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The musician rolls up a shirt cuff and indicates a line of faint marks running down his forearm, subtle traces from years of opioid use. “It requires so long to develop noticeable track marks,” he says. “You inject for years and you think: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my complexion is especially tough, but you can hardly notice it now. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and lets out a raspy chuckle. “Just kidding!”

The singer, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in decent shape for a person who has used every drug available from the time of 14. The songwriter responsible for such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and entirely candid. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate the conversation to a bar. Eventually, he orders for two pints of cider, which he then neglects to consume. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is likely to go off on wild tangents. It's understandable he has given up owning a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is extremely scattered. I just want to read all information at the same time.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he married recently, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this new family. I avoided domestic life much in my existence, but I’m ready 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 LSD sometimes, perhaps mushrooms and I’ll smoke pot.”

Clean to him means avoiding heroin, which he has abstained from in nearly a few years. He decided it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could scarcely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not bear this kind of conduct.’” He credits Teixeira for assisting him to cease, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I think certain individuals were meant to use substances and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his comparative clean living is that it has rendered him productive. “When you’re on smack, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and that,’” he explains. But now he is about to release his new album, his first album of original Lemonheads music in nearly 20 years, which contains flashes of the lyricism and catchy tunes that elevated them to the indie big league. “I haven't truly heard of this sort of dormancy period between albums,” he says. “This is some Rip Van Winkle situation. I maintain integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new until the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”

Dando is also publishing his first memoir, named Rumours of My Demise; the title is a reference to the stories that intermittently spread in the 1990s about his premature death. It’s a wry, heady, occasionally shocking narrative of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I wrote the first four chapters. That’s me,” he says. For the rest, he worked with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his hands full considering his haphazard conversational style. The composition, he says, was “difficult, but I was psyched to secure a good company. And it gets me out there as someone who has written a book, and that is all I wanted to accomplish since childhood. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the last-born of an attorney and a former model – speaks warmly about school, perhaps because it symbolizes a time prior to life got difficult by drugs and fame. He attended the city's elite private academy, a progressive institution that, he says now, “stood out. It had no rules aside from no skating in the hallways. Essentially, don’t be an asshole.” At that place, in bible class, that he met 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 punk icons; they signed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they released three albums. Once Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a one-man show, he hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

During the 90s, the band signed to a large company, Atlantic, and dialled down the noise in preference of a more languid and mainstream country-rock sound. This was “because Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “Upon hearing to our early records – a song like Mad, which was laid down the day after we finished school – you can hear we were attempting to do their approach but my voice didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could stand out in quieter music.” This new sound, waggishly described by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would take 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 vocal style. The name was taken from a news story in which a priest lamented a young man named the subject who had gone off the rails.

The subject wasn’t the sole case. By this point, the singer was using heroin and had developed a liking for cocaine, as well. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, shooting a video with actresses and seeing Kate Moss and film personalities. A publication anointed him one of the fifty most attractive people alive. He good-naturedly dismisses the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I’m too much with myself, I desire to become a different person”, was a plea for help. He was having too much fun.

However, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he provides a blow-by-blow account of the fateful festival no-show in the mid-90s when he did not manage to turn up for his band's scheduled performance after acquaintances proposed he come back to their accommodation. Upon eventually showing up, he delivered an impromptu live performance to a unfriendly audience who jeered and hurled objects. But that proved small beer next to what happened in the country shortly afterwards. The visit was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances