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The musician pushes back a sleeve and points to a line of faint marks running down his arm, faint scars from years of heroin abuse. “It requires so long to develop noticeable injection scars,” he remarks. “You inject for years and you believe: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is especially resilient, but you can hardly see it now. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and lets out a hoarse laugh. “Just kidding!”

Dando, one-time alternative heartthrob and key figure of 90s alt-rock band his band, appears in decent shape for a man who has used every drug going from the age of his teens. The songwriter behind such acclaimed tracks as My Drug Buddy, he is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who apparently had it all and threw it away. He is warm, charmingly eccentric and completely unfiltered. We meet at midday at a publishing company in central London, where he wonders if it's better to relocate the conversation to a bar. In the end, he sends out for two pints of apple drink, which he then forgets to consume. Often drifting off topic, he is apt to go off on random digressions. It's understandable he has given up owning a mobile device: “I struggle with the internet, man. My thoughts is extremely scattered. I desire to read everything at once.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he wed last year, have flown in from São Paulo, Brazil, 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 family much in my existence, but I'm prepared to try. I'm managing quite well so far.” At 58 years old, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this proves to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, perhaps mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means avoiding heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly a few years. He concluded it was the moment to give up after a catastrophic performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could scarcely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He credits his wife for assisting him to cease, though he has no remorse about his drug use. “I believe certain individuals were meant to use substances and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his relative sobriety is that it has rendered him productive. “When you’re on heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and that,’” he explains. But currently he is preparing to launch Love Chant, his debut record of original Lemonheads music in almost 20 years, which includes glimpses of the lyricism and melodic smarts that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never truly known about this sort of hiatus between albums,” he says. “This is a Rip Van Winkle situation. I do have integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new before I was ready, and at present I'm prepared.”

The artist is also publishing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the name is a nod to the rumors that fitfully spread in the 90s about his early passing. It’s a wry, intense, fitfully eye-watering narrative of his adventures as a musician and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. That’s me,” he declares. For the remaining part, he collaborated with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his hands full given his haphazard way of speaking. The writing process, he says, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a good publisher. And it positions me in public as someone who has written a book, and that’s all I wanted to do from childhood. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

He – the last-born of an attorney and a ex- fashion model – speaks warmly about school, maybe because it symbolizes a time prior to life got complicated by drugs and fame. He attended the city's elite private academy, a liberal establishment that, he recalls, “stood out. It had no rules except no skating in the corridors. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in religious studies, that he encountered Ben Deily and Ben Deily and formed a band in 1986. His band began life as a punk outfit, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and punk icons; they agreed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they put out three albums. Once band members departed, the group effectively became a solo project, he recruiting and dismissing musicians at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a large company, a prominent firm, and dialled down the squall in preference of a increasingly languid and mainstream folk-inspired style. This was “because the band's iconic album was released in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, Dando says. “Upon hearing to our early records – a track like an early composition, which was recorded the following we finished school – you can hear we were trying to do their approach but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I knew my voice could cut through softer arrangements.” The shift, humorously described by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the band into the mainstream. In 1992 they issued the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an flawless showcase for his writing and his melancholic croon. The name was derived from a newspaper headline in which a clergyman bemoaned a young man called Ray who had gone off the rails.

Ray was not the sole case. By this point, Dando was using heroin and had developed a penchant for cocaine, too. With money, he enthusiastically embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, shooting a music clip with actresses and dating Kate Moss and film personalities. A publication declared him one of the 50 most attractive people living. He cheerfully dismisses the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be a different person”, was a cry for assistance. He was having too much enjoyment.

However, the drug use got out of control. His memoir, he delivers a detailed account of the fateful Glastonbury incident in the mid-90s when he did not manage to turn up for his band's scheduled performance after acquaintances suggested he accompany them to their accommodation. When he finally showing up, he performed an impromptu live performance to a hostile crowd who jeered and threw bottles. But this was small beer next to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The trip was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances