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The musician pushes back a sleeve and points to a line of small dents running down his arm, subtle traces from years of opioid use. “It requires so long to develop decent track marks,” he says. “You do it for a long time and you believe: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my skin is especially resilient, but you can barely see it now. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy laugh. “Only joking!”

The singer, one-time alternative heartthrob and key figure of 90s alt-rock band his band, looks in decent shape for a person who has taken every drug available from the time of his teens. The musician responsible for such exalted songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who seemingly had it all and squandered it. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and entirely unfiltered. We meet at midday at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he wonders 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 losing his train of thought, he is likely to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My mind is extremely scattered. I desire to absorb everything at the same time.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed recently, have traveled from their home in South America, where they reside and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life much in my existence, but I’m ready to make an effort. I’m doing pretty good so far.” At 58 years old, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, perhaps psychedelics and I’ll smoke pot.”

Sober to him means avoiding opiates, which he has abstained from in almost a few years. He decided it was the moment to give up after a disastrous gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in recent years where he could barely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is unacceptable. My reputation will not tolerate this type of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I think some people were meant to take drugs and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative sobriety is that it has rendered him productive. “During addiction to smack, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and that,’” he explains. But now he is preparing to launch Love Chant, his first album of new Lemonheads music in nearly two decades, which includes glimpses of the songwriting and catchy tunes that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I haven't really heard of this kind of hiatus in a career,” he says. “It's some Rip Van Winkle shit. 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 am.”

The artist is also publishing his initial autobiography, named Rumours of My Demise; the title is a nod to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 90s about his early passing. It’s a ironic, heady, fitfully shocking account of his adventures as a musician and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. It's my story,” he declares. For the rest, he worked with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his hands full considering Dando’s disorganized conversational style. The writing process, he says, was “challenging, but I was psyched to get a good company. And it positions me in public as someone who has written a book, and that is all I wanted to do from childhood. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

Dando – the last-born of an attorney and a former model – talks fondly about school, perhaps because it represents a period before existence got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He went to Boston’s prestigious private academy, a liberal institution that, he says now, “stood out. There were few restrictions except no skating in the corridors. Essentially, avoid being an asshole.” It was there, in bible class, that he encountered Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band started out as a rock group, in thrall to the Minutemen and Ramones; they signed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they released multiple records. After Deily and Peretz departed, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a one-man show, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a major label, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in favour of a more languid and mainstream country-rock sound. This change occurred “since Nirvana’s iconic album was released in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, Dando explains. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a song like an early composition, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can detect we were trying to emulate their approach but my voice didn’t cut right. But I realized my voice could stand out in softer arrangements.” This new sound, humorously labeled by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would take the band into the mainstream. In 1992 they released the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable demonstration for his songcraft and his somber croon. The name was taken from a news story in which a priest bemoaned a individual called the subject who had strayed from the path.

Ray was not the only one. At that stage, Dando was consuming hard drugs and had developed a penchant for cocaine, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, filming a video with Angelina Jolie and seeing supermodels and film personalities. A publication anointed him one of the 50 sexiest individuals alive. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the idea that his song, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become a different person”, was a plea for help. He was having too much enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he provides a detailed description of the significant Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to turn up for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after two women proposed he come back to their accommodation. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an unplanned live performance to a unfriendly crowd who jeered and hurled bottles. But that proved minor compared to the events in Australia shortly afterwards. The visit was meant as a break from {drugs|substances