On September 30, 2022, towards the end of an epic 30-song set celebrating the 30th anniversary of their best-loved album, It's A Shame About Ray, The Lemonheads were joined onstage at London's iconic Roundhouse by a very special guest, their dear friend, former Hole leader Courtney Love.
Before fronting the indie-rock veterans for a delightfully loose performance of Into Your Arms (written and originally recorded by Australian duo Love Positions, but better known as the lead single from the Boston band's 1993 album Come On Feel The Lemonheads), Love paid a warm-hearted tribute to her pal Evan Dando, The Lemonheads' frontman, who she described as "the one constant" in her life since the early '90s, hailing him as "one man who doesn't have a fucking bad bone in his body." Grunge nerds may recall that Dando was the recipient of a prank call from Nirvana and studio legend Steve Albini during the making of In Utero, but Love followed up her guest spot in London with an Instagram post revealing that her late husband Kurt Cobain loved Dando too, writing "They just had such FUN with each other."
Given that, for much of his adult life, Dando's idea of "fun" frequently included the consumption of large quantities of hard drugs - first cocaine, then heroin and crack, and later Oxycontin - it was something of a miracle that he was actually alive to hear Love's glowing testimonials, a fact he knew better than anyone.
Dando actually started his experimentation with drugs before The Lemonheads ever existed.
“We had a good coke dealer in our high school,” he reveals in a new interview with The Independent. “I was using as much as I could find.”
Inspired by Keith Richards and William Burroughs, Dando soon graduated to using heroin. In the wake of the success of It's a Shame About Ray and Come On Feel The Lemonheads, rumours that Dando had overdosed and died spread regularly: the title of his forthcoming autobiography, Rumours of My Demise, is a nod to this. In 2006, the singer turned up two hours late for a performance at Glastonbury festival and was booed when he finally appeared: later he admitted that he'd been in bed with an American supermodel, an English singer, and a bag of heroin. He wasn't offered quite so many threesomes when his drug use contributed to him losing all his teeth, after he got addicted to Oxycontin.
“That’s when I got bad,” he admits in his interview with The Independent, rolling up his sleeves to show writer Michael Hann his arms.
“I thought, I gotta have some real track marks before I quit heroin,” he says. “Junkies think some stupid shit.”
Hann reveals that Dando is now two years clean of street drugs, his life saved by moving to Brazil and getting engaged. This doesn't mean that he's entirely clean, however, the singer admitting, “I think acid is OK once in a blue moon.”
Interviewed in The New York Times in 2019, Dando stated, “I’m sort of a fan of drugs and music. I think they’re good together. I’m just going to be honest about it. Why lie?”
“Drugs eventually become a pain, they become boring, and they don’t do what you want them to do,” he added. “But that’s for everyone to figure out for themselves.”
