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The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and indicates a line of faint marks running down his arm, subtle traces from decades of heroin abuse. “It takes so much time to get decent track marks,” he remarks. “You do it for years and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is especially tough, but you can hardly see it today. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and emits a raspy chuckle. “Only joking!”

Dando, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, appears in reasonable nick for a person who has taken numerous substances going from the age of his teens. The musician responsible for such exalted 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 completely candid. Our interview takes place at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he wonders if we should move our chat to a bar. In the end, he sends out for two pints of apple drink, which he then neglects to consume. Frequently drifting off topic, he is likely to veer into random digressions. No wonder he has stopped owning a mobile device: “I struggle with online content, man. My mind is extremely all over the place. I desire to absorb all information at the same time.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed last year, have traveled from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my life, but I’m ready to make an effort. I'm managing quite well up to now.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use acid occasionally, maybe mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means avoiding heroin, which he hasn’t touched in almost a few years. He concluded it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could scarcely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’” He credits his wife for helping him to stop, though he has no remorse about using. “I believe certain individuals were supposed to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative clean living is that it has rendered him creative. “During addiction to smack, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and that, and that,’” he says. But currently he is preparing to release Love Chant, his first album of new Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which includes flashes of the songwriting and catchy tunes that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really known about this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “It's a Rip Van Winkle shit. I do have integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new before the time was right, and at present I'm prepared.”

Dando is also releasing his initial autobiography, named Rumours of My Demise; the title is a reference to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 90s about his premature death. It is a wry, heady, occasionally shocking account of his adventures as a performer and user. “I authored the first four chapters. That’s me,” he declares. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out considering Dando’s disorganized way of speaking. The composition, he notes, was “challenging, but I felt excited to secure a good publisher. And it gets me out there as a person who has written a book, and that’s everything I desired to accomplish since childhood. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the youngest child of an attorney and a former fashion model – talks fondly about school, perhaps because it symbolizes a time prior to life got complicated by drugs and celebrity. He went to Boston’s elite Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he says now, “was the best. There were no rules aside from no rollerskating in the hallways. Essentially, avoid being an jerk.” It was there, in bible class, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in 1986. The Lemonheads started out as a rock group, in thrall to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out three albums. Once Deily and Peretz departed, the group effectively became a one-man show, he hiring and firing bandmates at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the band signed to a major label, Atlantic, and reduced the squall in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream country-rock style. This change occurred “because the band's Nevermind was released in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, Dando explains. “If you listen to our initial albums – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the following we graduated high school – you can hear we were trying to do what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could stand out in softer arrangements.” This new sound, waggishly described by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the band into the mainstream. In 1992 they issued the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless demonstration for Dando’s writing and his somber croon. The name was derived from a news story in which a priest bemoaned a individual named 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 eagerly embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, shooting a music clip with Angelina Jolie and dating supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him one of the fifty sexiest individuals alive. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was having a great deal of fun.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse became excessive. His memoir, he delivers a blow-by-blow account of the fateful Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to appear for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after acquaintances suggested he come back to their hotel. When he finally did appear, he delivered an impromptu live performance to a hostile audience who booed and hurled bottles. But that proved small beer next to the events in Australia soon after. The visit was intended as a break from {drugs|substances