🔗 Share this article

The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a line of faint marks running down his arm, subtle traces from decades of opioid use. “It takes so much time to develop noticeable injection scars,” he remarks. “You do it for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my complexion is particularly tough, but you can hardly see it today. What was the point, eh?” He grins and emits a raspy chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, one-time indie pin-up and key figure of 90s alt-rock band his band, looks in decent shape for a man who has used every drug available from the age of his teens. The songwriter responsible for such acclaimed songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a celebrity who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and entirely unfiltered. We meet at midday at a publishing company 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 glasses of apple drink, which he then neglects to consume. Frequently drifting off topic, he is likely to go off on random digressions. No wonder he has given up owning a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is extremely scattered. I desire to absorb all information at the same time.”

He and his wife his partner, 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 new family. I avoided family often in my existence, but I’m ready to try. I'm managing quite well up to now.” At 58 years old, he states he is clean, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use acid occasionally, perhaps psychedelics and I’ll smoke marijuana.”

Sober to him means avoiding heroin, which he has abstained from in nearly a few years. He concluded it was time to give up after a disastrous 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 type of behaviour.’” He credits his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no remorse about using. “I believe certain individuals were supposed to use substances and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative sobriety is that it has rendered him creative. “When you’re on smack, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But currently he is about to release Love Chant, his first album of new band material in almost two decades, which includes glimpses of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I haven't truly heard of this kind of hiatus between albums,” he comments. “This is some Rip Van Winkle situation. I do have standards about my releases. I wasn’t ready to do anything new until I was ready, and now I am.”

The artist is also releasing his initial autobiography, titled Rumours of My Demise; the title is a reference to the stories that intermittently circulated in the 1990s about his early passing. It’s a ironic, intense, fitfully shocking account of his adventures as a musician and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. That’s me,” he says. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out given his haphazard way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I was psyched to secure a good company. And it positions me in public as a person who has written a book, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish from childhood. In education I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

Dando – the last-born of an lawyer and a ex- model – speaks warmly about school, perhaps because it symbolizes a time before life got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He went to the city's prestigious Commonwealth school, a progressive institution that, he recalls, “was the best. It had few restrictions except no skating in the hallways. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in religious studies, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and started a group in 1986. His band started out as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and punk icons; they signed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. After Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively became a one-man show, Dando recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his discretion.

During the 90s, the band contracted to a major label, a prominent firm, and reduced the noise in favour of a increasingly melodic and accessible folk-inspired style. This was “since the band's iconic album came out in ’91 and they had nailed it”, Dando says. “If you listen to our initial albums – a song like an early composition, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can detect we were attempting to emulate what Nirvana did but my voice didn’t cut right. But I knew my singing could cut through softer arrangements.” This new sound, humorously labeled by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would take the act into the mainstream. In the early 90s they issued the LP their breakthrough record, an flawless showcase for Dando’s songcraft and his somber croon. The name was taken from a news story in which a priest lamented a young man called Ray who had strayed from the path.

The subject wasn’t the only one. At that stage, the singer was using heroin and had acquired a penchant for crack, too. With money, he eagerly embraced the rock star life, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, filming a video with actresses and dating Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. People magazine declared him among the fifty sexiest people alive. Dando good-naturedly dismisses the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying too much enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use became excessive. His memoir, he delivers a detailed description of the significant Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to appear for his band's allotted slot after acquaintances suggested he accompany them to their hotel. Upon eventually showing up, he delivered an impromptu live performance to a unfriendly audience who booed and threw bottles. But that proved small beer next to the events in Australia soon after. The visit was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances