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The musician rolls up a sleeve and indicates a line of faint marks along his forearm, subtle traces from years of opioid use. “It requires so long to develop noticeable track marks,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you believe: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my skin is particularly resilient, but you can hardly notice it today. What was the point, eh?” He grins and emits a hoarse laugh. “Only joking!”

The singer, former alternative heartthrob and key figure of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, looks in reasonable nick for a person who has used every drug going from the age of his teens. The musician responsible for such exalted songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who apparently achieved success and threw it away. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely unfiltered. We meet at lunchtime at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he questions if it's better to relocate the conversation to the pub. In the end, he sends out for two pints of cider, which he then neglects to consume. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is apt to veer into wild tangents. No wonder he has given up owning a smartphone: “I struggle with online content, man. My mind is too scattered. I desire to read all information at the same time.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed recently, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life much in my life, but I'm prepared to make an effort. I’m doing quite well so far.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid sometimes, perhaps psychedelics and I’ll smoke marijuana.”

Sober to him means avoiding opiates, which he hasn’t touched 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 perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He credits 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 relative clean living is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on heroin, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But now he is preparing to release Love Chant, his debut record of new band material in almost two decades, which includes glimpses of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I’ve never really known about this sort of hiatus between albums,” he says. “It's some lengthy sleep shit. I do have standards about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work until the time was right, and at present I am.”

The artist is also publishing his first memoir, titled stories about his death; the name is a reference to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 90s about his premature death. It is a ironic, heady, fitfully eye-watering narrative of his experiences as a performer and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. It's my story,” he says. For the remaining part, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his hands full considering Dando’s haphazard way of speaking. The composition, he notes, was “difficult, but I was psyched to get a good company. And it positions me out there as a person who has written a book, and that is everything I desired to do from I was a kid. In education I admired James Joyce and Flaubert.”

Dando – the last-born of an lawyer and a former fashion model – talks fondly about his education, perhaps because it symbolizes a time before life got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He attended the city's elite Commonwealth school, a progressive establishment that, he says now, “was the best. It had no rules except no rollerskating in the corridors. In other words, don’t be an asshole.” It was there, in religious studies, that he encountered Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and started a group in the mid-80s. His band began life as a punk outfit, in awe to Dead Kennedys and punk icons; they agreed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. After band members departed, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a one-man show, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the band contracted to a major label, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in favour of a more languid and accessible country-rock sound. This was “since Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “Upon hearing to our early records – a song like Mad, which was laid down the day after we graduated high school – you can detect we were trying to do their approach but my voice wasn't suitable. But I knew my singing could stand out in softer arrangements.” The shift, waggishly described by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the band into the popularity. In the early 90s they issued the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable demonstration for his songcraft and his melancholic vocal style. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a priest lamented a young man named the subject who had gone off the rails.

Ray was not the sole case. At that stage, Dando was using hard drugs and had developed a liking for crack, as well. With money, he eagerly threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, associating with Hollywood stars, filming a music clip with Angelina Jolie and dating Kate Moss and film personalities. People magazine anointed him among the fifty most attractive individuals living. He cheerfully dismisses the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was having a great deal of fun.

However, the substance abuse became excessive. In the book, he provides a blow-by-blow account of the fateful festival no-show in 1995 when he failed to appear for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after two women proposed he accompany them to their hotel. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an impromptu live performance to a hostile crowd who jeered and threw objects. But that proved small beer compared to what happened in Australia shortly afterwards. The trip was meant as a break from {drugs|substances