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Evan Dando pushes back a sleeve and points to a line of faint marks running down his arm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It requires so much time to develop decent track marks,” he says. “You inject for a long time and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my complexion is particularly tough, but you can barely see it today. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and emits a raspy chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, looks in decent shape for a man who has taken every drug going from the age of his teens. The musician behind such acclaimed songs as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who apparently achieved success and squandered it. He is warm, goofily charismatic and entirely candid. Our interview takes place at midday at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he questions if it's better to relocate the conversation to a bar. In the end, he sends out for two pints of apple drink, which he then neglects to consume. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is likely to go off on random digressions. It's understandable he has stopped owning a mobile device: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My mind is too scattered. I just want to read everything at the same time.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he married last year, have flown in from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace family often in my life, but I'm prepared to make an effort. I’m doing quite well so far.” Now 58, he states he is clean, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use acid occasionally, maybe mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means avoiding opiates, which he hasn’t touched in almost a few years. He concluded it was the moment to give up after a catastrophic gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could scarcely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not bear this type of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I believe some people were meant to take drugs and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his relative clean living is that it has rendered him productive. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and that,’” he explains. But now he is preparing to launch Love Chant, his first album of new band material in nearly 20 years, which contains glimpses of the lyricism and melodic smarts that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really known about this kind of dormancy period between albums,” he says. “It's a Rip Van Winkle shit. I maintain standards about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to create fresh work before I was ready, and at present I'm prepared.”

The artist is also publishing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the name is a reference to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 1990s about his early passing. It is a ironic, heady, fitfully shocking account of his experiences as a performer and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. It's my story,” he says. For the rest, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his hands full considering his haphazard conversational style. The writing process, he says, was “challenging, but I felt excited to secure a good publisher. And it gets me out there as a person who has authored a memoir, and that is all I wanted to accomplish from childhood. At school I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and literary giants.”

Dando – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- model – talks fondly about his education, maybe because it symbolizes a time before life got difficult by drugs and fame. He went to the city's prestigious private academy, a progressive institution that, he recalls, “stood out. There were few restrictions aside from no skating in the corridors. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” It was there, in religious studies, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in 1986. His band began life as a punk outfit, in awe to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they signed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they released multiple records. After Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a one-man show, he hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the band contracted to a major label, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in favour of a more melodic and mainstream country-rock style. This was “since Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in 1991 and they had nailed it”, Dando says. “If you listen to our early records – a song like an early composition, which was recorded the following we graduated high school – you can hear we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my voice didn’t cut right. But I knew my singing could cut through softer arrangements.” The shift, humorously labeled by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would take the band into the mainstream. In 1992 they issued the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless showcase for his writing and his somber croon. The title was taken from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman lamented a individual called the subject who had strayed from the path.

Ray wasn’t the only one. At that stage, Dando was using heroin and had developed a liking for cocaine, as well. With money, he eagerly threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, associating with Hollywood stars, filming a video with actresses and dating Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him one of the 50 sexiest individuals living. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying a great deal of fun.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse got out of control. His memoir, he provides a detailed account of the fateful festival no-show in 1995 when he failed to appear for his band's scheduled performance after acquaintances proposed he come back to their accommodation. Upon eventually showing up, he delivered an unplanned live performance to a hostile crowd who jeered and threw bottles. But this was minor compared to what happened in the country shortly afterwards. The visit was meant as a break from {drugs|substances