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The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a series of faint marks running down his forearm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It requires so much time to develop decent injection scars,” he says. “You inject for a long time and you think: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my skin is especially tough, but you can barely notice it now. What was the point, eh?” He grins and emits a hoarse chuckle. “Only joking!”

Dando, one-time indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, looks in reasonable nick for a person who has taken numerous substances available from the age of 14. The musician behind such exalted songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who apparently achieved success and threw it away. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and entirely candid. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to a bar. In the end, he orders for two glasses of apple drink, which he then forgets to drink. Frequently drifting off topic, he is apt to go off on wild tangents. It's understandable he has given up using a mobile device: “I struggle with online content, man. My thoughts is too scattered. I desire to absorb all information at the same time.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he wed last year, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they reside and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this new family. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my life, but I’m ready to try. I’m doing quite well up to now.” Now 58, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this turns out to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, maybe mushrooms and I consume pot.”

Sober to him means not doing heroin, which he has abstained from in nearly a few years. He decided it was time to give up after a catastrophic gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in recent years where he could barely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not bear this type of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I think some people were supposed to use substances and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his relative sobriety is that it has made him creative. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and that,’” he explains. But currently he is preparing to launch Love Chant, his first album of new Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which includes flashes of the songwriting and melodic smarts that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really known about this sort of hiatus in a career,” he comments. “It's a lengthy sleep situation. I maintain standards about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new until the time was right, and at present I'm prepared.”

The artist is also releasing his first memoir, titled Rumours of My Demise; the title is a reference to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 90s about his premature death. It’s a ironic, heady, fitfully eye-watering narrative of his experiences as a musician and user. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he declares. For the rest, he collaborated with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out given Dando’s haphazard way of speaking. The composition, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a good company. And it positions me in public as someone who has authored a memoir, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish since I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

Dando – the last-born of an lawyer and a former fashion model – speaks warmly about his education, perhaps because it symbolizes a period prior to existence got difficult by drugs and fame. He went to the city's prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he says now, “stood out. There were no rules 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 Jesse Peretz and formed a band in 1986. The Lemonheads started out as a rock group, in thrall to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out three albums. After band members departed, the Lemonheads largely turned into a one-man show, he hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the band signed to a major label, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in preference of a more languid and mainstream country-rock sound. This was “since the band's iconic album was released in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “If you listen to our early records – a song like an early composition, which was recorded the following we finished school – you can hear we were trying to emulate their approach but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could stand out in quieter music.” This new sound, humorously labeled by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would take the band into the popularity. In 1992 they issued the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless showcase for Dando’s songcraft and his melancholic croon. The name was derived from a newspaper headline in which a priest bemoaned a young man named Ray who had gone off the rails.

The subject wasn’t the sole case. By this point, the singer was using heroin and had developed a liking for crack, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly embraced the rock star life, associating with Hollywood stars, filming a video with actresses and seeing Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. A publication anointed him one of the 50 most attractive individuals living. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the notion 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 having too much enjoyment.

However, the drug use became excessive. His memoir, he provides a blow-by-blow description of the fateful Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he failed to turn up for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after two women proposed he accompany them to their accommodation. Upon eventually showing up, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile crowd who jeered and hurled bottles. But this was small beer compared to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The visit was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances