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Evan Dando pushes back a sleeve and indicates a series of faint marks along his arm, faint scars from years of heroin abuse. “It requires so long to get noticeable injection scars,” he remarks. “You inject for a long time and you think: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my complexion is particularly resilient, but you can barely see it today. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and emits a hoarse laugh. “Only joking!”

Dando, former indie pin-up and leading light of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, looks in decent shape for a person who has taken numerous substances available from the age of 14. The musician behind such exalted songs as My Drug Buddy, he is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and entirely candid. Our interview takes place at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he questions if we should move the conversation to a bar. In the end, he sends out for two glasses of cider, which he then forgets to consume. Frequently drifting off topic, he is likely to go off on wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped using a smartphone: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is too all over the place. I just want to absorb all information at once.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he married recently, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they reside and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my existence, but I’m ready to try. I'm managing pretty good up to now.” At 58 years old, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use LSD sometimes, perhaps mushrooms and I’ll smoke marijuana.”

Clean to him means avoiding heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly a few years. He concluded it was time to quit after a catastrophic gig at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not bear this type of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to cease, though he has no regrets about using. “I believe certain individuals were meant to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative sobriety is that it has rendered him productive. “During addiction to smack, you’re all: ‘Forget about that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But now he is preparing to release his new album, his first album of new Lemonheads music in almost 20 years, which includes glimpses of the lyricism and melodic smarts that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never truly heard of this sort of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “This is some lengthy sleep shit. I maintain integrity about my releases. I wasn’t ready to do anything new until the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”

The artist is also publishing his first memoir, titled Rumours of My Demise; the name is a nod to the stories that intermittently spread in the 1990s about his premature death. It’s a ironic, intense, occasionally eye-watering narrative of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I authored the first four chapters. That’s me,” he declares. For the remaining part, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out given his haphazard conversational style. The composition, he says, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a good company. And it gets me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that’s everything I desired to accomplish since childhood. At school 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 period before life got difficult by drugs and fame. He went to Boston’s prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he says now, “stood out. There were no rules aside from no skating in the corridors. In other words, avoid being an asshole.” It was there, in bible class, that he met Ben Deily and Ben Deily and formed a band in the mid-80s. His band began life as a punk outfit, in awe to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they signed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. Once Deily and Peretz departed, the Lemonheads largely became a one-man show, he hiring and firing bandmates at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the band signed to a large company, Atlantic, and dialled down the squall in favour of a increasingly languid and mainstream country-rock sound. This was “since Nirvana’s iconic album came out in ’91 and they had nailed it”, he explains. “If you listen to our initial albums – a song like an early composition, which was recorded the following we graduated high school – you can hear we were attempting to emulate what Nirvana did but my voice didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could stand out in quieter music.” The shift, humorously labeled by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the act into the popularity. In the early 90s they issued the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless showcase for Dando’s writing and his somber vocal style. The title was derived from a newspaper headline in which a priest bemoaned a young man named the subject who had gone off the rails.

Ray wasn’t the sole case. By this point, the singer was using hard drugs and had acquired a liking for crack, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, filming a video with actresses and dating supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication anointed him one of the 50 most attractive individuals alive. He good-naturedly dismisses the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become a different person”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying a great deal of enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he provides a detailed account of the significant Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to appear for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after acquaintances suggested he accompany them to their hotel. When he finally did appear, he delivered an unplanned acoustic set to a unfriendly audience who booed and hurled bottles. But that proved small beer compared to the events in the country soon after. The visit was intended as a break from {drugs|substances