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Evan Dando pushes back a sleeve and indicates a line of faint marks along his arm, subtle traces from years of opioid use. “It takes so long to get noticeable injection scars,” he says. “You do it for years and you think: I'm not ready to quit. Maybe my complexion is especially tough, but you can hardly see it now. What was the point, eh?” He smiles and emits a hoarse laugh. “Only joking!”

Dando, 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 age of his teens. The musician responsible for such acclaimed songs as My Drug Buddy, he is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who seemingly achieved success and threw it away. He is friendly, charmingly eccentric and completely candid. Our interview takes place at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he wonders if it's better to relocate our chat to a bar. In the end, he sends out for two glasses of cider, which he then neglects to drink. Often drifting off topic, he is apt to veer into random digressions. It's understandable he has given up owning a smartphone: “I can’t deal with online content, man. My mind is too all over the place. I desire to absorb everything at the same time.”

Together with his spouse Antonia Teixeira, whom he married recently, have traveled from their home in South America, where they live and where he now has three adult stepchildren. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this new family. I didn’t embrace family often in my existence, but I’m ready to make an effort. I'm managing pretty good up to now.” At 58 years old, he states he is clean, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I occasionally use LSD occasionally, maybe mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”

Sober 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 gig at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could barely play a note. “I thought: ‘This is not good. My reputation will not bear this type 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 I was among them was me.”

One advantage of his comparative sobriety is that it has rendered him creative. “When you’re on heroin, you’re all: ‘Forget about that, and that, and that,’” he says. But currently he is preparing to launch Love Chant, his first album of original band material in almost 20 years, which includes glimpses of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the mainstream success. “I’ve never really known about this kind of dormancy period between albums,” he says. “It's a lengthy sleep shit. I maintain standards about what I put out. I wasn’t ready to do anything new until the time was right, and at present I am.”

Dando is also publishing his initial autobiography, titled Rumours of My Demise; the title is a nod to the rumors that intermittently circulated in the 1990s about his premature death. It’s a wry, intense, occasionally eye-watering account of his adventures as a performer and addict. “I wrote the first four chapters. That’s me,” he declares. For the remaining part, he collaborated with co-writer his collaborator, whom one can assume had his hands full given his disorganized way of speaking. The writing process, he notes, was “challenging, but I was psyched to secure a good company. And it positions me in public as a person who has authored a memoir, and that’s everything I desired to accomplish from I was a kid. At school I admired Dylan Thomas and literary giants.”

Dando – the youngest child of an attorney and a ex- model – talks fondly about school, perhaps because it represents a time prior to existence got difficult by drugs and celebrity. He attended the city's prestigious Commonwealth school, a liberal institution that, he says now, “stood out. It had few restrictions aside from no rollerskating in the hallways. In other words, avoid being an jerk.” It was there, in religious studies, that he encountered Jesse Peretz and Jesse Peretz and formed a band in the mid-80s. The Lemonheads began life as a punk outfit, in thrall to the Minutemen and Ramones; they agreed to the local record company their first contract, with whom they released multiple records. After Deily and Peretz left, the Lemonheads effectively became a one-man show, he hiring and firing musicians at his whim.

In the early 1990s, the band signed to a major label, Atlantic, and reduced the squall in preference of a more melodic and accessible country-rock style. This was “since the band's Nevermind came out in ’91 and they had nailed it”, Dando says. “Upon hearing to our initial albums – a song like an early composition, which was recorded the day after we finished school – you can hear we were attempting to do their approach but my vocal didn’t cut right. But I realized my voice could cut through softer arrangements.” The shift, humorously described by critics as “bubblegrunge”, would propel the act into the mainstream. In the early 90s they released the album It’s a Shame About Ray, an impeccable showcase for his writing and his somber vocal style. The name was taken from a news story in which a clergyman lamented a young man named Ray who had gone off the rails.

The subject wasn’t the only one. At that stage, Dando was consuming heroin and had developed a penchant for crack, as well. Financially secure, he eagerly threw himself into the rock star life, becoming friends with Johnny Depp, filming a music clip with actresses and dating supermodels and film personalities. A publication anointed him one of the 50 most attractive people alive. Dando good-naturedly rebuffs the idea that his song, in which he voiced “I'm overly self-involved, I desire to become someone else”, was a cry for assistance. He was having too much enjoyment.

However, the drug use became excessive. In the book, he provides a blow-by-blow description of the fateful festival no-show in 1995 when he failed to turn up for the Lemonheads’ scheduled performance after acquaintances proposed he come back to their accommodation. Upon eventually showing up, he performed an unplanned live performance to a unfriendly audience who booed and hurled objects. But that proved small beer next to what happened in Australia shortly afterwards. The visit was meant as a break from {drugs|substances