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The musician pushes back a shirt cuff and indicates a series of small dents running down his forearm, subtle traces from decades of opioid use. “It takes so long to develop noticeable injection scars,” he remarks. “You do it for years and you believe: I can’t stop yet. Maybe 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 indie pin-up and key figure of 90s alt-rock band his band, looks in decent shape for a person who has taken numerous substances available from the time of his teens. The musician responsible for such acclaimed tracks as My Drug Buddy, he is also known as the music industry's famous casualty, a star who seemingly had it all and squandered it. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and completely unfiltered. We meet at midday at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he wonders if we should move the conversation to a bar. Eventually, he orders for two pints of apple drink, which he then forgets to drink. Often drifting off topic, he is apt to veer into wild tangents. No wonder he has given up using a smartphone: “I struggle with online content, man. My mind is extremely all over the place. I just want to read everything 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 a grown-up blended family. “I'm attempting to be the backbone of this new family. I avoided family much in my life, but I'm prepared to make an effort. I’m doing pretty good so far.” Now 58, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I’ll take LSD sometimes, maybe psychedelics and I’ll smoke marijuana.”

Clean to him means not doing opiates, which he has abstained from in nearly a few years. He decided it was the moment to quit after a disastrous performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in 2021 where he could barely perform adequately. “I thought: ‘This is unacceptable. The legacy will not tolerate this type of behaviour.’” He acknowledges his wife for assisting him to cease, though he has no regrets about using. “I think certain individuals were meant to use substances and I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his relative clean living is that it has rendered him creative. “During addiction to heroin, you’re all: ‘Oh fuck that, and this, and that,’” he explains. But now he is preparing to launch his new album, his debut record of new Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which includes glimpses of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really heard of this kind of hiatus in a career,” he says. “It's a lengthy sleep shit. I maintain standards about my releases. I didn't feel prepared to do anything new until I was ready, and at present I am.”

Dando is also releasing his first memoir, titled Rumours of My Demise; the name is a reference to the stories that intermittently spread in the 90s about his early passing. It’s a ironic, intense, fitfully eye-watering narrative of his experiences as a performer and addict. “I authored the initial sections. That’s me,” he declares. For the rest, he collaborated with co-writer Jim Ruland, whom one can assume had his work cut out considering his disorganized way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “difficult, but I was psyched to get a reputable publisher. And it positions me in public as someone who has written a book, and that’s everything I desired to do since I was a kid. In education I was obsessed with James Joyce and literary giants.”

Dando – the youngest child of an lawyer and a ex- model – talks fondly about his education, perhaps because it represents a period prior to existence got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He went to Boston’s elite Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he recalls, “was the best. It had few restrictions except no skating in the corridors. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” At that place, in religious studies, that he met Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and formed a band in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads started out as a rock group, in awe to the Minutemen and Ramones; they signed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they put out multiple records. Once Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively became a solo project, 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 preference of a more languid and accessible folk-inspired style. This change occurred “since Nirvana’s Nevermind came out in 1991 and they had nailed it”, Dando says. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a track like Mad, which was recorded the day after we graduated high school – you can hear we were trying to emulate their approach but my voice wasn't suitable. But I realized my singing could cut through quieter music.” This new sound, humorously described by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would take the band into the mainstream. In 1992 they issued the LP their breakthrough record, an impeccable demonstration for his songcraft and his melancholic croon. The name was taken from a newspaper headline in which a priest lamented a young man called the subject who had strayed from the path.

The subject wasn’t the only one. At that stage, the singer was consuming heroin and had acquired a penchant for crack, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly embraced the celebrity lifestyle, becoming friends with Hollywood stars, filming a video with Angelina Jolie and dating supermodels and Milla Jovovich. A publication declared him one of the 50 sexiest people alive. Dando cheerfully dismisses the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he voiced “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying too much fun.

Nonetheless, the substance abuse got out of control. In the book, he provides a blow-by-blow description of the fateful Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to turn up for his band's allotted slot after acquaintances proposed he accompany them to their accommodation. When he finally did appear, he delivered an unplanned acoustic set to a hostile crowd who jeered and hurled bottles. But this was minor next to the events in the country shortly afterwards. The trip was intended as a respite from {drugs|substances