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The musician rolls up a sleeve and points to a series of small dents running down his arm, subtle traces from years of heroin abuse. “It requires so much time to develop noticeable injection scars,” he says. “You do it for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my complexion is particularly tough, but you can hardly notice it today. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, looks in reasonable nick for a man who has used every drug going from the age of his teens. The musician behind such exalted tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who apparently had it all and squandered it. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and entirely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at midday at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to a bar. Eventually, he orders for two glasses of apple drink, which he then neglects to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is likely to go off on random digressions. It's understandable he has given up owning a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My thoughts is extremely all over the place. I just want to absorb everything at the same time.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he wed recently, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where Dando now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life much in my life, but I'm prepared to try. I’m doing pretty good up to now.” At 58 years old, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I’ll take LSD sometimes, perhaps mushrooms and I’ll smoke marijuana.”

Clean to him means avoiding heroin, which he hasn’t touched in almost three years. He concluded it was time to quit after a disastrous performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could barely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He credits Teixeira for helping him to cease, though he has no regrets about using. “I believe certain individuals were meant to use substances and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative clean living is that it has rendered him productive. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and this, and that,’” he says. But currently he is about to release his new album, his debut record of new band material in nearly 20 years, which contains flashes of the songwriting and melodic smarts that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really heard of this sort of dormancy period in a career,” he comments. “This is some Rip Van Winkle situation. I maintain integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work before I was ready, and at present I am.”

The artist is also publishing his first memoir, named Rumours of My Demise; the title is a nod to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 1990s about his early passing. It is a ironic, heady, fitfully shocking account of his experiences as a performer and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. It's my story,” he says. For the rest, he worked with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out considering his disorganized way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to secure a good publisher. And it positions me out there as someone who has written a book, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish since I was a kid. In education I admired Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

He – the youngest child of an attorney and a ex- model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it symbolizes a period prior to life got difficult by substances and celebrity. He attended Boston’s prestigious Commonwealth school, a progressive institution that, he says now, “stood out. It had few restrictions aside from no rollerskating in the corridors. Essentially, don’t be an asshole.” At that place, in bible class, that he met Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and started a group in 1986. The Lemonheads began life as a rock group, in awe to Dead Kennedys and punk icons; they signed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. Once band members departed, the group effectively became a solo project, he recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the band signed to a major label, a prominent firm, and dialled down the squall in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream folk-inspired sound. This was “since Nirvana’s iconic album came out in ’91 and they had nailed it”, he explains. “If you listen to our early records – a track like Mad, which was laid down the following we graduated high school – you can hear we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I knew my singing could stand out in quieter music.” The shift, humorously described by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the band into the popularity. In 1992 they issued the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless demonstration for Dando’s songcraft and his melancholic vocal style. The title was taken from a newspaper headline in which a priest bemoaned a individual named the subject who had strayed from the path.

Ray was not the sole case. At that stage, the singer was consuming heroin and had developed a penchant for crack, as well. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the rock star life, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, filming a video with actresses and dating supermodels and film personalities. People magazine declared him among the fifty sexiest people alive. He good-naturedly dismisses the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was having too much fun.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse became excessive. In the book, he delivers a blow-by-blow description of the significant festival no-show in the mid-90s when he failed to turn up for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after acquaintances proposed he come back to their hotel. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an unplanned live performance to a hostile audience who jeered and hurled bottles. But that proved small beer next to what happened in Australia shortly afterwards. The trip was meant as a break from {drugs|substances