Will.i.am by Danny White

considering sampling the melody from Sting’s iconic ‘An Englishman in New York’ on one of the tracks for the album, it was eventually decided that they would invite him to
sing on the track, which was called ‘Union’. While James Brown had blown the band away with his charisma and star-like behaviour, Sting impressed them with the scale of his home, to
which he invited Will and the band to stay while they were in the south-west of England to perform at the Glastonbury Festival.
    Lake House, in Wiltshire, is indeed a breathtaking house and Will was mesmerized the moment he arrived at the800-acre property in Salisbury. The opulent, castle-like main
building houses some fourteen bedrooms and eight bathrooms. In the grounds stands a 350-year-old tree – the presence of which was said to have convinced Sting and his wife Trudie to buy the
place. Will connected well with Sting and Trudie. Together they engaged in lengthy and deep conversations about spiritual matters. Sting also took the ensemble on a trip to the nearby attraction of
Stonehenge.
    *
    The majority of the work on the new album, which was to be called
Monkey Business
, took place in London. The band had rented three properties in Chiswick, the one Will
stayed in was a tall, narrow house in the corner of a cul-de-sac. He and the band loved the greenery of the neighbourhood and were amused by the ubiquity of pregnant women and mothers of newborn
babies. It seemed to be an area of many different types of creativity – fertile ground indeed.
    The band was focused and productive. As Fergie put it, they were creating a ‘waterfall’ that became ‘this huge ocean that is
Monkey Business
’. During the three
months they worked on the album in London, that waterfall flowed well. Inspiration seemed to be everywhere: following a visit to a bhangra club in London, they recorded the Bollywood-flavouredsong ‘Don’t Phunk With My Heart’. They also recorded in France, Brazil and Japan.
    Will found he was inspired in the strangest of settings. One day they were travelling in Japan on the ‘bullet’ train, which can travel up to 180 miles per hour. He was listening to a
CD of surfing rock-style tunes when one of them, a track called ‘Miserlou’, inspired him to create a new song. He fired-up his laptop and began to work on the new song, using recording
software he had installed for moments such as these. As the rest of the band sat drinking sake, Will was hard at work, his creative juices flowing at top speed as the train raced through Japan.
Later, on a flight, he sat and worked further on the song. When the flight arrived in Tokyo, Will took his computer to the park and recorded the vocals. This was the sort of crazy way in which the
album came together.
    The title of the album had a degree of playful protest to it. Over the course of several years, the band had felt that the orders that their management and record label constantly bestowed upon
them had almost relegated the band to the role of performing monkeys. In a harsh assessment of the band’s place in the chain, Will would say, ‘Sing, monkey, dance, monkey, get on stage,
monkey!’ But there was a secondary dimension to the simian stature they felt they had developed. As the band had been driven away from a venueone evening, so many fans
had surrounded their vehicle that they felt that they were monkeys in a zoo, caged away from the visitors. Finally, the impish ways that the band adopted to get through the rigours of touring also
felt, at times, like ‘monkey business’. Thus the title of the new album was representative of the band’s feelings at the time, capturing well the upsides and downsides of their
growing fame. To a degree, it also signifies the long-term spirit of Will’s band, who always believed that playfulness was a crucial part of the experience both publicly and behind the
scenes.
    Released in May 2005,
Monkey Business
made for an engrossing body of work. As