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Evan Dando rolls up a sleeve and indicates a line of small dents running down his forearm, faint scars from years of heroin abuse. “It takes so much time to develop noticeable track marks,” he remarks. “You do it for years and you think: I can’t stop yet. Perhaps my complexion is especially tough, but you can barely notice it now. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and lets out a raspy chuckle. “Just kidding!”

Dando, former indie pin-up and key figure of 1990s alternative group the Lemonheads, looks in decent shape for a man who has used every drug available from the time of 14. The songwriter responsible for such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who apparently achieved success and threw it away. He is friendly, goofily charismatic and completely candid. We meet at lunchtime at a publishing company in Clerkenwell, where he questions if it's better to relocate the conversation to a bar. Eventually, he orders for two pints of cider, which he then neglects to drink. Frequently drifting off topic, he is likely to veer into random digressions. No wonder he has stopped using a smartphone: “I struggle with the internet, man. My thoughts is extremely all over the place. I just want to absorb all information at the same time.”

He and his wife Antonia Teixeira, whom he wed last year, have flown in from their home in South America, where they live and where Dando now has three adult stepchildren. “I'm attempting to be the foundation of this new family. I avoided domestic life often in my life, but I'm prepared to try. I'm managing quite well up to now.” Now 58, he says he has quit hard drugs, though this turns out to be a flexible definition: “I occasionally use acid sometimes, maybe mushrooms and I’ll smoke pot.”

Clean to him means not doing heroin, which he hasn’t touched in nearly a few years. He decided it was the moment to give up after a disastrous performance at a Los Angeles venue in 2021 where he could scarcely play a note. “I realized: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not tolerate this kind of behaviour.’” He credits Teixeira for assisting him to cease, though he has no remorse about using. “I think some people were supposed to use substances and one of them was me.”

A benefit of his relative sobriety is that it has made him productive. “During addiction to heroin, you’re like: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and that,’” he explains. But now he is preparing to release his new album, his debut record of original Lemonheads music in nearly 20 years, which includes flashes of the songwriting and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't really known about this kind of hiatus between albums,” he says. “This is a Rip Van Winkle shit. I do have integrity about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new before the time was right, and now I am.”

The artist is also publishing his initial autobiography, titled stories about his death; the name is a nod to the rumors that fitfully circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It is a wry, intense, occasionally eye-watering narrative of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he declares. For the rest, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom you imagine had his work cut out considering his haphazard way of speaking. The writing process, he says, was “difficult, but I was psyched to get a reputable publisher. And it gets me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that’s all I wanted to accomplish since childhood. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

Dando – the youngest child of an attorney and a ex- fashion model – talks fondly about school, perhaps because it symbolizes a period prior to life got complicated by substances and celebrity. He went to the city's elite private academy, a progressive institution that, he says now, “stood out. It had no rules aside from no skating in the corridors. In other words, don’t be an asshole.” It was there, in bible class, that he met Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads started out as a rock group, in thrall to the Minutemen and Ramones; they agreed to the local record company Taang!, with whom they put out multiple records. After Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively turned into a one-man show, he recruiting and dismissing musicians at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the group contracted to a large company, a prominent firm, and reduced the squall in favour of a more melodic and accessible country-rock style. This was “because Nirvana’s Nevermind was released in ’91 and they perfected the sound”, Dando explains. “If you listen to our early records – a song like an early composition, which was recorded the following we finished school – you can detect we were trying to emulate what Nirvana did but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” The shift, humorously labeled by reviewers as “a hybrid genre”, would take the band into the popularity. In the early 90s they released the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable demonstration for his songcraft and his melancholic croon. The title was derived from a newspaper headline in which a priest bemoaned a individual called the subject who had gone off the rails.

Ray was not the sole case. By this point, Dando was using hard drugs and had acquired a liking for crack, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly threw himself into the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, filming a video with actresses and dating Kate Moss and film personalities. People magazine declared him among the 50 sexiest individuals alive. Dando cheerfully dismisses the notion that his song, in which he voiced “I’m too much with myself, I desire to become 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 blow-by-blow description of the fateful festival no-show in the mid-90s when he did not manage to appear for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after acquaintances suggested he accompany them to their hotel. Upon eventually showing up, he performed an impromptu acoustic set to a unfriendly audience who jeered and threw objects. But this was small beer next to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The visit was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances