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Evan Dando pushes back a shirt cuff and indicates a series of faint marks along his forearm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It takes so much time to develop decent injection scars,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is especially resilient, but you can hardly see it today. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and emits a raspy laugh. “Just kidding!”

Dando, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 1990s alternative group his band, looks in decent shape for a person who has used numerous substances going from the time of 14. The songwriter behind such exalted songs as My Drug Buddy, he is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly achieved success and threw it away. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and completely candid. We meet at midday at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to a bar. In the end, he sends out for two pints of cider, 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 stopped owning a mobile device: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My thoughts is too scattered. I desire to read everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed recently, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this new family. I didn’t embrace domestic life much in my existence, but I'm prepared to try. I’m doing quite well up to now.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD sometimes, maybe mushrooms and I’ll smoke pot.”

Sober to him means avoiding opiates, which he hasn’t touched in almost three years. He decided it was the moment to give up after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not tolerate this kind of conduct.’” He credits his wife for helping him to stop, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I think some people were meant to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his relative clean living is that it has rendered him productive. “When you’re on smack, you’re all: ‘Forget about that, and that, and that,’” he explains. But currently he is about to launch Love Chant, his debut record of new band material in nearly 20 years, which contains glimpses of the songwriting and catchy tunes that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I haven't really heard of this kind of dormancy period between albums,” he says. “This is a Rip Van Winkle situation. I maintain standards about my releases. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work until the time was right, and at present I am.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, titled stories about his death; the title is a nod to the rumors that fitfully circulated in the 90s about his premature death. It’s a ironic, intense, fitfully eye-watering account of his adventures as a musician and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. It's my story,” he says. For the rest, he collaborated with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom one can assume had his work cut out given his haphazard conversational style. The writing process, he notes, was “challenging, but I felt excited to get a good publisher. And it positions me in public as a person who has written a book, and that is everything I desired to do from childhood. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and Flaubert.”

Dando – the last-born of an lawyer and a ex- fashion model – speaks warmly about school, maybe because it represents a time prior to life got difficult by drugs and fame. He attended Boston’s elite private academy, a liberal institution that, he recalls, “was the best. There were few restrictions aside from no skating in the corridors. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in religious studies, that he met 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 Ramones; they signed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they released multiple records. After Deily and Peretz departed, the group largely turned into a solo project, he recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the band contracted to a large company, a prominent firm, and dialled down the noise in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream folk-inspired sound. This change occurred “since Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in 1991 and they had nailed it”, he says. “Upon hearing to our early records – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can detect we were trying to emulate their approach but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could cut through softer arrangements.” This new sound, waggishly described by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the act into the mainstream. In the early 90s they issued the album their breakthrough record, an flawless demonstration for Dando’s writing and his somber croon. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a priest bemoaned a young man called Ray who had gone off the rails.

Ray wasn’t the only one. By this point, Dando was consuming heroin and had acquired a penchant for crack, too. With money, he enthusiastically threw himself into the rock star life, associating with Johnny Depp, shooting a video with actresses and dating Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. People magazine anointed him one of the fifty sexiest people alive. Dando cheerfully dismisses the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become someone else”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying too much enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse became excessive. In the book, he delivers a detailed account of the significant festival no-show in 1995 when he failed to turn up for his band's scheduled performance after two women proposed he accompany them to their accommodation. When he finally did appear, he delivered an unplanned live performance to a hostile audience who jeered and threw bottles. But that proved small beer next to the events in Australia soon after. The trip was intended as a break from {drugs|substances