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Evan Dando pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a line of small dents running down his forearm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It takes so long to develop noticeable injection scars,” he remarks. “You inject for a long time and you believe: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my skin is especially tough, but you can barely notice it now. What was the point, eh?” He grins and lets out a hoarse chuckle. “Only joking!”

Dando, one-time indie pin-up and key figure of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in reasonable nick for a man who has used numerous substances available from the time of 14. The songwriter responsible for such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, he is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who apparently achieved success and squandered it. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and entirely candid. We meet at lunchtime at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he wonders if we should move the conversation to a bar. In the end, he orders for two pints of cider, which he then neglects to consume. Often losing his train of thought, he is apt to veer into wild tangents. No wonder he has stopped using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with the internet, man. My mind is too scattered. I just want to absorb 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 reside and where Dando now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this recent household. I avoided family often in my existence, 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 turns out to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid occasionally, maybe psychedelics and I consume pot.”

Clean to him means not doing opiates, which he has abstained from in almost three years. He decided it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic performance at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could barely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not bear this kind of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for assisting him to stop, though he has no remorse about using. “I believe some people were supposed to take drugs and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “When you’re on smack, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and that, and that,’” he explains. But now he is preparing to launch his new album, his debut record of original Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which contains flashes of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I haven't truly known about this kind of dormancy period between albums,” he comments. “This is a lengthy sleep situation. I maintain standards about my releases. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work until 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 fitfully spread in the 1990s about his premature death. It’s a ironic, intense, fitfully shocking account of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I wrote the initial sections. That’s me,” he says. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out considering Dando’s haphazard conversational style. The composition, he says, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a good company. And it gets me in public as someone who has written a book, and that’s everything I desired to accomplish since childhood. In education I admired James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it represents a time prior to life got complicated by drugs and fame. He attended Boston’s elite private academy, a progressive institution that, he says now, “was the best. It had no rules except no rollerskating in the corridors. In other words, avoid being an asshole.” It was there, in bible class, that he met Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads started out as a punk outfit, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they agreed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they put out multiple records. After band members left, the group largely turned into a one-man show, Dando recruiting and dismissing musicians at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a major label, a prominent firm, and reduced the squall in preference of a increasingly melodic and mainstream country-rock sound. This was “because the band's Nevermind was released in ’91 and they had nailed it”, Dando explains. “Upon hearing to our early records – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can hear we were trying to emulate their approach but my voice didn’t cut right. But I knew my singing could stand out in quieter music.” The shift, waggishly labeled by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the act into the popularity. In 1992 they issued the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless demonstration for Dando’s songcraft and his melancholic vocal style. The name was derived from a news story in which a clergyman lamented a young man called the subject who had gone off the rails.

Ray wasn’t the sole case. By this point, the singer was consuming hard drugs and had acquired a penchant for cocaine, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly threw himself into the rock star life, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, shooting a video with Angelina Jolie and seeing Kate Moss and film personalities. A publication declared him among the 50 sexiest individuals living. Dando good-naturedly rebuffs the idea that his song, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be someone else”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying too much fun.

However, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he delivers a detailed account of the fateful festival no-show in the mid-90s when he failed to appear for his band's allotted slot after two women proposed he come back to their hotel. When he finally showing up, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a unfriendly crowd 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