🔗 Share this article

With the exception of Harry Styles, individual artistic journeys of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the public imagination. They usually follow certain rules – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” mainstream-approved smooth pop-rock territory – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs 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 former talent show band members are wont to do, among them emphatically stating that she's free from the press-managed restrictions of the manufactured pop industry – based on the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a fan emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

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 quite as interesting as her debut single: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, powered by exactly the Supremes sample the name implies; things are padded out with a interpretation of the Madonna classic Frozen that transforms into a musical compilation of nineties club anthems, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs allied to clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while the track Natural at Disaster begins like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished figure: she declares, she states at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; giving a shoutout to her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she proposes showing appreciation by adding a official undergarment to the merchandise booth.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the way these kind of solo careers end – the enmity towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to announce that Little Mix are back – but the fact that every attendee seem to be knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that was released just a month ago makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing 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 plays the O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester tonight and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.