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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the public imagination. They usually follow certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least a track featuring a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s 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 press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – judging by tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

A Superb Debut

She opened her solo account 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 samples from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

As the set on her first solo tour proves, not everything on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by exactly the Supremes sample the name implies; things are padded out with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a medley of nineties club anthems, from the track Pacific State by 808 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 catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with song sections that present a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She dedicates 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 unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished presence: she declares, she states at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the hostility towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are back – but the fact that every attendee appear knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And should it occur, the final Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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