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The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a series of small dents along his arm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It takes so long to get decent injection scars,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my complexion is especially resilient, but you can hardly notice it now. What was it all for, eh?” He smiles and emits a hoarse laugh. “Only joking!”

The singer, former alternative heartthrob and key figure of 1990s alternative group his band, appears in reasonable nick for a man who has taken every drug available from the time of 14. The musician responsible for such acclaimed tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also recognized as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a celebrity who seemingly achieved success and squandered it. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and entirely unfiltered. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to the pub. In the end, he orders for two glasses of apple drink, which he then neglects to consume. Often drifting off topic, he is likely to veer into wild tangents. It's understandable he has given up using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My thoughts is extremely all over the place. I just want to read everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he married last year, have traveled from their home in South America, where they live and where Dando now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this new family. I didn’t embrace domestic life much in my existence, but I’m ready to make an effort. I'm managing pretty good up to now.” At 58 years old, he says he is clean, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, maybe psychedelics and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means not doing heroin, which he has abstained from in almost a few years. He concluded it was the moment to quit after a disastrous performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could barely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not bear this kind of behaviour.’” He credits his wife for assisting him to cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I think certain individuals were meant to take drugs and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative clean living is that it has made him creative. “During addiction to smack, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he explains. But currently he is about to launch his new album, his debut record of original Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which includes flashes of the songwriting and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't really heard of this sort of hiatus in a career,” he comments. “It's a lengthy sleep shit. I do have integrity about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new until the time was right, and at present I am.”

The artist is also releasing his initial autobiography, titled stories about his death; the name is a nod to the rumors that fitfully circulated in the 90s about his early passing. It is a wry, intense, occasionally shocking account of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. That’s me,” he says. For the rest, he worked with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his hands full considering Dando’s haphazard conversational style. The writing process, he says, was “challenging, but I felt excited to get a reputable company. And it positions me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that’s all I wanted to do from childhood. At school I admired Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

Dando – the youngest child of an lawyer and a former fashion model – talks fondly about school, perhaps because it symbolizes a time prior to life got complicated by drugs and celebrity. He went to Boston’s prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he recalls, “was the best. It had no rules aside from no skating in the corridors. Essentially, don’t be an asshole.” At that place, in bible class, that he met Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in 1986. His band started out as a rock group, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they put out three albums. Once Deily and Peretz left, the group largely turned into a solo project, Dando hiring and firing musicians at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a major label, a prominent firm, and dialled down the squall in preference of a increasingly melodic and mainstream country-rock style. This was “because Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in ’91 and they had nailed it”, he explains. “If you listen to our early records – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the day after we graduated high school – you can detect we were attempting to emulate what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I knew my voice could cut through quieter music.” The shift, humorously described by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the band into the popularity. In the early 90s they issued the LP their breakthrough record, an impeccable demonstration for his songcraft and his somber croon. The name was derived from a news story in which a clergyman bemoaned a young man named Ray who had gone off the rails.

The subject wasn’t the only one. At that stage, the singer was using hard drugs and had acquired a liking for crack, as well. With money, he enthusiastically embraced the celebrity lifestyle, associating with Hollywood stars, shooting a video with actresses and seeing supermodels and film personalities. People magazine declared him among the fifty most attractive people living. He cheerfully dismisses the idea that his song, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be someone else”, was a plea for help. He was having too much enjoyment.

However, the drug use became excessive. His memoir, he provides a blow-by-blow description of the significant Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he failed to appear for his band's allotted slot after acquaintances suggested he come back to their hotel. When he finally did appear, he delivered an impromptu live performance to a hostile crowd who booed and threw bottles. But this was minor next to what happened in Australia soon after. The visit was meant as a break from {drugs|substances