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Evan Dando pushes back a sleeve and points to a line of small dents along his arm, subtle traces from decades of heroin abuse. “It requires so much time to develop noticeable injection scars,” he remarks. “You do it for a long time and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my skin is especially tough, but you can barely notice it today. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and emits a raspy laugh. “Only joking!”

The singer, one-time alternative heartthrob and leading light of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, looks in decent shape for a man who has taken numerous substances going from the time of his teens. The songwriter behind such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who apparently achieved success and squandered it. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and completely candid. We meet at midday at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he questions if it's better to relocate the conversation to a bar. Eventually, he sends out for two pints of cider, which he then forgets to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is apt to veer into wild tangents. It's understandable he has stopped owning a smartphone: “I struggle with online content, man. My mind is too scattered. I desire to read everything at once.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he married last year, have traveled from their home in South America, where they reside and where Dando now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this recent household. I avoided domestic life much in my existence, but I’m ready to make an effort. I’m doing pretty good so far.” Now 58, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I’ll take LSD occasionally, maybe mushrooms and I consume pot.”

Clean to him means avoiding opiates, which he has abstained from in almost three years. He concluded it was the moment to give up after a catastrophic gig at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could barely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not tolerate this type of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for helping him to stop, though he has no remorse about using. “I think some people were meant to use substances and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his relative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “During addiction to heroin, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and that, and that,’” he explains. But currently he is preparing to release Love Chant, his debut record of new band material in nearly two decades, which includes flashes of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I’ve never really heard of this sort of hiatus in a career,” he says. “This is a lengthy sleep shit. I maintain integrity about my releases. I wasn’t ready to do anything new before I was ready, and now I am.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, titled stories about his death; the name is a nod to the stories that intermittently circulated in the 90s about his early passing. It is a wry, intense, fitfully eye-watering account of his experiences as a musician and addict. “I authored the first four chapters. It's my story,” he declares. For the rest, he collaborated with co-writer his collaborator, whom one can assume had his work cut out considering Dando’s disorganized way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a reputable company. And it gets me out there as someone who has authored a memoir, and that’s everything I desired to accomplish since childhood. At school I admired Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

Dando – the youngest child of an attorney and a former model – talks fondly about school, perhaps because it symbolizes a period prior to existence got complicated by drugs and celebrity. He went to the city's elite private academy, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “stood out. It had few restrictions aside from no skating in the hallways. Essentially, avoid being an asshole.” It was there, in bible class, that he met Ben Deily and Ben Deily and formed a band in 1986. The Lemonheads started out as a rock group, in awe to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they released three albums. Once band members departed, the Lemonheads largely turned into a solo project, he recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his discretion.

During the 90s, the group signed to a large company, Atlantic, and reduced the squall in preference of a increasingly melodic and accessible country-rock sound. This was “since the band's Nevermind was released in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a song like Mad, which was laid down the following we finished school – you can hear we were trying to do their approach but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I knew my voice could cut through softer arrangements.” This new sound, waggishly labeled by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would take the act into the mainstream. In the early 90s they issued the album their breakthrough record, an flawless demonstration for Dando’s songcraft and his melancholic croon. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman bemoaned a individual named Ray who had gone off the rails.

Ray was not the sole case. At that stage, the singer was using heroin and had developed a penchant for cocaine, too. With money, he enthusiastically threw himself into the rock star life, associating with Hollywood stars, shooting a music clip with actresses and seeing supermodels and film personalities. People magazine declared him one of the 50 sexiest people alive. Dando cheerfully rebuffs the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was having a great deal of enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use got out of control. His memoir, he provides a blow-by-blow account of the fateful Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he failed to turn up for his band's allotted slot after acquaintances proposed he accompany them to their accommodation. When he finally showing up, he delivered an unplanned live performance to a hostile crowd who jeered and hurled bottles. But that proved minor compared to the events in Australia shortly afterwards. The visit was intended as a break from {drugs|substances