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The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and indicates a line of small dents running down his arm, subtle traces from decades of opioid use. “It requires so much time to develop decent track marks,” he says. “You do it for a long time and you think: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my complexion is particularly resilient, but you can barely notice it today. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and emits a hoarse laugh. “Just kidding!”

The singer, former alternative heartthrob and key figure of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, appears in decent shape for a person who has taken every drug going from the age of his teens. The songwriter responsible for such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, he is also recognized as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly had it all and squandered it. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and entirely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, where he wonders if it's better to relocate the conversation to a bar. Eventually, he sends out for two glasses of apple drink, which he then neglects to drink. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is apt to go off on random digressions. It's understandable he has given up using a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My thoughts is extremely scattered. 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 a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my existence, but I’m ready to make an effort. I’m doing quite well so far.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I’ll take LSD occasionally, maybe psychedelics and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means not doing heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly a few years. He decided it was the moment to give up after a disastrous gig at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could scarcely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for assisting him to stop, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I believe certain individuals were meant to take drugs and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative clean living is that it has rendered him productive. “During addiction to heroin, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and the other,’” he explains. But now he is preparing to launch Love Chant, his first album of original Lemonheads music in almost 20 years, which includes flashes of the songwriting and melodic smarts that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really heard of this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “It's a Rip Van Winkle situation. I do have integrity about my releases. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work before the time was right, and at present I'm prepared.”

Dando is also releasing his initial autobiography, named stories about his death; the title is a nod to the stories that fitfully spread in the 1990s about his early passing. It is a wry, intense, occasionally eye-watering account of his experiences as a musician and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. That’s me,” he says. For the remaining part, he collaborated with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom you imagine had his work cut out considering his disorganized way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a good publisher. And it gets me out there as a person who has authored a memoir, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish from childhood. In education I admired Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

Dando – the last-born of an lawyer and a ex- model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it represents a time prior to existence got difficult by substances and celebrity. He went to Boston’s prestigious Commonwealth school, a progressive institution that, he says now, “was the best. There were no rules except no rollerskating in the corridors. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” It was there, in religious studies, that he met Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band began life as a punk outfit, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they signed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they put out three albums. After Deily and Peretz left, the group effectively turned into a one-man show, he recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a major label, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in preference of a increasingly melodic and mainstream country-rock sound. This was “since Nirvana’s iconic album came out in 1991 and they had nailed it”, he says. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the following we graduated high school – you can detect we were trying to emulate what Nirvana did but my voice didn’t cut right. But I knew my singing could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, humorously described by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would propel 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 derived from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman lamented a individual called Ray who had gone off the rails.

The subject was not the only one. At that stage, Dando was consuming hard drugs and had developed a penchant for cocaine, too. Financially secure, he enthusiastically threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, shooting a music clip with actresses and seeing Kate Moss and film personalities. A publication anointed him among the 50 most attractive people alive. He cheerfully dismisses the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I desire to become a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was having too much enjoyment.

However, the substance abuse became excessive. His memoir, he delivers a detailed account of the fateful Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he did not manage to appear for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after two women suggested he accompany them to their hotel. Upon eventually showing up, he delivered an unplanned acoustic set to a hostile audience who jeered and hurled bottles. But this was minor compared to what happened in the country soon after. The trip was intended as a break from {drugs|substances