Evan Dando rolls up a sleeve and points to a line of small dents running down his forearm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It takes so long to get decent track marks,” he says. “You do it for years and you think: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my skin is particularly tough, but you can barely see it now. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy laugh. “Just kidding!”
Dando, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, looks in reasonable nick for a man who has taken every drug going from the age of 14. The songwriter behind such exalted tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray and My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely unfiltered. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, central London, where he wonders if we should move our chat to the pub. In the end, he sends out for two pints of cider, 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 given up owning a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is too all over the place. I just want to read everything at once.”
