🔗 Share this article

The musician pushes back a sleeve and points to a series of faint marks along his forearm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It takes so much time to get noticeable injection scars,” he says. “You do it for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my complexion is especially tough, but you can barely see it today. What was it all for, eh?” He smiles and lets out a raspy laugh. “Just kidding!”

Dando, former indie pin-up and key figure of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in decent shape for a person who has used numerous substances available from the age of his teens. The songwriter behind such acclaimed songs as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is warm, goofily charismatic and entirely unfiltered. We meet at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he wonders if it's better to relocate the conversation to the pub. In the end, he orders for two glasses of cider, which he then forgets to drink. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is likely to go off on random digressions. It's understandable he has stopped using a mobile device: “I struggle with online content, man. My mind is extremely scattered. I just want to read everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he married recently, 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 backbone of this new family. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my existence, but I'm prepared to make an effort. I'm managing quite well so far.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use LSD sometimes, perhaps psychedelics and I’ll smoke pot.”

Sober to him means not doing heroin, which he hasn’t touched in almost three years. He concluded it was time to quit after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could scarcely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He credits his wife for helping him to stop, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I think certain individuals were supposed to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his comparative clean living is that it has rendered him creative. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and the other,’” he says. But currently he is preparing to launch Love Chant, his first album of original band material in nearly 20 years, which contains flashes of the lyricism and melodic smarts that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I haven't truly known about this sort of dormancy period between albums,” he says. “This is some lengthy sleep situation. I maintain standards about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new before I was ready, and now I'm prepared.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, titled Rumours of My Demise; the title is a reference to the rumors that intermittently spread in the 90s about his early passing. It’s a wry, heady, fitfully eye-watering account of his experiences as a musician and user. “I wrote the initial sections. That’s me,” he declares. For the rest, he worked with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his hands full given his haphazard way of speaking. The composition, he says, was “difficult, but I was psyched to get a good company. And it gets me out there as a person who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to do since I was a kid. At school I admired Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

He – the youngest child of an attorney and a former fashion model – speaks warmly about his education, maybe because it symbolizes a period before life got complicated by substances and fame. He attended Boston’s prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal establishment that, he recalls, “stood out. It had few restrictions except no rollerskating in the corridors. Essentially, don’t be an jerk.” At that place, in bible class, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band started out as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they put out three albums. Once Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively became a solo project, he hiring and firing bandmates at his discretion.

During the 90s, the group contracted to a large company, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in favour of a more languid and accessible folk-inspired style. This change occurred “since the band's iconic album was released in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, Dando says. “If you listen to our initial albums – a song like an early composition, which was laid down the day after we graduated high school – you can detect we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my voice wasn't suitable. But I knew my voice could stand out in quieter music.” The shift, waggishly described by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would take the act into the mainstream. In the early 90s they issued the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable showcase for Dando’s writing and his melancholic 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.

Ray wasn’t the only one. By this point, Dando was using hard drugs and had developed a liking for crack, too. With money, he eagerly threw himself into the rock star life, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, shooting a music clip with actresses and seeing supermodels and film personalities. People magazine anointed him one of the 50 most attractive people alive. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the notion that his song, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was enjoying too much enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he provides a detailed description of the fateful Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to turn up for his band's scheduled performance after two women suggested he accompany them to their hotel. When he finally did appear, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile audience who booed and hurled objects. But that proved small beer next to the events in the country soon after. The visit was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances