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Evan Dando pushes back a shirt cuff and points to a series of small dents along his arm, faint scars from decades of heroin abuse. “It requires so much time to get decent track marks,” he says. “You do it for years and you think: I can’t stop yet. Perhaps my complexion is particularly tough, but you can hardly notice it now. What was the point, eh?” He grins and emits a hoarse chuckle. “Only joking!”

Dando, former indie pin-up and leading light of 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads, looks in reasonable nick for a person who has used numerous substances going from the age of 14. The musician responsible for such exalted tracks as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a celebrity who apparently achieved success and threw it away. He is warm, goofily charismatic and entirely candid. Our interview takes place at midday at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he wonders if we should move the conversation to the pub. In the end, he sends out for two glasses of apple drink, which he then forgets to drink. Often losing his train of thought, he is apt to go off on random digressions. No wonder he has stopped using a mobile device: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My mind is extremely scattered. I desire to absorb everything at the same time.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he wed recently, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace family much in my existence, but I’m ready to make an effort. I’m doing pretty good up to now.” Now 58, he says he is clean, though this turns out to be a flexible definition: “I’ll take acid sometimes, perhaps mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means not doing opiates, which he hasn’t touched in nearly a few years. He decided it was the moment to quit after a catastrophic gig at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in recent years where he could scarcely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is not good. The legacy will not tolerate this kind 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 one of them was me.”

A benefit of his comparative clean living is that it has made him creative. “During addiction to heroin, you’re all: ‘Forget about that, and that, and the other,’” he says. But now he is about to release his new album, his first album of new Lemonheads music in nearly two decades, which includes flashes of the lyricism and melodic smarts that elevated them to the mainstream success. “I haven't really heard of this sort of dormancy period between albums,” he says. “This is some Rip Van Winkle situation. I maintain standards about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to create fresh work until I was ready, and at present I'm prepared.”

The artist is also releasing his initial autobiography, titled stories about his death; the name is a reference to the stories that intermittently circulated in the 1990s about his early passing. It’s a ironic, intense, fitfully eye-watering account of his adventures as a musician and user. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he declares. For the rest, he collaborated with co-writer his collaborator, whom you imagine had his work cut out considering Dando’s disorganized conversational style. The composition, he says, was “challenging, but I felt excited to secure a good company. And it gets me out there as a person who has authored a memoir, and that is everything I desired to do since I was a kid. At school I was obsessed with Dylan Thomas and literary giants.”

Dando – the last-born of an attorney and a ex- fashion model – speaks warmly about his education, maybe because it symbolizes a period before existence got complicated by drugs and celebrity. He went to Boston’s prestigious private academy, a liberal establishment that, he says now, “stood out. It had no rules except no rollerskating in the hallways. Essentially, don’t be an jerk.” It was there, in religious studies, that he met Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and started a group in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads began life as a punk outfit, in thrall to Dead Kennedys and punk icons; they signed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they released three albums. After Deily and Peretz departed, the group effectively turned into a one-man show, he recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the group signed to a major label, a prominent firm, and dialled down the squall in favour of a increasingly melodic and mainstream country-rock sound. This change occurred “since Nirvana’s iconic album came out in 1991 and they had nailed it”, he explains. “If you listen to our early records – a song like Mad, which was recorded the following we graduated high school – you can hear we were attempting to emulate what Nirvana did but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I knew my singing could stand out in softer arrangements.” The shift, waggishly described by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the band into the popularity. In 1992 they released the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable demonstration for his songcraft and his melancholic croon. The name was derived from a newspaper headline in which a priest lamented a individual called the subject who had strayed from the path.

The subject wasn’t the sole case. At that stage, the singer was using hard drugs and had acquired a penchant for cocaine, as well. Financially secure, he enthusiastically embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, filming a video with Angelina Jolie and seeing Kate Moss and Milla Jovovich. People magazine anointed him among the 50 most attractive people living. He good-naturedly rebuffs the idea that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying too much fun.

Nonetheless, the drug use got out of control. His memoir, he delivers a detailed description of the fateful Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he failed to turn up for his band's allotted slot after two women proposed he come back to their hotel. Upon eventually showing up, he delivered an impromptu acoustic set to a hostile audience who jeered and threw bottles. But that proved minor compared to what happened in the country soon after. The visit was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances