Jade Thirlwall Review: The Music World's Most Unique Artist Rises Above Manufactured Origins

With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands 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 including a cameo by an American rapper, or a move into “grownup” Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members 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 top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe 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 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 everything on her debut album her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, driven by precisely the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that transforms into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers Unconditional to her mother: it features a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and powerful guitar riffs allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music 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 dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a immensely likable, delightfully authentic figure: she declares, she announces at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are here in force, she suggests thanking them by including a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the way such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to announce that the original group are reunited – but the fact that the entire audience seem to be knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that only came out a month ago causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is not destined to fade into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade plays the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester this evening and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.