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The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a series of small dents along his forearm, faint scars from years of opioid use. “It takes so much time to get decent injection scars,” he says. “You inject for years and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my complexion is particularly tough, but you can barely see it now. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and lets out a raspy laugh. “Only joking!”

Dando, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in decent shape for a man who has used numerous substances available from the time of 14. The songwriter responsible for such exalted songs as My Drug Buddy, he is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who apparently had it all and squandered it. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and entirely unfiltered. We meet at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he wonders if we should move our chat to the pub. In the end, he sends out for two pints of apple drink, which he then forgets to consume. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is likely to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped using a mobile device: “I struggle with the internet, man. My mind is too all over the place. I just want to read all information at the same time.”

Together with his spouse his partner, whom he wed recently, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they reside and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace domestic life much in my life, but I'm prepared to make an effort. I'm managing pretty good up to now.” At 58 years old, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I’ll take acid occasionally, perhaps mushrooms and I’ll smoke marijuana.”

Sober to him means not doing heroin, which he has abstained from in almost a few years. He decided it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no remorse about using. “I believe some people were supposed to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his relative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and that,’” he says. But now he is preparing to launch his new album, his first album of new Lemonheads music in almost 20 years, which contains flashes of the songwriting and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't truly known about this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he comments. “It's a Rip Van Winkle situation. I maintain standards about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to create fresh work before the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”

The artist is also publishing his initial autobiography, titled Rumours of My Demise; the name is a nod to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 90s about his early passing. It is a wry, intense, occasionally shocking account of his adventures as a musician and addict. “I authored the first four chapters. That’s me,” he declares. For the rest, he collaborated with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out given his disorganized way of speaking. The composition, he says, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a good company. And it gets me out there as a person who has authored a memoir, and that is all I wanted to accomplish since childhood. At school I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

He – the youngest child of an attorney and a former model – talks fondly about school, perhaps because it represents a time before life got complicated by substances and celebrity. He went to Boston’s prestigious private academy, a liberal establishment that, he says now, “stood out. There were few restrictions aside from no rollerskating in the hallways. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in religious studies, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and started a group in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads started out as a punk outfit, in thrall to the Minutemen and punk icons; they signed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they released three albums. Once Deily and Peretz departed, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a solo project, Dando recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his discretion.

During the 90s, the group contracted to a major label, a prominent firm, and reduced the squall in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream country-rock sound. This was “because the band's iconic album was released in ’91 and they had nailed it”, he says. “If you listen to our early records – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can hear we were attempting to emulate their approach but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I knew my voice could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, humorously labeled by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would take the band into the popularity. In the early 90s they issued the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless demonstration for his songcraft and his melancholic croon. The title was derived from a news story in which a clergyman bemoaned a individual named the subject who had strayed from the path.

Ray was not the sole case. By this point, the singer was using heroin and had acquired a penchant for cocaine, too. With money, he enthusiastically threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, filming a video with Angelina Jolie and dating Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him one of the 50 most attractive individuals alive. Dando good-naturedly dismisses the idea that his song, in which he voiced “I’m too much with myself, I desire to become a different person”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying a great deal of enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse got out of control. His memoir, he delivers a blow-by-blow account of the significant festival no-show in 1995 when he failed to appear for his band's allotted slot after two women suggested he accompany them to their hotel. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile crowd who jeered and threw bottles. But this was minor next to what happened in Australia shortly afterwards. The visit was meant as a break from {drugs|substances