🔗 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 certain rules – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track featuring a cameo by an American rapper, or a move into “grownup” Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that renders the unconventional route currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She definitely participates in doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are wont to do, among them emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – based on the audience this evening, the most popular item on the merchandise stall is a handheld cooling device displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but regardless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and disjointed mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her first solo tour proves, not every song on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by precisely the Motown musical snippet the name implies; the show is extended with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a medley of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a nearly discordant brand of funk or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She offers the track Unconditional to her mother: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while the track Natural at Disaster begins like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

A Charming Performer

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished figure: she declares, she states at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are here in force, she suggests showing appreciation by adding a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the manner these kind of solo careers end – the hostility towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to announce that the original group are back – but the reality that the entire audience seem to be knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that only came out a month ago causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade plays the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is touring the UK until 23 October.