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Evan Dando rolls up a shirt cuff and points to a series of small dents along his forearm, faint scars from years of heroin abuse. “It takes so much time to develop noticeable injection scars,” he says. “You do it for a long time and you think: I can’t stop yet. Perhaps my complexion is especially tough, but you can barely see it now. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy chuckle. “Only joking!”

The singer, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 1990s alternative group his band, looks in decent shape for a man who has taken numerous substances available from the time of his teens. The musician responsible for such acclaimed tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who seemingly achieved success and threw it away. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and completely candid. Our interview takes place at midday at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he wonders if we should move the conversation to the pub. In the end, he orders for two pints of apple drink, which he then forgets to drink. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is likely to veer into wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped using a mobile device: “I struggle with the internet, man. My mind is too scattered. I just want to absorb everything at once.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he married recently, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this new family. I avoided family often in my life, but I’m ready to try. I'm managing pretty good so far.” At 58 years old, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid occasionally, perhaps psychedelics and I consume pot.”

Clean to him means not doing opiates, which he hasn’t touched in nearly three years. He concluded it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could barely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not tolerate this type of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I think some people were supposed to use substances and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative sobriety is that it has rendered him creative. “During addiction to smack, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and that,’” he says. But currently he is about to launch Love Chant, his first album of new Lemonheads music in nearly two decades, which contains flashes of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I’ve never really heard of this sort of dormancy period between albums,” he comments. “This is some lengthy sleep situation. I do have integrity about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new until the time was right, and now I am.”

Dando is also publishing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the name is a nod to the stories that fitfully spread in the 1990s about his early passing. It is a ironic, intense, occasionally eye-watering narrative of his adventures as a musician and addict. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he declares. For the remaining part, he collaborated with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom one can assume had his work cut out considering Dando’s haphazard conversational style. The writing process, he notes, was “challenging, but I felt excited to get a good publisher. And it gets me out there as someone who has written a book, and that is everything I desired to do since I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the last-born of an attorney and a ex- model – talks fondly about his education, perhaps because it symbolizes a time prior to life got difficult by substances and fame. He went to Boston’s elite private academy, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “stood out. It had no rules aside from no rollerskating in the hallways. Essentially, don’t be an asshole.” At that place, in religious studies, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band started out as a punk outfit, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and punk icons; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they put out multiple records. After Deily and Peretz departed, the group largely became a one-man show, he recruiting and dismissing musicians at his whim.

During the 90s, the group contracted to a large company, Atlantic, and reduced the squall in preference of a more melodic and accessible folk-inspired sound. This was “because Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in 1991 and they had nailed it”, Dando explains. “If you listen to our early records – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the following we graduated high school – you can detect we were trying to do their approach but my voice didn’t cut right. But I realized my voice could stand out in softer arrangements.” This new sound, humorously labeled by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would take the band into the mainstream. In the early 90s they issued the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless showcase for Dando’s writing and his melancholic vocal style. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman bemoaned a individual called Ray who had gone off the rails.

The subject was not the only one. By this point, the singer was consuming heroin and had acquired a penchant for cocaine, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly embraced the rock star life, associating with Hollywood stars, filming a video with actresses and seeing supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him among the 50 sexiest individuals living. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the notion that his song, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become a different person”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying a great deal of fun.

However, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he provides a blow-by-blow description of the fateful Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he failed to turn up for his band's allotted slot after acquaintances suggested he accompany them to their hotel. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an impromptu live performance to a unfriendly crowd who jeered and threw objects. But this was minor compared to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The visit was meant as a break from {drugs|substances