Page 1 of Hamartia
Paris, 4th September 2023
Two and a half years after a leaked video changed the entire landscape of his life, Raphael Scott is ready to talk. His first solo album, Hamartia, released December 3rd, is the main focus of our chat, but it would be impossible to appreciate the destination without first looking at the route he took to get here.
Having been lucky enough to have an early listen, the album is certainly a departure from his previous persona as the swaggering, screaming, tattooed frontman of The Dead Poets. The album cover features a stripped back Raphael, tattoos covered, face bare, and heart even more exposed. Hamartia is a raw and shockingly honest exploration of love in all its forms. “It’s just a few love songs,” Raphael says during our interview. But from the outside looking in, it’s also a study in those flaws we find within ourselves, the ones that threaten to destroy us, when faced with an all-consuming, life-altering kind of love.
My deep dive on his father, Finn Sullivan, a few years ago, should have made me the last person to whom Raphael would want to tell this story. (His refusal to acknowledge his father for the first five years of his career has been a subject of much journalistic discourse since The Dead Poets first arrived in 2017.)
But Raphael is not the man he was then. He’d listened to my podcast on his father. He’d enjoyed it. He’d even learned something, he said. (He doesn’t elaborate on what that is.)
As we sit down in the large airy living room of his apartment in Les Halles in the 1st arrondissement, he looks entirely unlike the man I’d seen fronting The Dead Poets a few years ago. His band and his old persona are on hiatus indefinitely.
He offers me a variety of things I’m not expecting: Turkish coffee (he’s addicted) or Bubble Tea (he drinks it like water) and nods happily when I ask him if it’s okay to switch on the recorder after we’re settled with our drinks. (We both opt for water in the end.)
He sits comfortably in a large armchair near the balcony, long white curtains billowing softly in Paris’ late summer breeze. He’s barefoot, wearing sweats, and a loose long-sleeved T-shirt, and his hair is long enough that he’s scraped half of it up into a knot at the top of his head.
He looks young, I think. Too young to have experienced all that he has. To have his name and his life and his sexuality become a topic of mass discussion.
This isn’t an exposé. That’s been done already. But Raphael still looks a little nervous as I tell him I’m turning on the recorder. When I tell him not to worry, that I’ll send him a copy of it after and remind him I’ve no intention of publishing anything without his approval, he offers me a bright smile. Warm and friendly. And it’s in this, for the first time, I see echoes of his father in his face.
[The distant sound of traffic below and the faint chirp of birds singing.]
LQ: First of all, this apartment is incredible. It’s entirely unprofessional for me to talk about that and I’ll cut it out after. [my laughter] But I have an interior design obsession like you wouldn’t believe. These are the only accounts I follow on Instagram. And you, now.
RS: [Raphael laughs] Ah, thanks. I love it here too. Paris in the summer is really special for me. Now, it’s even more special.
LQ: And you didn’t include it as a song on the album? New York and Seoul made it on there. Why not Paris?
RS: Ha, well. I moved here after I finished the album. It was too late by then. But you’re right, it should definitely be on there.
LQ: And Camille is here too, right? You and her make it work now?
RS: [Raphael nods, smiling wide] We do. We make it work. It’s working. She’s incredible.
LQ: Was there a time where you thought it wouldn’t?
RS: Of course, right after. I thought she’d hate me. It’s what I deserved.
LQ: After the video you mean.
RS: I mean, yeah. But all of it really. She deserved better.
LQ: But you were the one exposed in the most awful of ways. Before you were ready. You didn’t deservethat.
RS: [shrugs] No. But it was no different to any other paparazzi photo or video; there are a million of them out there. I expect it. I’m ready for it. I never cared much what people thought of me so I always thought that there wasn’t anything that could hurt me. But not everyone is like me. Jae wasn’t. And Camille wasn’t. And they both got hurt, which was ultimately down to me.
LQ: But the video, you weren’t to blame for that.
RS: You sound like my therapist. I mean, I know that. But it doesn’t make any difference. Two of the people I cared most about in the world were hurt and I’d been a part of hurting them. But it’s in the past now. She’s happy, I’m happy, Jae’s happy. We all got out of the other end, relatively unscathed.
LQ: You tweeted once about the inevitability of things. Of love and fame and death. It was a quote from your father. Do you believe that this was all…inevitable?
RS: [A soft laugh] Me falling in love with a guy? Ha, probably, you know. I’m sure the second he was born he was meant for me. People think that the video was the big moment, that something changed for me at that point. Something irrevocable happened. But it wasn’t then, it wasn’t that, it was the first time I set eyes on him. That was the moment. Nothing was ever going to be the same after that. I knew it. And it wasn’t.
LQ: Are you talking about love at first sight or something else?
[Raphael laughs again]
RS: I mean, it sounds ridiculous, I know. But it was like I heard angels singing or something the first time I saw him. I’d never seen anything as beautiful or as…fuck…as perfect as him. It really was like a religious experience for me. He laughed when I told him that. It’s funny you’re asking about love at first sight because he said he hated me at first sight—so there’s hope for us all, I suppose.