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The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and indicates a line of small dents along his arm, subtle traces from decades of heroin abuse. “It takes so much time to develop decent track marks,” he says. “You inject for a long time and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my complexion is particularly tough, but you can hardly see it today. What was the point, eh?” He grins and emits a hoarse laugh. “Just kidding!”

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 available from the time of 14. The songwriter behind such acclaimed tracks as My Drug Buddy, he is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a celebrity who apparently had it all and threw it away. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely candid. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at a publishing company in central London, where he wonders if we should move our chat to the pub. In the end, he sends out for two glasses of apple drink, which he then neglects to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is likely to veer into random digressions. No wonder he has stopped owning a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My thoughts is too scattered. I just want to read all information at once.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he married last year, have traveled from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this recent household. I avoided family often in my existence, but I'm prepared to try. I'm managing pretty good up to now.” At 58 years old, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid sometimes, maybe mushrooms and I consume pot.”

Sober to him means avoiding heroin, which he has abstained from in almost three years. He decided it was time to give up after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could barely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not bear this type of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for helping him to stop, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I think certain individuals were supposed to use substances and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his relative clean living is that it has made him productive. “During addiction to heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But now he is preparing to launch Love Chant, his first album of original band material in almost 20 years, which contains glimpses of the lyricism and melodic smarts that propelled them to the indie big league. “I’ve never truly heard of this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he comments. “It's some lengthy sleep situation. I maintain integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new before 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 fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his early passing. It is a ironic, heady, fitfully eye-watering account of his experiences as a performer and user. “I wrote the initial sections. It's my story,” he declares. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom you imagine had his hands full given his haphazard conversational style. The writing process, he says, was “difficult, but I felt excited to secure a reputable publisher. And it positions me out there as someone who has authored a memoir, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish from childhood. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

Dando – the last-born of an attorney and a former model – speaks warmly about school, perhaps because it represents a time prior to existence got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He attended the city's elite Commonwealth school, a liberal establishment that, he recalls, “stood out. It had few restrictions aside from no skating in the corridors. In other words, don’t be an jerk.” It was there, in religious studies, that he met Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads began life as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they put out three albums. After band members left, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a one-man show, Dando recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a large company, a prominent firm, and dialled down the squall in preference of a more languid and accessible country-rock sound. This change occurred “because the band's Nevermind was released in 1991 and they had nailed it”, Dando says. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a song like Mad, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can detect we were attempting to emulate what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I knew my singing could stand out in softer arrangements.” This new sound, humorously described by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would take the band into the mainstream. In the early 90s they issued the album their breakthrough record, an impeccable showcase for his songcraft and his melancholic vocal style. The name was derived from a news story in which a priest lamented a individual called Ray who had strayed from the path.

Ray wasn’t the sole case. By this point, the singer was consuming heroin and had acquired a liking for cocaine, too. Financially secure, he eagerly threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, filming a music clip with actresses and dating Kate Moss and film personalities. People magazine declared him one of the fifty sexiest individuals living. Dando cheerfully dismisses the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was having a great deal of fun.

Nonetheless, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he provides a detailed account of the significant Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to turn up for his band's allotted slot after two women proposed he come back to their accommodation. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an unplanned live performance to a hostile audience who booed and threw objects. But this was small beer next to what happened in Australia shortly afterwards. The visit was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances