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Evan Dando rolls up a shirt cuff and points to a line of faint marks running down his arm, subtle traces from decades of opioid use. “It requires so much time to develop decent injection scars,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my complexion is particularly resilient, but you can hardly notice it now. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and lets out a hoarse laugh. “Just kidding!”

The singer, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, looks in decent shape for a person who has used every drug going from the time of his teens. The songwriter behind such exalted songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who seemingly achieved success and threw it away. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely candid. We meet at lunchtime 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 pints of apple drink, which he then forgets to consume. Often losing his train of thought, he is likely to veer into wild tangents. No wonder he has given up using a mobile device: “I struggle with online content, man. My thoughts is extremely scattered. I desire to absorb all information at once.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed last year, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this new family. I didn’t embrace family much in my life, but I'm prepared to try. I’m doing quite well up to now.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid sometimes, perhaps psychedelics and I’ll smoke marijuana.”

Sober to him means not doing heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly a few years. He concluded it was the moment to give up after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 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 cease, though he has no regrets about using. “I believe some people were supposed to use substances and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his comparative clean living is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on smack, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and this, and that,’” he says. But currently he is preparing to release his new album, his debut record of original band material in almost 20 years, which contains flashes of the lyricism and melodic smarts that propelled them to the indie big league. “I’ve never truly known about this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he comments. “This is a lengthy sleep situation. I maintain standards about my releases. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work until I was ready, and at present I am.”

Dando is also releasing his initial autobiography, titled Rumours of My Demise; the name is a nod to the stories that fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It is a ironic, heady, fitfully eye-watering account of his experiences as a performer and addict. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he declares. For the rest, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom one can assume had his hands full given his disorganized 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 someone who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to accomplish since I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

He – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- model – talks fondly about his education, maybe because it symbolizes a period prior to life got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He went to Boston’s prestigious private academy, a liberal institution that, he says now, “stood out. It had no rules except no rollerskating in the corridors. Essentially, avoid being an asshole.” It was there, in religious studies, that he encountered Ben Deily and Ben Deily and started a group in 1986. The Lemonheads began life as a punk outfit, in thrall to the Minutemen and punk icons; they signed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they released multiple records. After band members departed, the group largely became a one-man show, Dando recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his discretion.

During the 90s, the group signed to a large company, a prominent firm, and reduced the squall in preference of a increasingly melodic and accessible folk-inspired sound. This was “since Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, Dando says. “Upon hearing to our early records – a track like Mad, which was laid down the day after we finished school – you can detect we were attempting to emulate what Nirvana did but my voice didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could stand out in softer arrangements.” The shift, waggishly labeled by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the act into the popularity. In 1992 they released the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless showcase for Dando’s songcraft and his somber vocal style. The title was derived from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman lamented a individual called Ray who had gone off the rails.

Ray wasn’t the only one. By this point, Dando was using hard drugs and had developed a liking for crack, as well. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the rock star life, associating with Johnny Depp, shooting a video with actresses and dating Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him among the 50 sexiest people alive. He good-naturedly rebuffs the idea that his song, 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 enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he delivers a blow-by-blow description of the fateful festival no-show in the mid-90s when he failed to appear for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after two women suggested he accompany them to their accommodation. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile crowd who booed and threw bottles. But this was minor next to the events in the country soon after. The trip was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances