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Evan Dando rolls up a sleeve and points to a series of faint marks running down his forearm, faint scars from decades of opioid use. “It requires so much time to develop noticeable injection scars,” he says. “You do it for years and you believe: I can’t stop yet. Maybe my complexion is especially tough, but you can hardly notice it today. What was it all for, eh?” He grins and lets out a hoarse laugh. “Only joking!”

The singer, former indie pin-up and leading light of 1990s alternative group his band, looks in reasonable nick for a person who has taken numerous substances going from the time of 14. The songwriter responsible for such acclaimed songs as My Drug Buddy, Dando is also known as rock’s most notorious burn-out, a star who apparently had it all and squandered it. He is warm, goofily charismatic and completely candid. We meet at lunchtime at his publishers’ offices in central London, where he questions if we should move the conversation to a bar. In the end, he orders for two glasses of cider, which he then neglects to consume. Frequently losing his train of thought, he is apt to veer into wild tangents. No wonder he has given up using a smartphone: “I struggle with the internet, man. My mind is extremely scattered. I just want to read all information at once.”

He and his wife his partner, whom he married last year, have flown in from their home in South America, where they reside and where he now has a grown-up blended family. “I’m trying to be the foundation of this recent household. I didn’t embrace domestic life much in my existence, but I’m ready to make an effort. I’m doing pretty good so far.” At 58 years old, he states he has quit hard drugs, though this turns out to be a loose concept: “I’ll take acid sometimes, maybe mushrooms and I consume marijuana.”

Clean to him means avoiding opiates, which he has abstained from in almost a few years. He decided it was time to give up after a catastrophic gig at a Los Angeles venue in recent years where he could barely 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 using. “I believe some people were supposed to take drugs and one of them was me.”

One advantage of his relative sobriety is that it has made him creative. “When you’re on smack, you’re like: ‘Forget about that, and this, and the other,’” he says. But currently he is about to release Love Chant, his first album of original Lemonheads music in almost two decades, which includes flashes of the lyricism and catchy tunes that propelled them to the indie big league. “I haven't really known about this sort of hiatus between albums,” he says. “This is a Rip Van Winkle situation. I do have standards about what I put out. I didn't feel prepared to create fresh work until the time was right, and now I am.”

The artist is also releasing his first memoir, named stories about his death; the name is a nod to the stories that fitfully spread in the 90s about his early passing. It is a wry, heady, occasionally shocking narrative of his experiences as a performer and user. “I wrote the first four chapters. That’s me,” he says. For the remaining part, he worked with ghostwriter Jim Ruland, whom you imagine had his hands full given his haphazard conversational style. The writing process, he says, was “challenging, but I was psyched to secure a good company. And it positions me in public as a person who has written a book, and that’s everything I desired to accomplish since childhood. At school I was obsessed with James Joyce and Flaubert.”

He – the last-born of an attorney and a former fashion model – talks fondly about school, maybe because it symbolizes a time prior to life got difficult by drugs and fame. He went to Boston’s elite Commonwealth school, a progressive institution that, he recalls, “was the best. It had few restrictions except no rollerskating in the corridors. Essentially, don’t be an asshole.” At that place, in religious studies, that he met Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily and started a group in the mid-80s. His band started out as a rock group, in awe to Dead Kennedys and Ramones; they signed to the Boston label their first contract, with whom they released three albums. After Deily and Peretz left, the group largely turned into a solo project, Dando recruiting and dismissing bandmates at his discretion.

In the early 1990s, the group contracted to a major label, a prominent firm, and reduced the noise in preference of a more languid and accessible country-rock sound. This was “since Nirvana’s iconic album was released in 1991 and they perfected the sound”, he explains. “If you listen to our initial albums – a track like Mad, which was laid down the following we graduated high school – you can hear we were attempting to emulate their approach but my vocal wasn't suitable. But I knew my voice could stand out in quieter music.” The shift, humorously labeled by critics as “a hybrid genre”, would take the band into the popularity. In the early 90s they issued the album their breakthrough record, an impeccable showcase for his songcraft and his melancholic vocal style. The title was derived from a news story in which a clergyman lamented a young man named the subject who had gone off the rails.

The subject wasn’t the sole case. At that stage, Dando was consuming heroin and had developed a penchant for crack, too. Financially secure, he eagerly threw himself into the rock star life, associating with Johnny Depp, shooting a music clip with actresses and seeing supermodels and Milla Jovovich. People magazine anointed him one of the 50 sexiest people alive. He good-naturedly rebuffs the notion that My Drug Buddy, in which he sang “I'm overly self-involved, I wanna be a different person”, was a plea for help. He was enjoying too much enjoyment.

Nonetheless, the drug use got out of control. In the book, he provides a detailed account of the significant Glastonbury incident in 1995 when he did not manage to appear for the Lemonheads’ allotted slot after acquaintances proposed he accompany them to their accommodation. When he finally showing up, he performed an unplanned live performance to a hostile crowd who booed and threw objects. But that proved minor compared to what happened in Australia shortly afterwards. The trip was meant as a respite from {drugs|substances