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The musician rolls up a sleeve and points to a series of small dents running down his arm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It takes so long to get decent injection scars,” he remarks. “You inject for a long time and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my complexion is particularly tough, but you can barely see it now. What was the point, eh?” He grins and lets out a hoarse chuckle. “Just kidding!”

The singer, one-time alternative heartthrob and leading light of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in reasonable nick for a man who has taken numerous substances going from the age of 14. The songwriter responsible for such exalted tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who apparently achieved success and threw it away. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely candid. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, where he questions if we should move our chat to a bar. Eventually, he sends out for two glasses of cider, which he then forgets to drink. Frequently drifting off topic, he is apt to veer into random digressions. It's understandable he has stopped using a smartphone: “I struggle with the internet, man. My thoughts is extremely all over the place. I desire to read everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed last year, have traveled from São Paulo, Brazil, where they reside and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this recent household. I avoided family often in my existence, but I'm prepared to try. I'm managing quite well so far.” At 58 years old, he states he is clean, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, maybe psychedelics and I’ll smoke marijuana.”

Sober to him means not doing opiates, which he hasn’t touched in nearly three years. He concluded it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He credits Teixeira for helping him to cease, though he has no remorse about using. “I believe certain individuals were meant to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative clean living is that it has rendered him creative. “When you’re on heroin, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and the other,’” he explains. But now he is preparing to launch his new album, his debut record of new band material in almost two decades, which includes flashes of the songwriting and melodic smarts that propelled them to the indie big league. “I’ve never truly heard of this kind of hiatus between albums,” he comments. “This is some Rip Van Winkle shit. I do have integrity about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to create fresh work before I was ready, and at present I'm prepared.”

Dando is also publishing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the name is a nod to the rumors that fitfully spread in the 1990s about his premature death. It’s a ironic, intense, occasionally shocking account of his experiences as a musician and addict. “I authored the first four chapters. That’s me,” he declares. For the remaining part, he collaborated with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out given Dando’s disorganized conversational style. The composition, he says, was “challenging, but I felt excited to get a reputable publisher. And it gets me out there as someone who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to do since childhood. At school I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

He – the last-born of an attorney and a former fashion model – talks fondly about his education, perhaps because it represents a period before life got difficult by drugs and fame. He went to Boston’s elite Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he recalls, “stood out. It had no rules aside from no rollerskating in the hallways. Essentially, don’t be an asshole.” At that place, in religious studies, that he met Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in 1986. The Lemonheads started out as a punk outfit, in thrall to the Minutemen and Ramones; they signed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they put out three albums. After band members departed, the Lemonheads effectively became a solo project, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the band contracted to a major label, Atlantic, and reduced the squall in favour of a more melodic and accessible folk-inspired sound. This was “because the band's Nevermind was released in ’91 and they had nailed it”, Dando says. “If you listen to our early records – a song like Mad, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can detect we were attempting to emulate their approach but my voice didn’t cut right. But I realized my voice could cut through softer arrangements.” The shift, humorously described by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would take the band into the mainstream. In the early 90s they issued the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable demonstration for Dando’s songcraft and his melancholic vocal style. The name was derived from a news story in which a clergyman lamented a young man called Ray who had strayed from the path.

Ray was not the only one. By this point, the singer was using heroin and had developed a liking for cocaine, as well. With money, he enthusiastically threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, filming a music clip with Angelina Jolie and dating supermodels and film personalities. People magazine declared him among the fifty sexiest people living. He cheerfully dismisses the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was enjoying a great deal of enjoyment.

However, the substance abuse became excessive. In the book, he provides a detailed description of the fateful festival no-show in 1995 when he failed to turn up for his band's scheduled performance after two women suggested he accompany them to their accommodation. Upon eventually showing up, he delivered an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile audience who booed and hurled bottles. But this was minor next to the events in the country soon after. The trip was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances