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The musician rolls up a sleeve and indicates a series of faint marks running down his forearm, subtle traces from decades of heroin abuse. “It requires so long to get noticeable track marks,” he remarks. “You inject for a long time and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my complexion is particularly tough, but you can barely see it now. What was the point, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, former indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in reasonable nick for a man who has used numerous substances available 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 celebrity who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and completely candid. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he wonders if we should move the conversation to a bar. In the end, he orders 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. It's understandable he has given up using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is too all over the place. I desire to read everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed recently, have flown in from their home in South America, where they live and where Dando now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my life, but I'm prepared to make an effort. I'm managing pretty good up to now.” Now 58, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid occasionally, perhaps mushrooms and I’ll smoke pot.”

Clean to him means not doing opiates, which he hasn’t touched in almost three years. He decided it was time to quit after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could barely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not tolerate this type of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for assisting him to cease, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I think some people were meant to use substances and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his relative clean living is that it has rendered him creative. “During addiction to heroin, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he explains. But now he is preparing to launch Love Chant, his first album of new Lemonheads music in nearly 20 years, which includes flashes of the songwriting and catchy tunes that elevated them to the indie big league. “I’ve never truly known about this kind of hiatus between albums,” he says. “This is some lengthy sleep shit. I do have integrity about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to create fresh work before the time was right, and at present I'm prepared.”

Dando is also publishing his initial autobiography, titled Rumours of My Demise; the title is a nod to the rumors that fitfully spread in the 1990s about his early passing. It is a wry, intense, occasionally eye-watering narrative of his adventures as a musician and user. “I wrote the initial sections. It's my story,” he declares. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom you imagine had his hands full considering Dando’s disorganized conversational style. The writing process, he says, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a good company. And it gets me out there as someone who has authored a memoir, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish from I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

Dando – the youngest child of an lawyer and a former fashion model – speaks warmly about his education, maybe because it symbolizes a period prior to existence got complicated by drugs and fame. He attended Boston’s elite private academy, a liberal institution that, he says now, “stood out. It had few restrictions except no rollerskating in the hallways. Essentially, don’t be an jerk.” At that place, in bible class, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in 1986. The Lemonheads began life as a rock group, in thrall to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they put out three albums. After band members left, the group effectively turned into a solo project, Dando hiring and firing musicians at his whim.

During the 90s, the band contracted to a large company, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in preference of a more languid and accessible country-rock style. This was “because Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in ’91 and they had nailed it”, he explains. “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 their approach but my voice didn’t cut right. But I knew my singing could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, waggishly described by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the act into the mainstream. In 1992 they issued the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable showcase for his writing and his somber croon. The name was taken from a news story in which a clergyman bemoaned a individual named the subject who had gone off the rails.

Ray was not the sole case. At that stage, Dando was consuming hard drugs and had developed a penchant for crack, too. With money, he enthusiastically threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, shooting a music clip with actresses and dating Kate Moss and film personalities. People magazine anointed him one of the fifty sexiest people alive. He good-naturedly dismisses the idea that his song, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become a different person”, was a plea for help. He was having a great deal of fun.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse became excessive. His memoir, he provides a detailed account of the significant Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he did not manage to appear for his band's allotted slot after two women suggested he accompany them to their accommodation. When he finally did appear, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a unfriendly audience who booed and hurled objects. But this was minor compared to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The trip was intended as a break from {drugs|substances