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Evan Dando pushes back a sleeve and points to a series of faint marks running down his arm, subtle traces from years of heroin abuse. “It takes so long to get noticeable injection scars,” he remarks. “You do it for years and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my complexion is especially tough, but you can hardly see it now. What was the point, eh?” He grins and lets out a hoarse chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, former indie pin-up and key figure of 1990s alternative group his band, appears in reasonable nick for a person who has used every drug available from the time of 14. The songwriter responsible for such acclaimed tracks 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 squandered it. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely unfiltered. We meet at lunchtime at a publishing company in central London, where he wonders if it's better to relocate our chat to a bar. In the end, he orders for two pints of apple drink, which he then forgets to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is likely to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped owning a mobile device: “I struggle with the internet, man. My mind is extremely scattered. I desire to absorb everything at once.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he married last year, have traveled from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this recent household. I avoided family much in my existence, but I'm prepared to try. I'm managing quite well up to now.” Now 58, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use acid sometimes, maybe psychedelics and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means avoiding heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly a few years. He concluded it was the moment to quit after a disastrous gig at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could barely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not bear this kind of conduct.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to cease, though he has no regrets about using. “I believe certain individuals were meant to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his comparative sobriety is that it has rendered him productive. “When you’re on smack, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and this, and that,’” he says. But now he is about to release Love Chant, his first album of original band material in almost 20 years, which includes glimpses of the lyricism and melodic smarts that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't really known about this sort of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “This is some Rip Van Winkle situation. I do have standards about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to create fresh work before the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, titled Rumours of My Demise; the name is a reference to the rumors that fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It’s a ironic, intense, occasionally eye-watering account of his adventures as a performer and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. That’s me,” he says. For the remaining part, he worked with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his hands full considering Dando’s disorganized way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “challenging, but I felt excited to get a reputable company. And it positions me in public as someone who has authored a memoir, and that’s everything I desired to accomplish since I was a kid. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

He – the last-born of an lawyer and a former fashion model – speaks warmly about school, maybe because it represents a time prior to existence got difficult by substances and celebrity. He went to the city's elite Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he says now, “was the best. There were no rules except no skating in the hallways. Essentially, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in bible class, that he met Ben Deily and Ben Deily and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band began life as a rock group, in awe to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they released three albums. After band members departed, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a solo project, he hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the group contracted to a large company, Atlantic, and dialled down the noise in preference of a increasingly languid and accessible folk-inspired sound. This was “since the band's iconic album came out in ’91 and they had nailed it”, he explains. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a song like Mad, which was laid down the following we finished school – you can detect we were trying to do what Nirvana did but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I realized my voice could stand out in quieter music.” The shift, humorously labeled by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the band into the popularity. In the early 90s they issued the album their breakthrough record, an flawless demonstration for his songcraft and his somber croon. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a priest lamented a individual called the subject who had gone off the rails.

The subject was not the only one. At that stage, the singer was consuming hard drugs and had developed a penchant for crack, too. With money, he enthusiastically embraced the rock star life, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, shooting a music clip with actresses and seeing Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him among the 50 sexiest people living. He cheerfully rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying too much fun.

Nonetheless, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he delivers a detailed description of the fateful festival no-show in 1995 when he did not manage to appear for his band's scheduled performance after acquaintances proposed he come back to their accommodation. When he finally showing up, he delivered an impromptu live performance to a unfriendly crowd who booed and hurled bottles. But this was small beer compared to the events in the country soon after. The trip was meant as a break from {drugs|substances