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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands rarely capture the public imagination. They usually follow predictable patterns – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single including a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into “grownup” Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She definitely participates in doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, among them loudly underlining that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – 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 Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with last year’s superb her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and fragmented melange of grand emotional pop songs, loud electronic instruments and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her first solo tour proves, not everything on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by exactly the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; the show is extended with a interpretation of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. The song Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with song sections that offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She dedicates Unconditional to her mum: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs allied to clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the thrilling strain of early 00s pop that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished figure: she is, she states at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the way such individual artistic pursuits end – the enmity towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are back – but the reality that every attendee seem to be word-perfect as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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