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Evan Dando pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a line of small dents running down his forearm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It takes so much time to get decent injection scars,” he remarks. “You do it for a long time and you believe: I can’t stop yet. Perhaps my skin is particularly resilient, but you can hardly notice it today. 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, looks in reasonable nick for a man who has used every drug available from the time of his teens. The musician responsible for such exalted 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 squandered it. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and entirely candid. Our interview takes place at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to the pub. Eventually, he orders for two glasses of apple drink, which he then neglects to consume. Frequently drifting off topic, he is likely to go off on wild tangents. It's understandable he has stopped using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My thoughts is extremely all over the place. I just want to read all information at once.”

Together with his spouse his partner, whom he wed last year, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this recent household. I avoided domestic life often in my existence, but I'm prepared to try. I’m doing quite well up to now.” Now 58, he states he is clean, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use LSD sometimes, perhaps mushrooms and I’ll smoke marijuana.”

Sober to him means avoiding heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly three years. He concluded it was time to quit after a disastrous gig at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could scarcely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not bear this type of conduct.’” He acknowledges Teixeira for helping him to cease, though he has no remorse about using. “I believe some people were meant to take drugs and one of them was me.”

A benefit of his relative clean living is that it has made him creative. “During addiction to smack, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and that,’” he says. But now he is about to release his new album, his first album of new band material in nearly 20 years, which includes glimpses of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't really heard of this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “It's a lengthy sleep shit. I do have standards about my releases. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work before I was ready, and now I am.”

Dando is also releasing his initial autobiography, named Rumours of My Demise; the title is a reference to the stories that intermittently circulated in the 90s about his premature death. It’s a wry, heady, fitfully eye-watering account of his experiences as a musician and addict. “I wrote the first four chapters. That’s me,” he declares. For the rest, he collaborated with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out considering Dando’s disorganized conversational style. The writing process, he says, was “challenging, but I was psyched to secure a reputable publisher. And it gets me in public as someone who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to accomplish from childhood. At school 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, perhaps because it represents a time prior to life got complicated by substances and celebrity. He went to the city's prestigious private academy, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “was the best. There were few restrictions aside from no rollerskating in the corridors. In other words, don’t be an asshole.” It was there, in religious studies, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and started a group in the mid-80s. His band began life as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and Ramones; they signed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they released multiple records. Once band members left, the Lemonheads largely became a one-man show, he recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a major label, Atlantic, and reduced the noise in favour of a increasingly languid and mainstream country-rock style. This was “because the band's Nevermind came out in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, Dando explains. “Upon hearing to our early records – a song like Mad, which was recorded the following we graduated high school – you can detect we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my voice could stand out in softer arrangements.” This new sound, humorously described by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the band into the mainstream. In 1992 they issued the LP their breakthrough record, an impeccable showcase for his writing and his somber vocal style. The title was taken from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman bemoaned a individual called the subject who had strayed from the path.

The subject wasn’t the only one. By this point, the singer was consuming hard drugs and had acquired a liking for cocaine, as well. With money, he enthusiastically embraced the rock star life, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, filming a music clip with Angelina Jolie and seeing supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication anointed him one of the 50 most attractive individuals living. Dando good-naturedly rebuffs the idea 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 enjoying too much fun.

Nonetheless, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he provides a blow-by-blow description of the fateful festival no-show in the mid-90s when he did not manage to appear for his band's allotted slot after two women suggested he come back to their accommodation. Upon eventually did appear, he delivered an unplanned live performance to a hostile crowd who jeered and hurled objects. But this was small beer compared to the events in the country soon after. The visit was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances