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Evan Dando rolls up a shirt cuff and indicates a line of faint marks running down his forearm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It requires so much time to get noticeable injection scars,” he says. “You do it for years and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is particularly resilient, but you can barely notice it today. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and emits a raspy chuckle. “Only joking!”

Dando, former indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in reasonable nick for a person who has taken every drug going from the time of his teens. The musician responsible for such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who apparently had it all and squandered it. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely candid. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate the conversation to a bar. Eventually, he orders for two glasses of cider, which he then forgets to consume. Often drifting off topic, he is apt to veer into random digressions. No wonder he has given up owning a smartphone: “I struggle with online content, man. My thoughts is too scattered. I just want to absorb everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed last year, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this recent household. I avoided domestic life much in my life, but I'm prepared to try. I'm managing pretty good up to now.” At 58 years old, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use acid occasionally, perhaps psychedelics 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 perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not bear this type of conduct.’” He credits his wife for assisting him to cease, though he has no regrets about his drug use. “I believe certain individuals were supposed to use substances and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his comparative sobriety is that it has made him creative. “When you’re on smack, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But now he is preparing to launch his new album, his first album of original band material in almost 20 years, which contains glimpses of the songwriting and melodic smarts that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't truly known about this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he comments. “This is some lengthy sleep shit. I do have integrity about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new before I was ready, and at present I'm prepared.”

The artist is also publishing his initial autobiography, named Rumours of My Demise; the name is a nod to the rumors that fitfully spread in the 90s about his premature death. It’s a wry, heady, fitfully shocking narrative of his experiences as a performer and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. That’s me,” he declares. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out given Dando’s haphazard conversational style. The composition, he says, was “challenging, but I felt excited to secure a reputable company. And it positions me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to accomplish from childhood. In education I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and literary giants.”

Dando – the last-born of an lawyer and a ex- fashion model – talks fondly about his education, maybe because it symbolizes a period before existence got complicated by drugs and celebrity. He went to the city's elite private academy, a liberal institution that, he says now, “was the best. There were few restrictions except no skating in the hallways. In other words, don’t be an jerk.” It was there, in religious studies, that he encountered Ben Deily and Ben Deily and formed a band in 1986. The Lemonheads started out as a punk outfit, in awe to the Minutemen and punk icons; they agreed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they released three albums. After Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively became a one-man show, Dando hiring and firing musicians at his discretion.

During the 90s, the band contracted to a large company, a prominent firm, and reduced the squall in favour of a more melodic and accessible folk-inspired sound. This was “since the band's Nevermind was released in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, Dando explains. “If you listen to our initial albums – a song like an early composition, which was laid down the following we graduated high school – you can detect we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, waggishly described by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the band into the mainstream. In 1992 they released the album their breakthrough record, an flawless demonstration for Dando’s writing and his melancholic croon. The name was taken from a news story in which a clergyman bemoaned a individual called the subject who had gone off the rails.

The subject wasn’t the sole case. At that stage, the singer was consuming heroin and had developed a penchant for cocaine, as well. With money, he enthusiastically embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, filming a music clip with Angelina Jolie and dating supermodels and film personalities. People magazine anointed him among the fifty sexiest people alive. Dando good-naturedly rebuffs the idea that his song, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become someone else”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying a great deal of enjoyment.

However, the substance abuse got out of control. In the book, he delivers a detailed account of the significant Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he failed to appear for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after acquaintances suggested he come back to their hotel. When he finally did appear, he delivered an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile audience who booed and threw bottles. But that proved minor next to the events in Australia soon after. The visit was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances