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The musician rolls up a shirt cuff and indicates a line of small dents running down his arm, subtle traces from years of heroin abuse. “It requires so much time to develop decent track marks,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you think: I can’t stop yet. Perhaps my skin is especially resilient, but you can barely notice it today. What was it all for, eh?” He smiles and emits a hoarse chuckle. “Only joking!”

Dando, former alternative heartthrob and key figure of 90s alt-rock band his band, looks in reasonable nick for a man who has used numerous substances available from the age of his teens. The songwriter responsible for such exalted songs as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who apparently achieved success and squandered it. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and entirely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, where he questions if we should move our chat to the pub. Eventually, he sends out for two pints of apple drink, which he then forgets to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is apt to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has given up using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My thoughts is too all over the place. I just want to absorb everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed recently, have traveled 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 backbone of this new family. I didn’t embrace family often in my existence, but I’m ready to make an effort. I'm managing quite well so far.” Now 58, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I’ll take LSD sometimes, maybe mushrooms and I’ll smoke pot.”

Sober to him means avoiding heroin, which he has abstained from in almost three years. He decided it was the moment to give up after a catastrophic gig at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could barely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’” He acknowledges Teixeira for helping him to cease, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I think certain individuals were meant to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his comparative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But currently he is about to release his new album, his debut record of original Lemonheads music in nearly two decades, which contains flashes of the songwriting and catchy tunes that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I haven't truly known about this kind of hiatus between albums,” he comments. “This is some lengthy sleep shit. I do have standards about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new until the time was right, and now I am.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, titled stories about his death; the name is a reference to the stories that fitfully spread in the 90s about his premature death. It’s a wry, heady, occasionally shocking narrative 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 co-writer his collaborator, whom one can assume had his hands full given his haphazard conversational style. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a good publisher. And it positions me in public as someone who has written a book, and that is all I wanted to do from childhood. At school I admired James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the youngest child of an attorney and a former model – speaks warmly about his education, perhaps because it represents a period prior to existence got complicated by substances and celebrity. He went to Boston’s prestigious private academy, a progressive institution that, he recalls, “was the best. It had no rules aside from no rollerskating in the corridors. Essentially, avoid being an asshole.” At that place, in religious studies, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band started out as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they put out multiple records. Once Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads largely became a solo project, Dando hiring and firing musicians at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a large company, a prominent firm, and reduced the noise in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream country-rock style. This was “because Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in ’91 and they had nailed it”, Dando explains. “Upon hearing to our early records – a track like an early composition, which was laid down the following we graduated high school – you can hear we were trying to do their approach but my voice didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, humorously labeled by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the act into the popularity. In 1992 they issued the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable showcase for Dando’s writing and his melancholic croon. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman bemoaned a individual called the subject who had strayed from the path.

The subject was not the only one. By this point, the singer was consuming hard drugs and had acquired a penchant for crack, too. Financially secure, he eagerly threw himself into the rock star life, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, filming a video with actresses and seeing Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. People magazine declared him among the 50 most attractive people living. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the idea that his song, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I desire to become a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was having too much fun.

However, the drug use became excessive. His memoir, he delivers a detailed description of the fateful festival no-show in the mid-90s when he did not manage to turn up for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after two women proposed he come back to their accommodation. Upon eventually did appear, he delivered an unplanned acoustic set to a unfriendly audience who jeered and hurled bottles. But this was minor compared to the events in Australia shortly afterwards. The trip was intended as a break from {drugs|substances