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The musician pushes back a sleeve and points to a series of faint marks along his arm, subtle traces from years of heroin abuse. “It requires so much time to develop decent track marks,” he remarks. “You do it for a long time and you think: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my complexion is especially resilient, but you can barely see it now. What was the point, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy chuckle. “Only joking!”

Dando, one-time alternative heartthrob and key figure of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, appears in reasonable nick for a man who has taken numerous substances going from the age of his teens. The songwriter responsible for such acclaimed tracks as It’s a Shame About Ray, he is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who seemingly had it all and threw it away. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and entirely candid. We meet at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to the pub. Eventually, he sends out for two glasses of cider, which he then neglects to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is apt to veer into random digressions. No wonder he has stopped owning a mobile device: “I struggle with the internet, man. My mind is too scattered. I desire to read everything at the same time.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he wed last year, have traveled from São Paulo, Brazil, where they reside and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace domestic life often in my existence, but I’m ready to try. I’m doing quite well so far.” Now 58, he states he is clean, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid occasionally, perhaps mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means not doing opiates, which he hasn’t touched in nearly three years. He decided it was time to quit after a disastrous gig at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could barely perform adequately. “I realized: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this type of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for helping him to cease, though he has no remorse about using. “I think some people were meant to use substances and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his relative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But currently he is about to release Love Chant, his debut record of new Lemonheads music in almost 20 years, which contains glimpses of the songwriting and catchy tunes that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never truly heard of this sort of dormancy period in a career,” he comments. “It's some Rip Van Winkle situation. I do have integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work before the time was right, and now I'm prepared.”

Dando is also publishing his initial autobiography, titled Rumours of My Demise; the name is a reference to the rumors that fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It is a wry, intense, fitfully shocking narrative of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he says. For the rest, he collaborated with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom one can assume had his hands full considering Dando’s haphazard way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “challenging, but I was psyched to secure a good company. And it gets me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that is all I wanted to accomplish since childhood. At school I admired Dylan Thomas and Flaubert.”

He – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- fashion model – speaks warmly about school, perhaps because it represents a time prior to existence got difficult by substances and fame. He went to the city's elite Commonwealth school, a progressive establishment that, he recalls, “stood out. It had few restrictions aside from no skating in the hallways. Essentially, don’t be an jerk.” It was there, in bible class, that he met Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and started a group in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads began life as a punk outfit, in thrall to the Minutemen and Ramones; they signed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they released multiple records. Once Deily and Peretz departed, the Lemonheads largely turned into 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 reduced the noise in preference of a increasingly melodic and accessible country-rock style. This change occurred “since Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he says. “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 trying to do what Nirvana did but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I knew my voice could stand out in quieter music.” The shift, waggishly described by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the band into the popularity. In 1992 they released the LP their breakthrough record, an impeccable showcase for his songcraft and his somber croon. The title was derived from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman bemoaned a young man named Ray who had strayed from the path.

The subject was not the sole case. By this point, Dando was using hard drugs and had developed a liking for cocaine, too. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, filming a music clip with Angelina Jolie and seeing Kate Moss and film personalities. A publication declared him one of the fifty sexiest people living. He good-naturedly rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was having too much enjoyment.

However, the substance abuse became excessive. His memoir, he provides a detailed account of the fateful festival no-show in 1995 when he failed to appear for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after two women suggested he accompany them to their hotel. When he finally showing up, he delivered an impromptu live performance to a hostile audience who jeered and threw bottles. But that proved small beer compared to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The visit was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances