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Evan Dando rolls up a sleeve and indicates a series of small dents running down his arm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It takes so much time to get decent injection scars,” he says. “You do it for a long time and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Perhaps my skin is especially tough, but you can barely see it today. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and lets out a hoarse chuckle. “Only joking!”

The singer, former alternative heartthrob and leading light of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, appears in reasonable nick for a person who has taken numerous substances going from the time of his teens. The songwriter behind such exalted songs as It’s a Shame About Ray, Dando is also recognized as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who apparently achieved success and squandered it. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely unfiltered. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at a publishing company in central London, where he questions if we should move our chat to a bar. In the end, he sends out for two pints of apple drink, which he then neglects to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is likely to veer into random digressions. No wonder he has stopped using a smartphone: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My mind is too all over the place. I just want to read all information at once.”

Together with his spouse his partner, whom he married recently, have traveled from São Paulo, Brazil, where they live and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this new family. I avoided family often in my life, but I’m ready to try. I'm managing quite well so far.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use LSD sometimes, perhaps mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means not doing heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly a few years. He concluded it was time to quit after a catastrophic gig at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could scarcely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this type of conduct.’” He acknowledges Teixeira for assisting him to cease, though he has no remorse about using. “I believe certain individuals were meant to take drugs and I was among them was me.”

A benefit of his relative clean living is that it has rendered him creative. “During addiction to smack, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But currently he is about to launch Love Chant, his first album of new band material in almost two decades, which contains flashes of the songwriting and melodic smarts that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really known about this sort of dormancy period between albums,” he says. “It's a Rip Van Winkle shit. I do have standards about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new until the time was right, and at present I am.”

The artist is also releasing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the name is a reference to the stories that intermittently circulated in the 90s about his early passing. It is a ironic, intense, occasionally shocking narrative of his experiences as a musician and user. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he says. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter his collaborator, whom you imagine had his hands full considering Dando’s disorganized way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I felt excited to get a reputable publisher. And it positions me in public as a person who has written a book, and that is all I wanted to do since I was a kid. In education I admired James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the last-born of an attorney and a ex- model – speaks warmly about his education, perhaps because it represents a period prior to existence got complicated by drugs and fame. He attended Boston’s elite private academy, a liberal establishment that, he recalls, “stood out. It had few restrictions except no rollerskating in the corridors. In other words, don’t be an asshole.” It was there, in bible class, that he encountered Ben Deily and Ben Deily and started a group in the mid-80s. His band began life as a punk outfit, in awe to Dead Kennedys and punk icons; they signed to the Boston label Taang!, with whom they released multiple records. After band members left, the Lemonheads effectively became a solo project, Dando hiring and firing bandmates at his discretion.

During the 90s, the band signed to a large company, a prominent firm, and reduced the noise in preference of a more melodic and mainstream country-rock sound. This was “because the band's iconic album was released in ’91 and they had nailed it”, Dando explains. “If you listen to our early records – a song like an early composition, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can detect we were trying to emulate what Nirvana did but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could cut through softer arrangements.” The shift, humorously described by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would propel the act into the popularity. In the early 90s they released the LP It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable showcase for his writing and his melancholic croon. The title was taken from a newspaper headline in which a priest lamented a individual named Ray who had gone off the rails.

Ray wasn’t the only one. At that stage, Dando was using heroin and had acquired a liking for crack, as well. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the rock star life, associating with Johnny Depp, shooting a music clip with Angelina Jolie and dating supermodels and Milla Jovovich. People magazine declared him one of the fifty sexiest people living. He cheerfully dismisses the idea that his song, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was having a great deal of fun.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse became excessive. In the book, he provides a detailed description of the fateful festival no-show in the mid-90s when he failed to turn up for his band's scheduled performance after two women suggested he come back to their hotel. When he finally did appear, he performed an unplanned live performance to a hostile audience who booed and threw objects. But that proved minor next to the events in the country soon after. The visit was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances