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The musician rolls up a sleeve and indicates a series of small dents running down his arm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It takes so much time to get decent track marks,” he says. “You inject for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my skin is particularly tough, but you can barely see it today. What was the point, eh?” He grins and emits a hoarse laugh. “Only joking!”

Dando, one-time alternative heartthrob and leading light of 1990s alternative group his band, appears in decent shape for a person who has taken numerous substances going from the age of his teens. The songwriter behind such exalted songs as My Drug Buddy, he is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly had it all and squandered it. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and completely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at midday at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he questions if we should move the conversation to the pub. In the end, he orders for two pints of cider, which he then neglects to drink. Frequently drifting off topic, he is apt to veer into random digressions. No wonder he has given up using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My thoughts is too all over the place. I desire to read everything at once.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he married last year, have flown in from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace family often in my life, but I'm prepared to try. I’m doing pretty good up to now.” Now 58, he states he is clean, though this turns out to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use acid occasionally, perhaps mushrooms and I’ll smoke pot.”

Clean to him means avoiding heroin, which he has abstained from in almost three years. He concluded it was time to give up after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could barely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not tolerate this kind of conduct.’” He credits Teixeira for helping him to cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I believe certain individuals were meant to take drugs and one of them was me.”

A benefit of his relative clean living is that it has made him creative. “During addiction to smack, you’re all: ‘Forget about that, and this, and the other,’” he explains. But now he is about to release Love Chant, his debut record of original Lemonheads music in nearly 20 years, which includes glimpses of the songwriting and melodic smarts that elevated them to the indie big league. “I haven't truly heard of this kind of hiatus in a career,” he says. “It's a Rip Van Winkle shit. I maintain standards about my releases. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work before I was ready, and at present I'm prepared.”

The artist is also publishing his first memoir, titled stories about his death; the title is a reference to the stories that intermittently circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It’s a wry, intense, occasionally eye-watering narrative of his adventures as a musician and addict. “I authored the initial sections. It's my story,” he says. For the remaining part, he collaborated with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out given his haphazard way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “challenging, but I felt excited to secure a good company. And it positions me out there as someone who has authored a memoir, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish from I was a kid. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

Dando – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- fashion model – talks fondly about his education, perhaps because it symbolizes a period before life got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He attended the city's elite private academy, a liberal institution that, he recalls, “stood out. It had no rules aside from no skating in the hallways. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in religious studies, that he met Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and started a group in 1986. His band started out as a punk outfit, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they signed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. Once band members departed, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a solo project, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the band contracted to a large company, Atlantic, and reduced the noise in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream folk-inspired style. This was “because Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in 1991 and they had nailed it”, Dando explains. “If you listen to our initial albums – a track like Mad, which was laid down the day after we finished school – you can hear we were trying to do their approach but my voice didn’t cut right. But I knew my singing could stand out in quieter music.” The shift, humorously labeled by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would take the act into the popularity. In 1992 they released the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable demonstration for his writing and his somber vocal style. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman 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 heroin and had acquired a penchant for crack, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, associating with Johnny Depp, filming a video with Angelina Jolie and seeing Kate Moss and film personalities. People magazine anointed him among the 50 most attractive people living. He good-naturedly dismisses the idea that his song, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was enjoying too much fun.

However, the substance abuse got out of control. His memoir, he provides a detailed description of the fateful Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he did not manage to appear for his band's scheduled performance after acquaintances proposed he come back to their accommodation. When he finally showing up, he performed an unplanned acoustic set to a hostile crowd who jeered and hurled bottles. But that proved minor compared to the events in Australia soon after. The trip was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances