🔗 Share this article

Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the public imagination. They usually follow predictable patterns – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single including a guest appearance by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She definitely participates in engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members are known for undertaking, among them loudly underlining that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She opened her solo account with last year’s superb her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and disjointed mixture of big pop balladry, loud electronic instruments 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 debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by exactly the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; things are padded out with a interpretation of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or rather the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished figure: she is, she announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she suggests thanking them by including a official undergarment to the merchandise booth.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the manner such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the hostility towards ex-group member Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to announce that Little Mix are back – but the fact that the entire audience appear word-perfect as they join in vocally to an album that only came out a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And should it occur, the final Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the realms of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade plays the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester this evening and is touring the UK until 23 October.