🔗 Share this article

Evan Dando rolls up a shirt cuff and indicates a line of faint marks along his forearm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It requires so much time to get noticeable track marks,” he remarks. “You inject for a long time and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my complexion is especially resilient, but you can barely notice it now. What was the point, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, one-time alternative heartthrob and leading light of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, appears in decent shape for a man who has used numerous substances going from the age of his teens. The musician behind such acclaimed songs as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who seemingly had it all and squandered it. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and entirely unfiltered. We meet at lunchtime at a publishing company in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to a bar. Eventually, he sends out for two glasses of apple drink, which he then forgets to consume. 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 can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is extremely scattered. I just want to read everything at once.”

Together with his spouse his partner, whom he married last year, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this new family. I avoided domestic life often in my life, 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’ll take acid occasionally, perhaps psychedelics and I consume marijuana.”

Sober to him means avoiding opiates, which he has abstained from in nearly three years. He decided it was time to quit after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could barely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this type of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for helping him to cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I believe some people were supposed to take drugs and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his relative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on smack, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But currently he is preparing to release his new album, his first album of new Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which contains flashes of the lyricism and melodic smarts that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't truly heard of this sort of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “This is some lengthy sleep shit. I maintain standards about my releases. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work before the time was right, and now I am.”

Dando is also publishing his initial autobiography, named Rumours of My Demise; the name is a reference to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 90s about his premature death. It is a ironic, intense, occasionally eye-watering account of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he declares. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out given his disorganized way of speaking. The writing process, he says, was “difficult, but I was psyched to secure a good publisher. And it gets me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to accomplish from childhood. At school I admired James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the last-born of an lawyer and a former fashion model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it represents a time prior to life got difficult by substances and celebrity. He went to the city's prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal establishment that, he says now, “stood out. It had no rules aside from no rollerskating in the hallways. In other words, avoid being an asshole.” It was there, in religious studies, that he encountered Ben Deily and Ben Deily and started a group in the mid-80s. His band started out as a rock group, in awe to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they signed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they released multiple records. Once Deily and Peretz left, the group effectively turned into a solo project, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a major label, a prominent firm, and dialled down the squall in favour of a increasingly languid and mainstream folk-inspired style. This was “because Nirvana’s iconic album came out in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, Dando says. “If you listen to our initial albums – a track like Mad, which was recorded the following we graduated high school – you can hear we were trying to emulate their approach but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, waggishly labeled by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the band into the popularity. In the early 90s they issued the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless showcase for his songcraft and his melancholic croon. The title was derived from a news story in which a clergyman bemoaned a young man called Ray who had strayed from the path.

Ray was not the only one. By this point, the singer was using heroin and had developed a penchant for crack, too. Financially secure, he eagerly embraced the celebrity lifestyle, associating with Hollywood stars, filming a video with Angelina Jolie and dating supermodels and film personalities. A publication declared him one of the fifty most attractive people alive. Dando good-naturedly dismisses the notion that his song, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become someone else”, was a plea for help. He was having too much fun.

Nonetheless, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he provides a detailed account of the significant Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he did not manage to appear for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after two women proposed he accompany them to their accommodation. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an impromptu live performance to a hostile crowd who booed and threw objects. But this was small beer compared to what happened in the country soon after. The visit was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances