🔗 Share this article

The musician pushes back a sleeve and points to a line of small dents running down his arm, faint scars from years of heroin abuse. “It takes so long to develop decent track marks,” he says. “You do it for a long time and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my skin is particularly resilient, but you can hardly see it now. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and emits a hoarse chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band his band, looks in reasonable nick for a person who has taken every drug going from the time of 14. The musician responsible for such exalted songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also recognized as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly achieved success and squandered it. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and entirely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, where he wonders if we should move the conversation to the pub. Eventually, he sends out for two pints of apple drink, which he then forgets to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is apt to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My mind is too all over the place. I desire to read all information at the same time.”

Together with his spouse his partner, whom he married recently, have flown in from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the foundation 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 is clean, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, perhaps mushrooms and I’ll smoke pot.”

Clean to him means avoiding opiates, which he hasn’t touched in almost a few years. He concluded it was the moment to give up after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could barely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for assisting him to cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I think some people were supposed to take drugs and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his relative clean living is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on smack, you’re all: ‘Forget about that, and this, and the other,’” he explains. But currently he is about to launch Love Chant, his debut record of original band material in nearly 20 years, which includes flashes of the songwriting and melodic smarts that propelled them to the indie big league. “I’ve never really known about this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “This is some lengthy sleep situation. I do have integrity about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to create fresh work until I was ready, and now I am.”

Dando is also publishing his initial autobiography, titled stories about his death; the title is a reference to the rumors that intermittently spread in the 1990s about his early passing. It’s a ironic, heady, occasionally shocking account of his experiences as a performer and user. “I authored the first four chapters. It's my story,” he says. For the rest, he collaborated with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom you imagine had his work cut out given Dando’s haphazard conversational style. The composition, he says, was “challenging, but I was psyched to get a good publisher. And it gets me out there as a person who has written a book, and that’s all I wanted to do from I was a kid. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

He – the last-born of an lawyer and a former fashion model – talks fondly about school, perhaps because it represents a period before existence got complicated by substances and celebrity. He attended the city's prestigious Commonwealth school, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “stood out. There were no rules except no rollerskating in the hallways. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in bible class, that he encountered Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band started out as a punk outfit, in awe to Dead Kennedys and punk icons; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they released three albums. After Deily and Peretz departed, the group largely turned into a one-man show, he hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the band contracted to a large company, Atlantic, and reduced the squall in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream country-rock style. This was “because the band's iconic album was released in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he says. “If you listen to our initial albums – a track like an early composition, which was laid down the day after we finished school – you can hear we were trying to do what Nirvana did but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I knew my singing could cut through softer arrangements.” This new sound, waggishly labeled by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the band into the popularity. In 1992 they issued the LP their breakthrough record, an impeccable demonstration for Dando’s songcraft and his somber croon. The title was taken from a news story in which a priest lamented a individual named the subject who had gone off the rails.

Ray was not the sole case. At that stage, Dando was consuming hard drugs and had acquired a penchant for cocaine, as well. With money, he eagerly threw himself into the rock star life, associating with Hollywood stars, shooting a music clip with Angelina Jolie and seeing supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication anointed him one of the 50 sexiest people alive. He good-naturedly dismisses the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else”, was a plea for help. He was having too much fun.

However, the drug use became excessive. His memoir, he delivers a detailed description of the fateful Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he failed to turn up for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after acquaintances proposed he accompany them to their hotel. When he finally did appear, he delivered an unplanned live performance to a unfriendly crowd who booed and threw objects. But this was minor compared to what happened in the country soon after. The trip was meant as a break from {drugs|substances