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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track featuring a cameo by an American rapper, or a move into mature Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route 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, including loudly underlining that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from 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 usual.

An Impressive First Single

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and fragmented mixture of grand emotional pop songs, loud electronic instruments and audio excerpts from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

As the set on her first solo tour demonstrates, not everything on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by exactly the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; the show is extended with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that present a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar combined with clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before unexpectedly swerving into a dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished figure: she is, she states at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; giving a shoutout to her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she proposes thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the way such individual artistic pursuits end – the hostility towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are reunited – but the reality that every attendee seem to be knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is not destined to fade into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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