🔗 Share this article

The musician rolls up a sleeve and indicates a series of small dents along his arm, subtle traces from years of opioid use. “It takes so much time to develop decent track marks,” he says. “You do it for a long time and you think: I can’t stop yet. Perhaps my skin is especially resilient, but you can barely see it today. What was the point, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, former indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band his band, looks in decent shape for a person who has taken every drug going from the time of 14. The musician behind such exalted songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also recognized as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly achieved success and threw it away. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and completely candid. Our interview takes place at midday at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate the conversation to the pub. In the end, he sends out for two pints of cider, which he then neglects to consume. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is likely to veer into wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped owning a mobile device: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My mind is too all over the place. I just want to read all information at once.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he married last year, have traveled from São Paulo, Brazil, where they reside and where Dando now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this recent household. I avoided domestic life often in my existence, but I’m ready to try. I’m doing pretty good so far.” At 58 years old, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use acid sometimes, maybe mushrooms and I consume pot.”

Clean to him means not doing opiates, which he has abstained from in nearly a few years. He concluded it was time to quit after a disastrous performance at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could barely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not bear this kind of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for helping him to cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I think some people were meant to take drugs and one of them was me.”

A benefit of his relative sobriety is that it has rendered him productive. “During addiction to heroin, you’re all: ‘Forget about that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But now he is preparing to release his new album, his debut record of new Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which includes flashes of the songwriting and catchy tunes that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never truly known about this kind of hiatus in a career,” he comments. “It's a lengthy sleep shit. I do have integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work before I was ready, and now I'm prepared.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, named Rumours of My Demise; the name is a reference to the stories that intermittently spread in the 1990s about his early passing. It is a wry, heady, fitfully shocking narrative of his adventures as a performer and user. “I wrote the initial sections. It's my story,” he declares. For the rest, he collaborated with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom you imagine had his hands full considering his haphazard way of speaking. The composition, he says, was “challenging, but I felt excited to get a good company. And it positions me out there as a person who has written a book, and that is all I wanted to accomplish from I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and literary giants.”

He – the youngest child of an attorney and a ex- fashion model – talks fondly about his education, maybe because it symbolizes a period before life got difficult by substances and celebrity. He went to the city's elite private academy, a liberal institution that, he says now, “was the best. It had few restrictions aside from no skating in the hallways. In other words, don’t be an jerk.” It was there, in bible class, that he met Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band started out as a rock group, in awe to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they put out three albums. After band members departed, the group largely became a one-man show, Dando recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the band signed to a large company, a prominent firm, and dialled down the noise in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream country-rock sound. This was “since the band's iconic album came out in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, Dando says. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the following we finished school – you can hear we were attempting to emulate what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could cut through softer arrangements.” This new sound, humorously described by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would take the band into the mainstream. In the early 90s they released the album their breakthrough record, an impeccable showcase for his writing and his somber croon. The title was derived from a news story in which a priest lamented a individual named the subject who had gone off the rails.

The subject was not the sole case. At that stage, the singer was using heroin and had acquired a penchant for cocaine, as well. With money, he enthusiastically threw himself into the rock star life, associating with Johnny Depp, shooting a video with actresses and seeing Kate Moss and film personalities. People magazine declared him one of the fifty most attractive people living. Dando cheerfully dismisses the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I’m too much with myself, I desire to become someone else”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying a great deal of enjoyment.

However, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he provides a blow-by-blow account of the fateful Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he failed to appear for his band's scheduled performance after acquaintances suggested he accompany them to their accommodation. Upon eventually did appear, he delivered an unplanned acoustic set to a unfriendly crowd who booed and hurled objects. But this was minor next to what happened in the country soon after. The trip was intended as a break from {drugs|substances