🔗 Share this article

Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the audience's attention. They usually follow predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single including a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards “grownup” Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone gamely killing time before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are wont to do, among them loudly underlining that she's free from the press-managed restrictions of the manufactured pop industry – based on tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and fragmented mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and samples from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

As the set on her first solo tour proves, not everything on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as her debut single: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by exactly the Supremes sample its title suggests; the show is extended with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache melds an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She dedicates Unconditional to her mother: it features a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs allied to metallic pounding beats. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished figure: she declares, she states at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; giving a shoutout to her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are present in large numbers, she suggests showing appreciation by adding a official undergarment to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the manner such individual artistic pursuits end – the enmity towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to announce that the original group are reunited – but the reality that every attendee seem to be word-perfect as they sing along to an album that was released just a month ago causes one to ponder. And should it occur, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Jade's individual musical path is not destined to fade into the realms of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade performs at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester this evening and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.