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The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a line of faint marks along his arm, subtle traces from decades of opioid use. “It takes so long to get noticeable injection scars,” he says. “You inject for years and you believe: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my skin is particularly resilient, but you can hardly see it now. What was the point, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy laugh. “Just kidding!”

Dando, one-time indie pin-up and key figure of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, appears in decent shape for a person who has taken numerous substances going from the time of his teens. The musician behind such exalted tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also recognized as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly achieved success and threw it away. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and completely candid. Our interview takes place at midday at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he questions if it's better to relocate the conversation to a bar. In the end, he orders for two glasses of apple drink, which he then forgets to drink. Often drifting off topic, he is likely to go off on random digressions. No wonder he has stopped using a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is too scattered. I just want to read all information at once.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed last year, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace family often in my existence, but I’m ready to try. I'm managing pretty good so far.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I’ll take LSD sometimes, maybe psychedelics and I’ll smoke pot.”

Sober to him means avoiding heroin, which he has abstained from in nearly a few years. He concluded it was the moment to give up after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He credits his wife for assisting him to stop, though he has no regrets about using. “I think some people were meant to take drugs and one of them was me.”

A benefit of his relative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “During addiction to smack, you’re all: ‘Forget about that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But currently he is about to release Love Chant, his first album of new band material in nearly 20 years, which includes flashes of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't truly known about this sort of dormancy period between albums,” he comments. “This is some lengthy sleep shit. I maintain integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new until I was ready, and at present I am.”

The artist is also publishing his initial autobiography, named stories about his death; the name is a nod to the stories that fitfully circulated in the 90s about his premature death. It is a wry, intense, fitfully shocking account of his experiences as a musician and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. It's my story,” he declares. For the remaining part, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his hands full given his haphazard way of speaking. The composition, he notes, was “challenging, but I felt excited to secure a good company. And it positions me out there as someone who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to do since I was a kid. At school I admired Dylan Thomas and literary giants.”

Dando – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it symbolizes a time prior to life got complicated by drugs and fame. He attended the city's prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he says now, “stood out. There were no rules except no rollerskating in the hallways. Essentially, don’t be an asshole.” It was there, in religious studies, that he met Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and started a group in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads began life as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and Ramones; they signed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out three albums. After Deily and Peretz departed, the Lemonheads effectively became a one-man show, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

During the 90s, the band contracted to a large company, a prominent firm, and dialled down the squall in favour of a more melodic and accessible folk-inspired style. This was “because the band's iconic album was released in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, Dando says. “If you listen to our initial albums – a song like an early composition, which was laid down the day after we graduated high school – you can hear we were attempting to emulate their approach but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I knew my voice could cut through softer arrangements.” The shift, waggishly labeled by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would take the band into the popularity. In 1992 they released the album their breakthrough record, an flawless showcase for his writing and his somber croon. The name was derived from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman lamented a individual called Ray who had strayed from the path.

Ray wasn’t the only one. By this point, Dando was consuming heroin and had acquired a liking for cocaine, too. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the rock star life, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, filming a video with Angelina Jolie and seeing supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him one of the 50 most attractive individuals alive. Dando cheerfully dismisses the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was enjoying a great deal of enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he provides a detailed account of the fateful festival no-show in 1995 when he failed to turn up for his band's scheduled performance after two women proposed he accompany them to their accommodation. Upon eventually did appear, he performed an unplanned live performance to a unfriendly crowd who jeered and threw bottles. But this was minor next to what happened in Australia shortly afterwards. The trip was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances