I must confess

“What’s your story, Janet Devlin?” It’s with those five words that this interview begins. After all, had you not been one of the 12.6 million Brits who tuned into the eighth series of The X Factor back in 2011 (now an exhausting 15 seasons in), perhaps you won’t be familiar with one of the opening chapters of the Northern Irish singer-songwriter’s story so far. Is it a chapter of her life the flame-haired 25-year-old takes pleasure in sharing day-to-day?

“I normally lie,” begins Devlin, taking a sip of her drink. She’s curled up in a Big Brother-esque egg chair at London’s YouTube space where we meet (we’ll get to that).“The life that I live is too hard to explain,” she continues, speaking quickly. “I used to use Tinder back in the day – yeah, I quit. I’m ok with being single – [people were] always like, ‘So what do you do?’ I’d just lie and say, ‘Oh, I edit videos. That kinda stuff.’ I got caught out a few times. Once, I was on a date and someone came over and asked for a photograph… I was just like, ‘Ah, long story’. I [didn’t] really explain my real life. It’s nine years worth of crazy.”

According to Devlin, her life has “always been that way”. Before she became a sometime household name after her