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The musician rolls up a shirt cuff and points to a series of faint marks running down his arm, faint scars from years of heroin abuse. “It requires so long to develop decent track marks,” he remarks. “You do it for years and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my skin is particularly resilient, but you can barely notice it today. What was it all for, eh?” He smiles and emits a raspy laugh. “Just kidding!”

Dando, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 90s alt-rock band his band, looks in decent shape for a person who has taken numerous substances available from the age of 14. The songwriter responsible for such exalted tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who seemingly had it all and squandered it. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and entirely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at midday at his publishers’ offices in Clerkenwell, where he questions if we should move our chat to a bar. In the end, he sends out for two glasses of apple drink, which he then neglects to drink. Often drifting off topic, he is apt to go off on random digressions. It's understandable he has given up owning a mobile device: “I struggle with online content, man. My mind is extremely all over the place. I just want to read all information at once.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he wed last year, have flown in from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the backbone of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life much in my life, but I’m ready to try. I'm managing pretty good up to now.” At 58 years old, he says he is clean, though this proves to be a loose concept: “I’ll take LSD occasionally, maybe psychedelics and I’ll smoke pot.”

Clean to him means not doing heroin, which he has abstained from in almost three years. He concluded it was time to give up after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not bear this kind of behaviour.’” He credits his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about using. “I believe some people were supposed to use substances and one of them was me.”

A benefit of his relative sobriety is that it has rendered him creative. “When you’re on smack, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he explains. But currently he is about to release Love Chant, his first album of new Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which contains flashes of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really heard of this sort of hiatus in a career,” he says. “This is some lengthy sleep situation. I do have standards about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to create fresh work before the time was right, and at present I am.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, named Rumours of My Demise; the title is a nod to the rumors that fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his early passing. It’s a wry, heady, fitfully eye-watering narrative of his experiences as a performer and user. “I authored the first four chapters. It's my story,” he says. For the remaining part, he collaborated with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out given Dando’s disorganized way of speaking. The composition, he says, was “challenging, but I was psyched to get a good company. And it positions me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that’s everything I desired to do from I was a kid. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce and Flaubert.”

Dando – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- fashion model – talks fondly about his education, maybe because it symbolizes a period before existence got complicated by drugs and fame. He attended the city's prestigious private academy, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “was the best. It had few restrictions aside from no skating in the corridors. Essentially, avoid being an jerk.” It was there, in bible class, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in 1986. His band started out as a punk outfit, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and punk icons; they agreed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they released multiple records. Once Deily and Peretz left, the group largely became a one-man show, he recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his whim.

During the 90s, the group signed to a major label, Atlantic, and reduced the squall in favour of a more languid and accessible folk-inspired style. This was “because the band's iconic album came out in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a track like Mad, which was laid down the following we finished school – you can detect we were trying to do their approach but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I realized my voice could cut through softer arrangements.” The shift, humorously labeled by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would take the band into the mainstream. In the early 90s they issued the LP their breakthrough record, an impeccable showcase for Dando’s songcraft and his somber vocal style. The title was taken from a news story in which a priest lamented a individual called the subject who had gone off the rails.

Ray wasn’t the only one. By this point, the singer was consuming heroin and had acquired a liking for cocaine, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly embraced the rock star life, associating with Hollywood stars, shooting a video with actresses and seeing supermodels and film personalities. A publication declared him among the fifty most attractive people alive. He good-naturedly dismisses the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was having a great deal of enjoyment.

However, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he provides a blow-by-blow description of the significant festival no-show in the mid-90s when he did not manage to turn up for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after two women suggested he come back to their accommodation. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile crowd who booed and threw objects. But that proved minor compared to what happened in Australia soon after. The trip was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances