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Evan Dando pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a series of faint marks running down his arm, faint scars from years of opioid use. “It takes so much time to get noticeable track marks,” he says. “You do it for a long time and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is especially tough, but you can hardly notice it now. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and lets out a raspy chuckle. “Only joking!”

The singer, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, appears in decent shape for a man who has taken every drug available from the age of his teens. The songwriter behind such acclaimed tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a celebrity who apparently had it all and threw it away. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and completely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at midday at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to the pub. In the end, he orders for two glasses of cider, which he then forgets to drink. Often drifting off topic, he is likely to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has given up owning a smartphone: “I struggle with the internet, man. My mind is extremely all over the place. I desire to read all information at once.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he wed recently, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this new family. I avoided domestic life much in my existence, but I’m ready to try. I’m doing pretty good so far.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a flexible definition: “I’ll take LSD occasionally, perhaps mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means avoiding opiates, which he has abstained from in almost three years. He concluded it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could barely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He acknowledges Teixeira for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I think some people were supposed 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 this, and the other,’” he says. But now he is about to release his new album, his first album of new band material in nearly two decades, which includes glimpses of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't truly known about this kind of hiatus between albums,” he comments. “This is a lengthy sleep shit. I maintain integrity about my releases. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work before the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”

The artist is also publishing his initial autobiography, named stories about his death; the name is a reference to the stories that fitfully spread in the 90s about his early passing. It’s a ironic, heady, occasionally eye-watering account of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I authored the first four chapters. It's my story,” he declares. For the rest, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom one can assume had his hands full considering his disorganized way of speaking. The composition, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a good company. And it positions me in public as someone who has written a book, and that’s everything I desired to do since I was a kid. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

He – the last-born of an lawyer and a former fashion model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it represents a time prior to existence got complicated by drugs and fame. He went to the city's prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal establishment that, he says now, “was the best. There were few restrictions aside from no skating in the hallways. In other words, don’t be an asshole.” It was there, in bible class, that he met Ben Deily and Ben Deily and started a group in the mid-80s. His band started out as a punk outfit, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they signed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they put out multiple records. After Deily and Peretz departed, the group largely turned into a one-man show, he hiring and firing musicians at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the band contracted to a major label, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in favour of a increasingly languid and mainstream country-rock sound. This change occurred “because the band's Nevermind was released in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “Upon hearing to our early records – a song like an early composition, which was laid down the day after we graduated high school – you can detect we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could stand out in quieter music.” This new sound, waggishly described by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the act into the mainstream. In the early 90s they released the LP their breakthrough record, an flawless demonstration for Dando’s songcraft and his somber croon. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman lamented a young man named the subject who had strayed from the path.

Ray wasn’t the only one. At that stage, the singer was consuming heroin and had developed a liking for crack, as well. With money, he enthusiastically embraced the rock star life, associating with Hollywood stars, shooting a video with actresses and seeing supermodels and film personalities. A publication anointed him one of the fifty sexiest people alive. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was having a great deal of enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use became excessive. His memoir, he delivers a detailed description of the significant festival no-show in 1995 when he did not manage to turn up for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after two women suggested he come back to their hotel. Upon eventually showing up, he delivered an impromptu live performance to a unfriendly crowd who booed and threw objects. But this was small beer compared to the events in the country soon after. The trip was intended as a break from {drugs|substances