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The musician rolls up a shirt cuff and points to a series of small dents along his arm, subtle traces from years of opioid use. “It requires so much time to develop decent injection scars,” he says. “You inject for a long time and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is particularly resilient, but you can hardly notice it now. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and emits a hoarse chuckle. “Just kidding!”

The singer, one-time 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 age of his teens. The musician responsible for such exalted songs as My Drug Buddy, he is also recognized as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly achieved success and threw it away. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and completely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to the pub. Eventually, he sends out for two glasses of apple drink, which he then neglects to consume. Frequently drifting off topic, he is apt to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped owning a mobile device: “I struggle with online content, man. My thoughts is extremely all over the place. I desire to read all information at once.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he married recently, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this recent household. I avoided domestic life much in my life, but I’m ready to try. I’m doing pretty good up to now.” Now 58, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD sometimes, maybe mushrooms and I consume pot.”

Sober 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 disastrous performance at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not tolerate this type of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for assisting him to cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I think certain individuals were supposed to use substances and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative clean living is that it has made him creative. “During addiction to smack, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and that,’” he says. But currently he is preparing to launch Love Chant, his first album of original Lemonheads music in almost 20 years, which contains glimpses of the lyricism and melodic smarts that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I haven't really heard of this sort of hiatus in a career,” he comments. “It's a lengthy sleep situation. I maintain integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work before I was ready, and now I'm prepared.”

The artist is also publishing his first memoir, titled stories about his death; the name is a reference to the stories that intermittently spread in the 1990s about his early passing. It’s a ironic, intense, occasionally shocking narrative of his adventures as a musician and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. That’s me,” he declares. For the rest, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out given Dando’s haphazard way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to secure a good publisher. And it gets me in public as someone who has authored a memoir, and that is all I wanted to do since I was a kid. At school I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

Dando – the youngest child of an lawyer and a former fashion model – talks fondly about his education, perhaps because it symbolizes a period prior to life got difficult by substances and fame. He went to Boston’s elite Commonwealth school, a progressive institution that, he recalls, “stood out. There were few restrictions aside from no rollerskating in the corridors. Essentially, avoid being an asshole.” At that place, in religious studies, that he met Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in 1986. The Lemonheads started out as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and punk icons; they signed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they put out three albums. After Deily and Peretz departed, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a solo project, Dando recruiting and dismissing musicians at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the band signed to a major label, a prominent firm, and reduced the squall in preference of a more languid and accessible folk-inspired sound. This was “because Nirvana’s iconic album came out in ’91 and they had nailed it”, Dando says. “If you listen to our early records – a song like an early composition, which was recorded the following we graduated high school – you can hear we were trying to emulate what Nirvana did but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could cut through softer arrangements.” The shift, humorously labeled by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would take the band into the popularity. In 1992 they issued the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless demonstration for Dando’s writing and his melancholic croon. The title was taken from a news story in which a priest lamented a individual named Ray who had gone off the rails.

The subject was not the only one. By this point, the singer was using heroin and had developed a penchant for crack, too. With money, he enthusiastically embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, shooting a video with actresses and dating Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. A publication anointed him among the fifty most attractive people living. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was enjoying a great deal of fun.

However, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he delivers a blow-by-blow description of the significant Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he did not manage to appear for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after acquaintances suggested he accompany them to their accommodation. When he finally showing up, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a unfriendly crowd who jeered and threw bottles. But that proved minor next to the events in Australia shortly afterwards. The trip was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances