🔗 Share this article

Evan Dando pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a series of faint marks along his forearm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It requires so much time to get decent track marks,” he remarks. “You inject for a long time and you think: I can’t stop yet. Perhaps my skin is particularly resilient, but you can hardly notice it now. What was it all for, eh?” He smiles and emits a hoarse chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, former indie pin-up and key figure of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, looks in decent shape for a person who has used every drug going from the age of 14. The musician responsible for such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who seemingly achieved success and squandered it. He is warm, goofily charismatic and entirely candid. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, where he questions if we should move the conversation to the pub. Eventually, he sends out for two pints of cider, which he then forgets to consume. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is apt to veer into wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped owning a smartphone: “I struggle with online content, man. My mind is extremely scattered. I just want to read everything at once.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed recently, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this new family. I avoided family often in my existence, but I’m ready to try. I'm managing pretty good up to now.” Now 58, he states he is clean, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use acid sometimes, perhaps mushrooms and I consume pot.”

Sober to him means not doing heroin, which he hasn’t touched in almost three years. He decided it was the moment to quit after a disastrous performance at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could barely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’” He credits his wife for assisting him to cease, though he has no regrets about using. “I think certain individuals were supposed to use substances and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his comparative clean living is that it has rendered him creative. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and this, and the other,’” he says. But currently he is about to launch his new album, his debut record of original Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which contains glimpses of the songwriting and melodic smarts that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I haven't really heard of this sort of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “It's a lengthy sleep shit. I do have integrity about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new before the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”

Dando is also publishing his first memoir, titled Rumours of My Demise; the name is a nod to the stories that intermittently spread in the 90s about his early passing. It’s a wry, intense, occasionally eye-watering narrative of his adventures as a musician and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. It's my story,” he declares. For the remaining part, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his hands full given Dando’s haphazard way of speaking. The composition, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a good company. And it gets me out there as a person who has written a book, and that’s everything I desired to accomplish from childhood. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and Flaubert.”

Dando – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- fashion model – talks fondly about his education, maybe because it symbolizes a time prior to life got difficult by substances and celebrity. He attended the city's prestigious private academy, a liberal establishment that, he says now, “stood out. There were no rules except no rollerskating in the hallways. Essentially, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in bible class, that he met Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in 1986. The Lemonheads started out as a rock group, in awe to Dead Kennedys and punk icons; they signed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. Once Deily and Peretz departed, the Lemonheads largely turned into a solo project, he hiring and firing musicians at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a major label, a prominent firm, and dialled down the noise in favour of a more melodic and accessible country-rock sound. This was “since Nirvana’s iconic album was released in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, he says. “If you listen to our initial albums – a song like an early composition, which was recorded the day after we graduated high school – you can hear we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could stand out in softer arrangements.” This new sound, humorously described by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the act into the mainstream. In 1992 they released the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable showcase for Dando’s songcraft and his melancholic croon. The title was taken from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman bemoaned a young man called the subject who had strayed from the path.

Ray wasn’t the sole case. By this point, Dando was using hard drugs and had developed a liking for cocaine, as well. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the rock star life, associating with Hollywood stars, filming a music clip with Angelina Jolie and seeing supermodels and Milla Jovovich. People magazine anointed him among the 50 sexiest people living. He cheerfully rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was having a great deal of fun.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse became excessive. His memoir, he delivers a blow-by-blow account of the fateful festival no-show in 1995 when he failed to turn up for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after two women suggested he come back to their accommodation. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile audience who booed and hurled objects. But this was small beer next to what happened in the country shortly afterwards. The visit was intended as a break from {drugs|substances