The Lemonheads' frontman Reflects on Drug Use: 'Certain Individuals Were Meant to Take Drugs – and I Was One'

The musician rolls up a shirt cuff and indicates a line of faint marks along his forearm, faint scars from years of opioid use. “It takes so long to get noticeable track marks,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is particularly resilient, but you can barely see it today. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and emits a raspy chuckle. “Just kidding!”

The singer, one-time alternative heartthrob and key figure of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, appears in decent shape for a person who has used every drug available from the time of 14. The songwriter behind such acclaimed songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who apparently achieved success and squandered it. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and entirely candid. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he wonders if we should move our chat to a bar. Eventually, he sends out for two pints of cider, which he then forgets to consume. Often drifting off topic, he is apt to veer into wild tangents. It's understandable he has stopped using a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is too all over the place. I desire to read all information at once.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed last year, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where Dando now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying 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 managing pretty good up to now.” At 58 years old, he states he is clean, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use acid sometimes, maybe psychedelics and I consume marijuana.”

Sober to him means avoiding opiates, which he has abstained from in nearly a few years. He concluded it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in recent years where he could barely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’” He acknowledges Teixeira for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about using. “I believe certain individuals 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. “During addiction to heroin, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and this, and the other,’” he explains. But currently he is preparing to release his new album, his debut record of original Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which includes glimpses of the songwriting and catchy tunes that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never truly heard of this sort of hiatus between albums,” he says. “This is a lengthy sleep situation. I do have integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new until the time was right, and at present I'm prepared.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the title is a reference to the stories that fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It is a wry, heady, fitfully eye-watering narrative of his experiences as a performer and user. “I authored the first four chapters. That’s me,” he says. For the rest, he collaborated with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his hands full considering Dando’s haphazard conversational style. The composition, he notes, was “challenging, but I felt excited to get a reputable company. And it gets me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish from I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

Dando – the youngest child of an attorney and a ex- fashion model – talks fondly about his education, perhaps because it represents a period prior to existence got complicated by substances and fame. He went to the city's prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he says now, “was the best. It had no rules except no skating in the hallways. Essentially, avoid being an asshole.” At that place, in bible class, that he encountered Ben Deily and Ben Deily and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band began life as a rock group, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they put out three albums. After band members left, the Lemonheads largely turned into a solo project, he recruiting and dismissing musicians at his whim.

During the 90s, the band signed to a large company, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in favour of a increasingly languid and accessible folk-inspired style. This was “because the band's iconic album was released in ’91 and they had nailed it”, he explains. “Upon hearing 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 attempting to emulate what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” The shift, waggishly labeled by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would take the band 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 somber vocal style. The title was taken from a news story in which a priest lamented a young man called the subject who had gone off the rails.

Ray was not the only one. At that stage, the singer was using hard drugs and had acquired a liking for cocaine, as well. With money, he eagerly threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, shooting a music clip with Angelina Jolie and seeing supermodels and film personalities. A publication anointed him among the fifty most attractive individuals alive. Dando good-naturedly rebuffs the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was enjoying a great deal of fun.

Nonetheless, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he provides a detailed description of the fateful Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he did not manage to turn up for his band's scheduled performance after two women proposed he come back to their hotel. Upon eventually did appear, he delivered an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile crowd who jeered and threw objects. But this was small beer next to the events in Australia shortly afterwards. The visit was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances