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What's happened since you left the X Factor?
"When I came out of the show, I spent a couple of weeks in England just wrapping up stuff, doing a load of PAs. I came home and took about a month's break then got straight back in the studio - before I did the show I'd already started the guts of an album - and worked with the guy who looked like Captain Birdseye on our show (Mark Hudson) and put together a four-song demo. The thing with Mark was that he was trying to turn me into this kind of f**king Bon Jovi, young Rod Stewart and that wasn't really who I was. I wasn't happy with the stuff we ended up doing so I put that aside and got back with the band I was with before the show. The thing is, doing a big show like that is great for the exposure and it gets you out to all of the grannies and all of the young ones but for my kind of audience - because I'm not a pop singer, rock and roll is what I do - I had to really try and think about separating myself from The X Factor."
When you look back on The X Factor, do you think of it is a good thing?
"It would be pathetic for me to stand here and go 'It's a load of shite'. For me, it did exactly what it said on the tin, it did what I needed. I've been playing guitar since I was six years old, I've been playing in bands since I was twelve years old, and professionally since fifteen years old, I'd toured America by the time I was seventeen years old. I had fifteen years behind me of musical experience and I knew how hard it was to crack it so I looked on it as an opportunity. I turned up originally at the audition with my band thinking it was going to be for rock stars. I didn't even know Simon Cowell was one of the judges on it until I walked in the f**king door. I just looked at it as a vehicle to get me the exposure. I didn't give a shit if I came first, last, third. As far as that's gone, it's been great for me. The downsides are that I've had to work twice as hard to show people that I'm real and I am genuine about what I do."
Do you still keep in touch with people with from the X Factor? You got on well with Rowetta...
"I wrote a song for Ro and am actually going to send it over to her in the next couple of weeks. I really liked her because you could genuinely feel that myself and Rowetta were the only two people who had mileage behind us before we did the show. We'd be able to sit down and talk about bands that the types of people who do those shows wouldn't have a f**king clue about. I really really connected with her in a big way. She's mad in the head but in a good way."
How much has Sharon advised you since the end of the show?
"She did some stuff with me for a few months after the show but I haven't spoken to her in seven, eight months. She brought out a single for me in Ireland and stuff like that, but that was really it to be honest."
Did you actually want to win The X Factor?
"No, I never gave a shit about winning. When the show finished, I made a conscious decision that I wasn't going to be turning up to the opening of an envelope just to get my f**king photo taken. I didn't want to be on the conveyer belt. Because that's the way these shows work - it's a sad reality but that's the f**king reality of reality shows. You're the flavour of the month for the time you're on but then the conveyer belt moves on. I didn't want to have anything to do with that so I just got away from that as quickly as possible. We're bringing out the single in the next two months, we're doing the Mathew Street Festival which is to 250,000 people in Liverpool. We're basically playing anywhere they've got electricity. That's why I'm launching it now as opposed to off the back of The X Factor. I'm just letting the music do the talking."
What do you think to this year's winner?
"He's the perfect kind of guy to win a show like that, isn't he? It's like anything, it's a TV show and it's always going to be the armchair favourite that wins it. Good luck to him. I know Louis Walsh has made a few snide comments about the rest of us disappearing into thin air - well I don't know about Steve Brookstein but I haven't disappeared anywhere, man. While the rest of them are walking the tightrope, I'm building my career on proper foundations."
Now you're with a band, The Tsars. Could you tell us a little bit about how that came about?
"I grew up playing in a band called Petronella. That was my first band, I started that when I was 16 and I was in that with my brother until I was 21. We had toured every shithole in Ireland and we'd done 60 dates in the States and we had two independent top 30 singles that we released ourselves. We had a massive underground following in Ireland - people who saw us were like, 'You're going to make it, you're f**king brilliant, you're unbelievable.' We were hot tipped in the Hot Press, which is like the NME in Ireland, but every time we'd get so close we'd just fall and disappear like a fart in a space suit. That really came down to not ever having proper management and stuff like that. Eventually after five years of just banging our heads against the wall we split up. From then I took a year out and bought myself a little studio setup and spent the whole year writing and trying to find out who I was musically. I write for other people as well - I write RnB and hip-hop and funk, I've done a song for Tom Jones and I've done a Joss Stone-style song as well. So I spent that year writing everything that would come to me and then the lads came round to the house, doing a little bit of session work for me, then we got together and formed a band called DZ5, doing gigs and stuff like that. At that point we'd done a couple of gigs and they were a bit shit to be honest. I'd had enough of banging my f**king head against walls, so when The X Factor came up I thought it could have been an opportunity to get me out of that and give us some kind of platform for the band to work off."
What sort of music are you doing?
"Trying to define the music is a real pain in the hole because the truth is that it's changing all the time. Obviously it's an organic sound of music - it's electric guitars, beating drums... I don't know how the f**k you describe it. It's Hendrixy-Princey stuff, kind of crossed with Johnny Cash too. It's rock and roll!"
What's been your career high point so far?
"My high point is when I'm doing what I love doing, playing. We did a couple of big festivals last year - we did Rod Stewart in Ireland and we did O2 in the Park with 200,000 people. I had a single out at the time so when we were doing the song, they were all singing it back to us so that was pretty amazing."
What was it like working with Rod Stewart?
"It was fantastic because when I was fifteen or sixteen I was really big into the Faces, which is early Rod Stewart, and I love that stuff like 'Stay With Me' and 'Who's That Knocking On My Door?' I love that old, raw kind of pub rock. I got chatting to him and he's a really nice guy."
What's the general reaction to you like on the street?
"I tell you what, I find it f**king flabbergasting. The main reaction is for them to come over and say 'you were robbed in that show'. People will be f**king running over the street to tell me this all the time, it's really funny. 99.999% of the time they're really positive to me."
How would you describe your typical fan?
"There's nothing more I f**king hate than your leather jacket wearing, funny haircut, Mojo reader. These f**king dickheads who think they know everything about music when they know nothing about it. The way I am is that what you see is what you get, there's no bullshit with me. I think when people meet me they know about that so I like to think that people who listen to my music would be the same. Just honest people."
How well has Ireland taken to you?
"It's been okay, Ireland's been alright. It's a very small country and obviously, we don't have the numbers that you guys have over here with regards to population. So I'd have to say I've probably had a better reaction over here than I did in Ireland. Don't get me wrong, people in Ireland have been fantastic to me but I guess the thing isn't as big over there as it is over here."
What are your plans for over here in the UK?
"We're bringing the first single out in July. As I said I'd done a batch of stuff - nearly an album's worth - with Mark Hudson but I wasn't happy with it at all, man. It was totally the opposite to what I was. So I basically scrapped all that shit and I've restarted the album. So we're releasing the single in July, we're touring everywhere with electricity, we're doing a lot of festivals and we're just going to build it up the right way. If everybody wants to find out where we're playing, they can log onto the website at tabbyonline.com."
Thanks for talking to us, Tabby.
"I really appreciate you taking the time to talk. Cheers, God bless."
