Unfinished Monkey Business

You can sense that Black Eyed Peas' sexy vocalist Fergie isn’t all that comfortable with the interview situation. She constantly deflects questions with queries of her own in an attempt to make the journalist do the talking.
“Do you ever get a buzz from drinking herbal tea?” she quizzes as she takes a second sup of said beverage. "Depends what herbs you put into the tea" I quip, to an uncomfortable laugh. “Right on,” responds Taboo, the group's central male rapper before he wearily collapses back into his chair.

The source of Taboo's tiredness is chronic jetlag. Having flown in from LA, after a brief stop off in Berlin, Fergie and Taboo confess to being a bit all over the place due to sleep deprivation. Tonight things start to get crazy, with a gig at the Heineken Green Energy Festival marking the start of the promotional campaign for their new LP Monkey Business.
“We love doing festivals,” says Fergie with a burst of enthusiasm, “because festivals are basically raw and dirty, and you’re performing in front of people who know music. They’re here at a festival, a MUSIC festival, so they’ve obviously got a keener ear than the general public.”
Taboo too is excited about tonight. Festivals, he says, give the band a chance to win over new fans.
They certainly do; the Dublin Castle show is a sell out. However, the LA based four-piece are used to this. Since its release in 2003, Black Eyed Peas' debut record, Elephunk, has shifted 7.5 million copies. Its success was aided in no small part by Justin Timberlake’s collaboration on breakthrough single ‘Where Is The Love?’, and the appearance of Timberlake’s name on the new record, Monkey Business, along with those of Sting, James Brown, and Jack Johnson, is sure to be a source of much pleasure among execs at the Peas' label, Interscope.
“Well, all the collaborations happened really organically,” says Taboo. “We became friends with these people before we worked with them so as to keep this real organic vibe going.”
Organic seems the key word in their meeting with Sting, as Fergie notes. “Will.i.am (Black Eyed Peas central producer and vocalist) did some remixes for Sting and that relationship sort of blossomed, so he agreed to appear on our record. It was cool. We got to go to his house, or castle rather, in the English countryside. He grows all his own vegetables, has his own livestock, so we sat with him and his family and had this great organic dinner and organic lemonade and all that. He also took us to Stonehenge which was great.”
One touted collaboration that has yet to happen is with Darkness frontman, Justin Hawkins.
“He asked me to marry him in Australia,” smiles Fergie. “I’m still thinking about it."
"Justin is a great guy,” adds Taboo. “One of the most down to earth people in the business. We’d love to have done something with him for this record but our schedule kept conflicting so maybe next time. He did though get up on stage with us in Australia to guest on ‘Let’s Get Retarded’.”
Like Hawkins, both Fergie and Taboo plan solo records in the near future. For now, though, the focus is on pushing Monkey Business.
“This is the time for Black Eyed Peas so that’s where our focus is at,” says Taboo. “This is the year of the monkey. Elephunk came close to being our last record. If it wasn’t successful who knows what would have happened. Right now though we're going to give the whole world the Black Eyed experience. Ireland is just first on the list.”

Monkey Business is out on Interscope.