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The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a line of small dents along his arm, faint scars from years of opioid use. “It takes so much time to develop decent track marks,” he remarks. “You do it for a long time and you think: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my complexion is particularly tough, but you can hardly notice it today. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and emits a hoarse laugh. “Just kidding!”

Dando, one-time alternative heartthrob and leading light of 1990s alternative group his band, looks in decent shape for a man who has used numerous substances going from the time of his teens. The musician responsible for such acclaimed tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and completely candid. We meet at lunchtime at a publishing company in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to the pub. Eventually, he sends out for two pints of apple drink, which he then neglects to drink. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is likely to veer into random digressions. No wonder he has given up owning a smartphone: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My mind is too scattered. I just want to read everything at once.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed 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 new family. I avoided family much in my life, but I’m ready to make an effort. I'm managing pretty good up to now.” Now 58, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid sometimes, maybe psychedelics and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means avoiding opiates, which he has abstained from in almost three years. He concluded it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in recent years where he could barely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not bear this type of conduct.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I believe some people were meant to use substances and one of them was me.”

A benefit of his relative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on smack, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and that,’” he says. But currently he is about to release his new album, his first album of new Lemonheads music in nearly 20 years, which contains glimpses of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I’ve never truly heard of this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he comments. “This is some Rip Van Winkle shit. I do have standards about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new before the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the title is a nod to the stories that intermittently circulated in the 90s about his early passing. It’s a wry, intense, occasionally shocking narrative of his experiences as a performer and user. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he says. For the rest, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out considering his disorganized way of speaking. The composition, he says, was “challenging, but I felt excited to get a good company. And it gets me out there as someone who has written a book, and that is everything I desired to accomplish from I was a kid. In education I admired Dylan Thomas and literary giants.”

Dando – the last-born of an lawyer and a ex- fashion model – speaks warmly about his education, maybe because it represents a period before existence got complicated by substances and celebrity. He went to the city's prestigious private academy, a liberal establishment that, he recalls, “was the best. There were few restrictions aside from no rollerskating in the corridors. In other words, don’t be an asshole.” At that place, in religious studies, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and started a group in 1986. The Lemonheads started out as a punk outfit, in awe to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they agreed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. After band members left, the group effectively became a one-man show, he recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the band contracted to a large company, Atlantic, and dialled down the noise in preference of a increasingly melodic and mainstream folk-inspired sound. This change occurred “since Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in ’91 and they had nailed it”, Dando explains. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a song like an early composition, which was laid down the day after we finished school – you can detect we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I realized my voice could cut through quieter music.” The shift, humorously described by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would take the act into the popularity. In 1992 they released the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless demonstration for his songcraft and his somber croon. The title was taken from a news story in which a priest lamented a young man named the subject who had gone off the rails.

The subject wasn’t the only one. At that stage, Dando was consuming heroin and had acquired a liking for crack, too. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the celebrity lifestyle, associating with Hollywood stars, shooting a music clip with Angelina Jolie and dating Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. People magazine declared him one of the fifty most attractive individuals alive. He cheerfully rebuffs the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was having too much fun.

Nonetheless, the drug use became excessive. His memoir, he provides a blow-by-blow description of the fateful festival no-show in the mid-90s when he failed to appear for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after two women suggested he accompany them to their hotel. Upon eventually showing up, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile crowd who jeered and threw objects. But that proved small beer compared to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The trip was meant as a break from {drugs|substances