‘I had a dark path before I came to music and I’ve put myself together piece by piece’

The single is Better Now, and deals with triumph over the X-Factor favourite’s battles with depression, alcoholism and substance abuse - about which she continues to speak candidly.

“I’m proud to say, I have put myself back together piece by piece, track by track, confession by confession,” she offers, having checked herself into a rehab facility in 2019.

The stunning video, which shows Gortin as a mesmerising wilderness with Devlin our all-conquering heroine on horseback. was filmed by renowned cinematographer Sir Franz Pagot, who has captured some of the biggest names in cinema on screen including Peter O’Toole, Ray Winston, Jude Law and Steven Berkoff; he has also worked on films as distinguished as Full Metal Jacket, Robin Hood and Tim Burton’s spooky Sleepy Hollow.

“Franz is literally so inspirational and a knight. He’s amazing and I couldn’t actually believe that he wanted to do it. He listened to the song but whenever he was sat at dinner with his kids and he told his daughter ‘Janet Devlin wants me to do this music video’. she was like ‘If you don’t do this I will never speak to you again!”

She continues: “I love home and I feel like a lot of locals take it for granted but it is actually very beautiful. I always wanted to work with horses, I was into them for years before I got involved with singing and they symbolise a lot of peace for me and it takes me when I had freedom not enjoyed by many children with horses there to ride. I would just get up, tack up my horse and say to my parents, ‘Right, I’m off up the mountain here.’ Me and my horse would be galloping through the hills for six hours. I had so much freedom then and I wanted to capture a sense of that in the video.”

Devlin is poised, chatty, giggly and perhaps still somewhat wide-eyed and astonished by the scale of her fame, which of course began on 2011’X-Factor, when a fragile, pale almost indie-gothic looking Janet stood out immediately.

In a lot of ways Janet is an edgy, sensitive, alternative artist, her lyrics like poetry, her voice like cut-glass, she doesn’t seem like the happy clappy endlessly grinning blonde teen you’d typically find trying to impress the public on the X-Factor. She looks like a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, all lissom limbs and fiery red hair, her pallor and green eyes adding to her Celtic beauty.

Luckily Simon and his incredibly white veneers where on holiday that year, so for the 2011 competition Devlin had the infinitely more likeable and reasonable Gary Barlow to contend with.

She recalls the whole 2011 experience as something of a frenetic whirl: “I don’t really remember a lot of my time on the X-Factor if am being completely honest,” she laughs. Was it champagne parties with celebs that guaranteed her amnesia? No, she insists she was just 16, maybe stubborn and a tad surly; the experience mostly went by in a flash of studio cameras, nerves in dressing rooms and terrorising live performances. She knew her music was pretty alternative in terms of the usual X-Factor fodder: “I was stubborn, I knew what I didn’t want to be but not exactly who I did want to be.

“The live shows were awfully nerve-wracking. I mean, I don’t think I fully appreciated how many people were listening in from home and things like that, for me it was terrifying because there were 400 people in the studio all focused on my performance.”

During the show, none other than wildchild rocker queen of cool Courtney Love, convinced that Devlin is related to her late rockstar husband Kurt Cobain through Irish ancestry, tweeted Simon Cowell to try and give the Co Tyrone singer a Nirvana song to sing for the show.

Janet is clear: “I said no. Because I really, really love Nirvana and how can anyone deliver a Nirvana track better than Kurt Cobain?

“I knew that the moment I did a Nirvana track on a TV talent show everyone would be like, ‘Oh my God, Kurt Cobain will be rolling in his grave right now, and I didn’t need that because I was already getting enough criticism and invective levelled at me.”

To date the 25-year-old star has released two albums Hide & Seek (2013) and Running with Scissors (2014) but now her third offering Confessional - a concept album - is due for release accompanied by a tell-all memoir titled My Confessional. Each song correlates to a chapter in the book.

She confides: “The book does deal with a lot of mental problems I have had to deal with from a young age - at 12 I had begun self-harming, I was anorexic, I have dealt with psychological disorder. I think people totally misunderstood my shyness during X-Factor, because it was the narrative I was given and a narrative I fed into because I didn’t want anyone to know what was actually going on. I had a pretty dark path before I did TV and things and it was only a couple of weeks when I finally got over my eating disorder that I got confirmation to do the show. I had a lot to carry. People who know about eating disorders know that you become shy because you don’t actually have the energy to talk, you become like a wallflower, an outsider.

“Confessional is full of heavily metaphorical songs, and I want people to enjoy the album whether or not they intend to delve down into that narrative of my life.

“So yeah, this is basically the story of my existence as it happened.” The generic influences are rich and diverse; “with certain songs you would not believe they are actually from the same album, because they are just do different, so distinct.”

She confesses that in her downtime the music that speaks to her is as eclectic as it gets. “Anyone who dates me can never believe that my playlist is a direct representation of my personality; one minute it’s really sad piano vocals, then the next minute it’s rap, the next minute it’s heavy metal, then it’s country and western, then emo music and sad gal songs...it is just all over the place!”

Growing up in rural Tyrone you would imagine with a vocal and songwriting talent like that, Devlin must have been brought up with highly musical parents. Not so.

“My parents didn’t play instruments or anything like that but the broader family were musical.

“I remember when I was growing up and my mum asked me what I was going to be and I said a “popstar, a singer’ which everyone says at that age don’t they? And she said ‘Well, good luck, finding that!” And somehow I made this a reality and I still can’t fully get my head around it.

You never really - really - see that as a career option. So I thought I would basically go away and become a therapist. Thankfully I didn’t.””

Janet played her first socially distanced show at St Matthias Church in London on October 2 - her first performance in four years - and a sign of where live performance is headed for its survival in a post-Covid age, with chairs far apart, masks, hand sanitisers, and the talent distantly on stage.

“It was great. We sold out. It was pretty normal. I think the socially distanced gig is definitely workable and that is what we showed. We were one of the first people to do a show like that and thankfully nobody caught Covid! It was a blast, the only thing that was sad for me was that I love to hang about at the end and say thank-you and get photos with everybody and I couldn’t mingle with people in that way, which did feel weird.

“It is a terrifying time for performers. I was never one to do a huge number of live shows because most of my work is online and I do two shows once a week on a major online platform. So all this stuff about performance going online is very normal for me. But I do worry about the future of the industry and for all performers, of course I do. These are unprecedented times.”

Confessional by Janet Devlin was released in May 2020. The video for Better Now is available to view online now.