't for her rather un-hip-hop showbiz upbringing, she reckons she wouldn't have made it into the band. Her first big gig was voicing the characters of Sally and Lucy on the Charlie Brown cartoons. Then in 1984, she spent five years on the TV variety show Kids Incorporated, alongside budding talents including Jennifer Love Hewitt. "She was like my little sister," she says. "It was like kids at summer camp. But instead of going with kids who you knew, I went to camp and basically found my species of kid that I understood."

After five years on the show she went on to form teen-oriented dance-pop group Wild Orchid with two of her childhood friends. Their aspiration was to be the next Supremes or en Vogue but after 11 years together, their record label pulled the plug just before their third album was released. Fergie had a meltdown. "I was people-pleasing and doing music just because I was loyal to my friends, and in reality I was being unhealthy to myself. I wasn't happy."

She went through a phase she describes as an "alternative lifestyle", losing herself on the dance floor and in drugs. When her weight dropped dangerously she lied to her friends and said she was bulimic; it wasn't until she claims to have had a conversation with the man upstairs that she decided to get clean.

It was at her final show with Wild Orchid that her calling came. The band were on the same bill as the Black Eyed Peas.

"And I flipped out. I went, 'You guys don't even know about this band', oh my gosh, I went to see them in 98. These are people that I really believe in." After the gig she made sure she bumped into them in the hallway, where she told them she wanted to work with them. They exchanged phone numbers, and later a mutual friend suggested Fergie would be perfect to sing on a BEP track they were working on called Shut Up.

"It was completely intimidating," she says of joining an all-male band that had been together for eight years. "Look at the way they perform. I thought I was a good performer because I had been doing this since I was a little girl. I mean, look at these guys. I really had a challenge in front of me and I really had to pull out all of my tools, you know."

Elephunk went on to sell seven million copies, on the strength of hits Let's Get It Started, Shut Up, Hey Mama and the Justin Timberlake collaboration Where is the Love?, and Fergie found herself on the road, throwing herself into their energetic stage shows that incorporate break-dancing and capoeira [a Brazilian martial arts dance combo].

She also injected her own style into the mix: an eclectic fashion sense is a combination of 50s rockabilly, Orange County skate punk, old-school hip-hop, thrift store vintage and runways couture that she hopes will one day make her own clothing line. People Magazine recently named her as one of the world's 50 most beautiful people.

But compared with the laidback, boho hip-hop image the band had already created with their first two albums, Behind the Front and Bridging the Gap, Elephunk was their most accessible work yet, and with the surge of new fans came the backlash from the older fans who thought the band was selling out. Fergie recalls reading "mean" comments about herself on the internet and crying.

Will, too, had his reservations about her joining the band, telling Newsweek, "I thought, 'Fergie doesn't really come from our world, so how are they gonna take it? It'll make a lot of our fans pissed off.' But then I was like, 'Wait a second, when did we ever care what people said?"'

It was never the band's intention to make Elephunk a commercial record, Fergie insists. "It was a very creative environment. It wasn't like, 'Let's go for this or let's go for that.' It wasn't pre-meditated like people think. We were just trying to make good music."

They took the same "smorgasbord" approach to Monkey Business, drawing on everything from big pop hooks and old-school funk to 80s hip-hop and 60s Brazilian bossanova. In My Humps, Fergie raps, "Don't touch my humps, my lovely lady lumps," a tribute to MCs such as Roxanne Shante, MC Lite, Queen Latifah and Monie Love. Like That, featuring Q-Tip, Talib Kweli, Cee-Lo and John Legend, contains a sample from Who Can I Turn To? performed by Astrud Gilberto.

For the next few months they will tour the album, heading to Europe, Japan, and possibly Australia and New Zealand in October. And it won't all be monkey business. Will plans to set up shop across the ditch, where he will spend about six months of the year searching for unsigned talent.

That is if he doesn't get swamped.

"There was one time when we were leaving a show and we were in a van and people started running up to the van and they're pounding on it and putting up cameras. We couldn't leave but people were surrounding the van, shaking it, y'know. And Taboo says, 'I feel like a monkey in a cage right now'. We didn't know what to do. All we could do was wave hi," says Fergie. "But I don't think the attention is out of hand. We're at a very cool place right now, y'know. There is attention but we just feel appreciated. It's not overbearing. I should knock on wood I guess."

There's another reason for that album title, she says, as they approach the hip-hop club.

"We make a lot of flight attendants really angry because we'll have pillow fights or just be a little bit out of control on the flights. If apl falls asleep in the back lounge of the bus, he'll get his face written on."

LOWDOWN

WHO: Black Eyed Peas, hip-hop superstars

RELEASES: Behind the Front (1999), Bridging the Gap (2000), Elephunk (2003), Monkey Business (2005, out now)

HISTORY: Will.i.am and apl.de.ap met at high school where they were part of breakdancing crew Tribal Nation before they formed hip-hop group Atban Klann. Later they recruited another dancer/MC, Taboo, and changed their name to Black Eyed Peas and began playing in clubs around Los Angeles. Their debut was released to critical acclaim and featured guest appearances by De La Soul and Macy Gray.

TRIVIA: Apl.de.ap couldn't make the band's performance at the Big Day Out in Auckland in 2001 after he was stopped by customs at Auckland Airport for carrying 3.7g of cannabis. He was put on the next plane back to Los Angeles. The full band has played here twice since.