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The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and indicates a series of small dents along his arm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It requires so long to get decent injection scars,” he remarks. “You do it for a long time and you think: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my complexion is particularly tough, but you can hardly notice it now. What was it all for, eh?” He smiles and emits a raspy chuckle. “Only joking!”

Dando, former alternative heartthrob and key figure of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, appears in reasonable nick for a man who has taken numerous substances going from the time of his teens. The songwriter behind such acclaimed songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a celebrity who apparently had it all and squandered it. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and completely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he questions if it's better to relocate our chat to the pub. In the end, he sends out for two pints of cider, which he then forgets to drink. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is likely to go off on random digressions. No wonder he has given up owning a mobile device: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My mind is too scattered. I just want to read everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed recently, have traveled from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace family often in my life, but I'm prepared to make an effort. I'm managing quite well up to now.” At 58 years old, he says he is clean, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I’ll take acid occasionally, maybe psychedelics and I consume pot.”

Clean to him means avoiding opiates, which he hasn’t touched in nearly three years. He decided it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could barely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I think some people were meant to use substances and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative clean living is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and the other,’” he says. But currently he is about to release Love Chant, his first album of new band material in nearly two decades, which includes flashes of the songwriting and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't truly heard of this kind of dormancy period in a career,” he says. “This is a lengthy sleep shit. I maintain standards about my releases. 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 first memoir, titled stories about his death; the name is a nod to the stories that fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It’s a wry, intense, occasionally shocking narrative of his experiences as a musician and addict. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he says. For the rest, he worked with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom you imagine had his hands full considering his haphazard way of speaking. The composition, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to secure a reputable publisher. And it gets me out there as someone who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to accomplish from I was a kid. At school I admired James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the last-born of an attorney and a former fashion model – speaks warmly about his education, perhaps because it represents a period prior to existence got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He went to Boston’s prestigious private academy, a progressive establishment that, he says now, “stood out. There were few restrictions aside from no rollerskating in the hallways. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” It was there, in religious studies, that he encountered Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and started a group in 1986. His band began life as a punk outfit, in awe to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they released multiple records. Once Deily and Peretz departed, the group largely became a solo project, he hiring and firing bandmates at his whim.

During the 90s, the band contracted to a large company, Atlantic, and reduced the noise in favour of a more melodic and accessible folk-inspired style. This was “since the band's iconic album came out in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “If you listen to our early records – a song like an early composition, which was laid down the following we finished school – you can hear we were attempting to do what Nirvana did but my voice didn’t cut right. But I knew my singing could stand out in quieter music.” This new sound, humorously described by reviewers as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the band into the popularity. In 1992 they issued the LP their breakthrough record, an impeccable showcase for Dando’s songcraft and his somber croon. The name was derived from a news story in which a priest lamented a young man named the subject who had strayed from the path.

Ray wasn’t the only one. By this point, Dando was using heroin and had developed a penchant for crack, too. With money, he enthusiastically threw himself into the rock star life, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, shooting a music clip with Angelina Jolie and seeing supermodels and film personalities. A publication declared him among the 50 sexiest people living. He cheerfully dismisses the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else”, was a plea for help. He was having a great deal of fun.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse became excessive. In the book, he delivers a detailed description of the significant Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he failed to turn up for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after two women proposed he accompany them to their accommodation. When he finally did appear, he performed an unplanned live performance to a unfriendly audience who jeered and hurled objects. But that proved small beer compared to the events in Australia soon after. The visit was intended as a break from {drugs|substances