🔗 Share this article

Evan Dando rolls up a shirt cuff and indicates a line of faint marks running down his forearm, subtle traces from decades of heroin abuse. “It takes so much time to develop decent injection scars,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you believe: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my skin is especially resilient, but you can hardly notice it today. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and lets out a hoarse chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, one-time alternative heartthrob and leading light of 90s alt-rock band his band, looks in decent shape for a man who has taken numerous substances available from the time of his teens. The musician behind such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also recognized as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a celebrity who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and completely candid. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he questions if we should move our chat to a bar. In the end, he sends out for two glasses of apple drink, which he then neglects to consume. Often losing his train of thought, he is likely to veer into random digressions. It's understandable he has given up owning a smartphone: “I struggle with the internet, man. My mind is too scattered. I desire to read everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse his partner, whom he married last year, have traveled from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace domestic life much in my life, but I’m ready to make an effort. I’m doing pretty good so far.” Now 58, he states he is clean, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD sometimes, maybe mushrooms and I consume pot.”

Sober to him means avoiding heroin, which he has abstained from in nearly three years. He concluded it was time to quit after a catastrophic gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could barely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not bear this kind of behaviour.’” He credits his wife for helping him to cease, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I believe some people were supposed to use substances and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his relative sobriety is that it has rendered him creative. “During addiction to heroin, you’re all: ‘Forget about that, and this, and that,’” he says. But currently he is about to launch Love Chant, his first album of new band material in almost 20 years, which includes flashes of the songwriting and catchy tunes that elevated them to the indie big league. “I haven't really known about this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “It's a Rip Van Winkle shit. I do have standards about my releases. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work until I was ready, and now I am.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, titled stories about his death; the name is a nod to the stories that fitfully circulated in the 90s about his premature death. It’s a ironic, heady, fitfully shocking account of his experiences as a musician and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. It's my story,” he declares. For the remaining part, he collaborated with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out considering his disorganized conversational style. The composition, he says, was “difficult, but I was psyched to secure a reputable company. And it gets me out there as someone who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to accomplish since I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and Flaubert.”

Dando – the last-born of an attorney and a former model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it represents a time before existence got complicated by substances and fame. He attended the city's prestigious private academy, a liberal institution that, he recalls, “stood out. It had few restrictions except no skating in the corridors. In other words, don’t be an jerk.” At that place, in religious studies, that he met Ben Deily and Ben Deily and formed a band in 1986. His band started out as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and Ramones; they signed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they released three albums. After band members departed, the Lemonheads largely turned into a solo project, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

During the 90s, the band signed to a large company, Atlantic, and reduced the noise in favour of a increasingly languid and accessible folk-inspired style. This was “since Nirvana’s iconic album came out in 1991 and they had nailed it”, Dando explains. “If you listen to our early records – a song like Mad, which was laid down the following we finished school – you can hear we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” The shift, waggishly described by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the act into the popularity. In the early 90s they issued the album their breakthrough record, an flawless demonstration for Dando’s songcraft and his somber croon. 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 was not the sole case. At that stage, Dando was consuming hard drugs and had acquired a liking for crack, too. With money, he eagerly embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, filming a video with actresses and dating supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication anointed him one of the fifty sexiest individuals alive. Dando good-naturedly rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be 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 delivers a blow-by-blow account of the significant Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to turn up for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after two women suggested he come back to their accommodation. When he finally did appear, he delivered an impromptu live performance to a hostile audience who jeered and threw objects. But that proved small beer compared to the events in Australia soon after. The trip was intended as a break from {drugs|substances