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With the exception of Harry Styles, individual artistic journeys of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the public imagination. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single featuring a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into “grownup” Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that ex-reality TV group artists are wont to do, including emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a fan emblazoned with 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 songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and fragmented melange of grand emotional pop songs, loud electronic instruments and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her first solo tour demonstrates, not everything 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 also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by exactly the Supremes sample the name implies; the show is extended with a interpretation of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a medley of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific 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. Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs combined with metallic pounding beats. IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished figure: she is, she states at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are present in large numbers, she suggests showing appreciation by including a official undergarment to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the manner such individual artistic pursuits end – the enmity towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are back – but the fact that every attendee seem to be word-perfect as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a month ago makes you wonder. And should it occur, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.

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