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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the public imagination. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track featuring a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards “grownup” Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the sight and sound of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable 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 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 media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe 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 fragmented melange of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her initial individual concert series proves, not every song on her debut album her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting 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 N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. The song Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs combined with clanging industrial drums. IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster begins 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, delightfully authentic presence: she declares, she announces 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 official undergarment to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the hostility towards ex-group member Jesy Nelson expressed in the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to announce that the original group are back – but the reality that every attendee appear word-perfect as they sing along to a record that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And should it occur, the final Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the realms of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade performs at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is touring the UK through October 23rd.