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The musician rolls up a sleeve and points to a series of faint marks running down his forearm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It requires so much time to develop decent track marks,” he says. “You do it for years and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my complexion is particularly resilient, but you can barely notice it now. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and lets out a hoarse laugh. “Only joking!”

Dando, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in reasonable nick for a person who has used numerous substances available from the age of his teens. The songwriter responsible for such acclaimed tracks as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly achieved success and threw it away. He is warm, goofily charismatic and entirely unfiltered. We meet at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he wonders if we should move the conversation to the pub. In the end, he orders for two glasses of cider, which he then forgets to drink. Often drifting off topic, he is likely to veer into random digressions. It's understandable he has given up owning a mobile device: “I struggle with the internet, man. My mind is too scattered. I just want to absorb all information at once.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he wed recently, have traveled from their home in South America, where they reside and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my existence, but I’m ready to try. I'm managing pretty good so far.” Now 58, he states he is clean, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use acid sometimes, perhaps psychedelics and I consume pot.”

Sober to him means avoiding opiates, which he hasn’t touched in nearly three years. He decided it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could barely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not bear this kind of behaviour.’” He acknowledges Teixeira for assisting him to cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I think some people were meant to use substances and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his relative sobriety is that it has made him creative. “When you’re on smack, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and this, and that,’” he explains. But currently he is preparing to launch his new album, his debut record of new Lemonheads music in nearly 20 years, which contains flashes of the songwriting and melodic smarts that elevated them to the indie big league. “I’ve never truly heard of this sort of hiatus between albums,” he comments. “It's a Rip Van Winkle situation. I maintain integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new until I was ready, and now I'm prepared.”

Dando is also publishing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the title is a nod to the rumors that intermittently spread in the 90s about his early passing. It’s a wry, heady, fitfully shocking account of his experiences as a musician and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. It's my story,” he says. For the remaining part, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom one can assume had his hands full given Dando’s haphazard way of speaking. The composition, he says, was “difficult, but I was psyched to get a reputable company. And it gets me out there as someone who has written a book, and that is all I wanted to accomplish since I was a kid. In education I admired Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

He – the last-born of an lawyer and a former fashion model – talks fondly about his education, perhaps because it symbolizes a time prior to life got difficult by substances and celebrity. He went to Boston’s elite Commonwealth school, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “was the best. It had few restrictions except no rollerskating in the hallways. Essentially, don’t be an asshole.” At that place, in religious studies, that he met Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads started out as a rock group, in awe to the Minutemen and Ramones; they agreed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they put out three albums. Once Deily and Peretz departed, the group largely turned into a one-man show, Dando recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his whim.

During the 90s, the group contracted to a large company, a prominent firm, and dialled down the noise in preference of a increasingly languid and accessible country-rock sound. This change occurred “since the band's Nevermind was released in ’91 and they had nailed it”, he says. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a track like Mad, which was recorded the following we graduated high school – you can hear we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my voice wasn't suitable. But I knew my voice could cut through softer arrangements.” This new sound, waggishly labeled by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would take the act into the popularity. In the early 90s they released the LP their breakthrough record, an flawless demonstration for his writing and his somber vocal style. The title was derived from a newspaper headline in which a priest lamented a young man called Ray who had strayed from the path.

Ray was not the only one. By this point, the singer was consuming hard drugs and had developed a penchant for cocaine, too. With money, he eagerly embraced the celebrity lifestyle, associating with Hollywood stars, filming a video with actresses and dating supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication anointed him among the 50 most attractive people living. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the notion that his song, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was having too much enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use became excessive. His memoir, he delivers a detailed description of the fateful Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he failed to appear for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after two women proposed he accompany them to their accommodation. When he finally did appear, he performed an impromptu live performance to a hostile crowd who jeered and hurled objects. But this was minor compared to what happened in the country soon after. The trip was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances