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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – either an attempt at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least one single including a cameo by an American rapper, or a move into mature mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

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’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members are wont to do, among them emphatically stating that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – judging by tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo 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 the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and disjointed mixture of big pop balladry, 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 first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by precisely the Motown musical snippet the name implies; the show is extended with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a medley of 90s dance hits, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it has a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by electroclash, while the track Natural at Disaster begins like a keyboard-led emotional song before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished figure: she declares, she announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she suggests thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the manner such individual artistic pursuits end – the enmity towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to announce that Little Mix are reunited – but the fact that the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they join in vocally to an album that was released just a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And should it occur, the closing Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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