🔗 Share this article

Evan Dando pushes back a shirt cuff and indicates a line of small dents along his arm, subtle traces from years of opioid use. “It requires so much time to develop noticeable injection scars,” he says. “You inject for a long time and you believe: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my skin is particularly tough, but you can hardly notice it now. What was the point, eh?” He grins and emits a hoarse chuckle. “Only joking!”

Dando, former indie pin-up and key figure of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in decent shape for a man who has taken every drug going from the age of his teens. The musician behind such acclaimed songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and entirely candid. We meet at midday at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he wonders if it's better to relocate our chat to a bar. Eventually, he sends out for two glasses of cider, which he then forgets to drink. Frequently drifting off topic, he is apt to veer into wild tangents. No wonder he has given up using a smartphone: “I struggle with the internet, man. My thoughts is extremely scattered. I desire to absorb everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed recently, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they reside and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this recent household. I avoided domestic life often in my existence, but I'm prepared to try. I'm managing quite well up to now.” Now 58, he states he is clean, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, maybe psychedelics and I’ll smoke pot.”

Clean to him means avoiding opiates, which he has abstained from in nearly a few years. He decided it was time to give up after a catastrophic gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in recent years where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I think some people were supposed to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his comparative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “During addiction to heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and the other,’” he says. But now he is about to launch Love Chant, his first album of original Lemonheads music in nearly two decades, which includes glimpses of the songwriting and catchy tunes that elevated them to the indie big league. “I’ve never truly heard of this sort of hiatus between albums,” he says. “It's a lengthy sleep situation. I maintain standards about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work until I was ready, and now I am.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the name is a reference to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It is a wry, heady, occasionally eye-watering narrative of his experiences as a musician and addict. “I authored the initial sections. It's my story,” he declares. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom you imagine had his hands full given his haphazard way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “challenging, but I felt excited to get a good publisher. And it positions me in public as a person who has written a book, and that is all I wanted to accomplish from childhood. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

He – the last-born of an attorney and a former fashion model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it represents a time prior to life got complicated by substances and fame. He attended Boston’s elite private academy, a liberal institution that, he recalls, “was the best. It had few restrictions aside from no rollerskating in the hallways. In other words, avoid being an asshole.” At that place, in bible class, that he encountered Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and started a group in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads began life as a punk outfit, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they agreed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they put out multiple records. After Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively became a one-man show, he hiring and firing musicians at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a large company, Atlantic, and dialled down the noise in preference of a more languid and accessible folk-inspired style. This was “since Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, Dando explains. “If you listen to our initial albums – a track like Mad, which was laid down the day after we graduated high school – you can hear we were trying to do their approach but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, waggishly described by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the band into the popularity. In 1992 they released the LP their breakthrough record, an flawless demonstration for his writing and his melancholic croon. The name was taken from a news story in which a clergyman bemoaned a individual called the subject who had gone off the rails.

Ray was not the only one. By this point, the singer was using heroin and had acquired a penchant for cocaine, too. With money, he eagerly threw himself into the rock star life, associating with Johnny Depp, shooting a video with actresses and seeing supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him one of the 50 sexiest people alive. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the notion that his song, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I desire to become someone else”, was a plea for help. He was having a great deal of fun.

However, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he provides a detailed description of the significant Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to appear for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after acquaintances suggested he come back to their hotel. When he finally did appear, he delivered an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile crowd who booed and threw bottles. But this was minor compared to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The trip was meant as a break from {drugs|substances