ABOUT TEN minutes after I first meet Fergie, she starts crying. The lithe Black Eyed Peas singer is dressed in full stage regalia. Her hair is teased into a complex combination of corn-rows, reverse French braids and an explosion of extensions. She has 14 rings through her ears and a stud through the corner of her right eyebrow. She looks magnificent. “Damn, I’m gonna mess up my make-up,” she says, wiping away a tear before it has time to dissolve into a mascara-laden eyelash.

Fergie, 28 (real name Stacy Ferguson), is the most recent recruit to the hip-hop group from Los Angeles, and to say that her arrival last year has marked a change in their fortunes is an understatement. Where is the Love, co-written by Justin Timberlake, was the longest-running No 1 since Believe by Cher in 1998, and is also the biggest-selling single in Britain this year. Their album Elephunk has gone platinum with sales of 300,000 copies and is still in the Top 20 four months after release. And it is funky and funny, rhythmically adept and lyrically alert.

To a vast pop audience, they seem to be a new group. But Elephunk is actually the Peas’ third album. The first two sold fewer than 10,000 copies each in Britain. Despite an enthusiastic critical reception, the group’s appeal had yet to spread beyond the ranks of the hip-hop cognoscenti.

Their roots go back to 1989 when high-school friends Will.I.Am (William Adams) and Apl.De.Ap (Allen Pineda) first performed together under the name Atban Klann. Having recruited Taboo (Jaime Gomez) they became the Black Eyed Peas in 1995.

Fergie, meanwhile, was singing in a group called Wild Orchid. She had been a child actor and singer, in TV commercials and variety shows similar to the Mickey Mouse Club which gave the world Britney, Justin and Christina. Although Wild Orchid had achieved a measure of success, after ten years with the group she had become alienated and unhappy.

“I started doing Ecstasy,” she recalls. “Then I got addicted to crystal methamphetamine. My weight dropped to 90lb. I lied to my friends and said I was bulimic. Finally I started going crazy. In that moment I talked to God and He said: ‘I’ve given you all these gifts, so what are you doing?’ I decided to get clean. I told everybody what was wrong .”

It is at this point in her confession that the tears start to well up. Regaining her composure, Fergie recalls how she kicked drugs, left the group, moved back into her mother’s house and started work on the solo album that she’d been wanting to do “since I was seven years old”.

One of the producers she approached was Will, whom she had met at a Black Eyed Peas show in 1998 and had got to know over the years.

“The first time I saw the group, I thought, ‘I’m going to work with these guys someday’,” Fergie says. The first song that Will invited her to record with the Peas was Shut Up, which has been chosen as the follow-up to Where is the Love. It is another tremendously catchy pop/hip-hop track, in which Will and Fergie are thrust to the forefront in the role of a pair of bickering lovers. The two are not romantically involved, but does this kind of argument ever occur in real life? “Oh yes! We butt heads all the time,” Fergie says. “I’m very opinionated and so is he.”

“Oh no. We never argue,” Will says, having shuffled in after Fergie has left the room. “She has a weird way of arguing.” According to Will, the addition of Fergie has completed the group: “It seems like she has been in there from the beginning. When I think back to making some of our old records, I could’ve sworn that Fergie was in the room.”

Now 28, Will grew up in a single-parent family in the projects of South Central LA, the heart of gangland culture and the home of gangsta rap. “I’ve never gotten shot, but a lot of my friends are dead, people that I grew up with and went to school with. Music was my escape,” he says.

Unlike their gangsta peers, the Black Eyed Peas have abjured tales of pimps, drug-dealing and drive-by shootings, and make music that radiates goodwill and positive energy. Where is the Love is a song with a typically humanist post-9/11 message. The lyrics not only point a finger at the activities of the CIA and the Ku Klux Klan but also compares gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods to terrorist organisations.

“It takes loads of work off the KKK when you’ve got the Crips and the Bloods killing each other, don’t you think?” Will says, recalling the days when he couldn’t walk to school wearing anything that was either red or blue because it was enough to suggest he was in sympathy with one or other of these fearsome gangs.

The message is simpler but no less seductive on straightforward party anthems such as Let’s Get Retarded. Anyone lucky enough to have seen the group in recent weeks, either playing their own dates or on tour with Christina Aguilera, will know that their wonderfully energetic show is guaranteed to raise spirits.

Will, who never smokes, let alone takes hard drugs, regards music as both a stimulant and salvation. He suffered a bout of depression in 2001 that delayed the making of Elephunk by about eight months. He recalls an incident at that time which made him realise how important his musical career was to maintaining his sense of identity, literally.

“I was 25 years old, and I’d always thought my name was William Adams,” he says. “I needed to get hold of my full birth certificate so I could get a passport. So I went to the public records office. And when I see my birth certificate I discover that my name is actually William James Adams Jr. And I’m stunned. I’d never met my father. My Mom never talks about him. And yet I’ve got the exact same name as the dude. How come I never heard about him? “So I’m standing in the street crying, and this guy recognises me and comes up to me and he says, ‘Man, your music is so positive. When I’m feeling down, I just put on your CD.’ If ever I needed someone to tell me something that would make me appreciate my childhood and the person that it had turned me into, it was right then. And there he was. I think that dude must have been an angel.”

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